ELECTRIC WIZARD

JUS OBORN

TALKS TO THE

ROCKPIT

WE TALK ALL ABOUT THE STUNNING NEW RELEASE...

OCTOBER 2014

Doom legends Electric Wizard have just brought out their 8th album "Time To Die", a fitting title to a death -infested doomer that is sure to please a lot of their fans. Founding member and vocalist Jus Oborn took some time out to answer a few questions in a hilarious fashion!

Andrew: Hi hows it going. Thanks for the interview opportunity. Aside from the new album, what's the latest with the band at the moment?

Jus: Umm...We’ve all been diagnosed with Ebola, haha. Hopefully, we’ll be out of quarantine in time to play our forthcoming show in Manchester here in the UK

Andrew: So the new album "Time To Die" sounds great, I think a lot of Electric Wizard fans are going to absolutely love this one. What can you tell us about this album and how it came together?

Jus: This album had a painful, horrible birth, really. We started out writing the music a few years ago, me and Liz in an earlier line-up, and then things started to disintegrate. We spent a little while trying to put things back together, and then we hooked up with (drummer) Mark Greening again, continued working on the material, and things were cool for a bit. Then we were abused and tortured completely by people we’d been working with in the past, and then some negative personal shit and family stuff started to happen, followed by too much drinking and too much arguing, then eventually we got into the studio and managed to record all the trials and tribulations of a year in the fucking life of Electric Wizard. There you go.

Andrew: Onto the new album, I love "Funeral Of A Mind", has a nice groove to it and very trippy kind of stuff. Do you have any particular favorites from the album?

Jus: Myself, I like the title track...actually, I kind of like it all, haha. We’re very stringent when we’re writing the material, we don’t really let anything through that we think is mediocre or half-arsed. You’ve got to spend the rest of your life listening to this music, so every little thing that you’re not pleased with is going to sit there forever sounding like shit, haha. So we try to be disciplined, and I am pretty proud of the record. I think it sounds good.

Andrew: Death is the recurring theme on this album. What does death mean to you?

Jus: It means rotting in the grave and it’s all over. I don’t believe in reincarnation or being born again. I believe you’re alive once, and I think your life energy returns to something, if you want to get philosophical and heavy about it. But I certainly don’t think I will exist with all my memories in some sort of after-life… you can either live now or die forever, get on with it!

Andrew: Was there any particular inspiration for the album in anyway or did it simply come out organically?

Jus: Well, there is always a million different influences. With this album, some of those influences stretch back pretty much to my childhood, although it’s always hard to define what the specific background is to a record. Certain things maybe bubble to the fore, maybe I was listening to one band more than another, I don’t know. In the end, this album was probably influenced by anything and everything that’s ever influenced Electric Wizard...We didn’t say, ‘oh, let’s go for this kind of thing’.

Andrew: Has there been much changes in the band as far as writing music and lyrics over the years since you guys began? And if so, in what way?

Jus: Nothing’s really changed, to be honest. I’ve always written the majority of the riffs and always written all the lyrics. I mean, even in the old band, the first line-up, I probably wrote 80%-90% of the songs and the lyrics. And, as I say, things don’t really change, I mean someone will contribute something, usually the bass player, and we tend to write the riffs together. The writing process is very long and sort of stretched out while we discuss how we want a riff to sound before we even start to play it. It’s a strange process, but it works for us and we get there in the end.

Andrew: What is the tour schedule like for the rest of the year and next year?

Jus: Well, nothing for the rest of this year, apart from a headline show in Manchester in the UK, because there are millions of tours going on at the moment, plus we do like people to digest the album. And don’t forget that where we live is a little bit awkward – if anything goes wrong with the weather we might not be able to physically go on tour because the house might be in danger or we might not be able to get away. But, yea, we’ll be looking to tour in the spring of next year… nothing is fully booked yet, but there are quite a few things going on behind the scenes, and it looks like we’ll be playing everywhere on this fucking planet...hopefully leaving a bomb everywhere we go.

Andrew: A lot of fans here are asking if there is any chance we can see you guys come to Australia for a tour sometime. Any plans to come to Australia?

Jus: Well, yea...I’ve heard they are doing that shuttle thing, outer planet flights… if they do that, we’ll come to Australia, ha, ha!

Andrew: Which do you prefer, writing and recording or performing live?

Jus: Umm no… finishing and listening, haha.

Andrew: If you could be a fly on the wall for the recording of any classic album in history what would it be?

Jus: I’ll have to say something bloody obvious, to be honest – ‘Paranoid’. I would be stupid not to. I mean, there are other choices, but that’s number one.

Andrew: What is the meaning of life?

Jus: I don’t know if I can remember it... haha. Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women. I knew I would remember it eventually.

Jus spoke to Andrew Schizodeluxe - October 2014