Machine Head are heading back to Australia in July in support of their latest album ‘Catharsis‘ which was released earlier this year. The tour follows a completely sold out Australia run in 2015 held in theatres across the country in what’s dubbed as ‘An Evening With Machine Head’ which features nothing but the Northern California metal giants for 3 hours of pure metal. We talk to frontman Robb Flynn ahead of the tour to discuss these shows as well as the controversial new album.
Just to give a little back story on my history with Machine Head, I actually discovered the band way back in 1993 before the release of that epic debut album “Burn My Eyes”. Now keep in mind this was before the internet was really a thing and certainly way before digital downloading and streaming of music was around but somehow I managed to come across, through the good old days of tape trading, some bootleg recordings of Machine Head which included early versions of some of those tracks. I became a fan instantly and have been ever since. Admittedly there was that period in the late 90’s where I kind lost track of the band for a bit but I eventually came back around by the time “Through The Ashes Of Empires” came crashing through and even more so when “The Blackening” kicked all of our asses collectively. But still, Machine Head were always a band that drew my attention and certainly caught the ears of others with that signature sound which has become embedded into metal history forever. So it was with great pleasure and honour to be able to talk to the man himself, Rob Flynn who is now considered one of the greatest frontmen in modern metal history and our conversation, while mostly sticking to the obligatory tour and album promotion talk did end up down some memory lanes. It’s hard not to really, Machine Head have certainly created some absolutely wild and memorable memories, one of which involves the fair city of Perth of which we are based in. But I’m getting ahead of my self here as our discussion began with the return of the mighty Machine fucking Head to Australia in July. Robb began by stating how busy things are with the Japan leg of the tour looming as they gear up to travel to that part of the world before going on to Australia and explaining what the band plan to bring to the shows.
Robb: Yeah I mean it’s the ‘Evening With’ that we’ve been doing. We started doing An Evening With Machine Head, I want to say 2014 and it’s a 2 and a half to 3 hour show. It’s just Machine Head, there’s no intermission or nothing. We’ve done a lot of festivals and support slots and 45 minutes here and and hour there and we just got really burnt out on it man, we just got sick of it. We didn’t feel like it was really doing anything, it feels like festivals now are kind of, people go there to have fun and take selfies and hang out with their friends and smoke weed and get laid and get drunk and that’s awesome! But we didn’t want to be like one of the appetizers at a buffet which is what we kind of felt like after a while. So we really started doing this Evening With thing and it’s been amazing, people have really responded to it. It’s been huge for the band, the best attendances we’ve ever had in America, the best attendances we’ve ever had in Europe and it’s just amazing and we’re stoked to bring it to Australia and New Zealand.
The last time Machine Head were in Australia was 2015 which ended up being a completely sold out tour! That’s not an easy thing in a market like Australia that can be quite difficult to crack, especially for metal bands but it clearly showed how successful the band are and what an impact they have had on the metal community at large. This time around they are touring in support of their latest album “Catharsis” which was met with mixed reactions so I asked Robb now that some time has passed since the release how he now feels about those songs and whether they have been going over well with crowds on tour so far.
Robb: You know, it’s funny because I’ve been touring for 30 years now and I actually did my first tour in 1988 and even before that I was touring up and down California and even before the internet there’s always the type of thing where people were writing and if you were around before the internet you would read magazines and there was always the letter section and people would be talking shit and ‘This song sucks’ and ‘This band sucks’ and ‘This record sucks’ [laughs].
Ah yes I remember it well, a time that is probably now considered a relic of the past. But truly some things don’t change as Robb continues to point out.
Robb: I mean we had so much of that during the Burn My Eyes era it was crazy, people either really loved it or really hated it. I think it’s just when you make something that, and I don’t want to say it’s controversial, but when you make something that has a strong stance, a strong opinion, like you’re taking a side, people feel something from that. To me there’s been a lot of criticism but the fact that anybody is bothering to criticize I think is cool because it means they care. We have really passionate fans, we have some really dedicated fans and they want to fucking talk about it and that’s awesome. In a lot of ways that’s what the record was about, I wanted you to think, I wanted you to feel, I wanted you to feel something. Anything, anger, sadness, joy, fucking resentment, whatever the feeling was and make you open up your mind a little bit. Make you think outside of what metal could or couldn’t be and so the reaction that we got was kind of the reaction that…I didn’t NOT expect that reaction. And you never know when you go out and play it live what’s going to happen and you never know what songs are going to connect and there’s always going to be some songs that just fucking connect and go crazy live and there’s other songs where there’s always just a dud live and you never know why and it’s like that with every record. I gotta say man, the songs on this record like the track ‘Catharsis’ which was such a surprisingly controversial track, I thought that was just a straight up Machine Head banger, like a classic. So many people just fucking raged about that song and we were like, ‘What the fuck!’ and then when we played it live, oh my god! People lost their fucking minds man! Every night it’s a highlight of the set, “Triple Beam” is a highlight of the set, ‘Is There Anybody Out There” is a highlight of the set and it’s almost the type of thing where everything you read on the internet is wrong [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] Isn’t that usually the case though!
Robb: Of course they’re fucking flipping out on all the songs that everybody goes crazy over live! And maybe that’s because of it or I don’t know why. It’s weird, it’s really weird.
I remember reviewing the “Catharsis” album after sitting with it for some time, even long after it was released and I’m glad I did as among all the negative reactions that were pouring through at the time, I realized that to me it still had that signature Machine Head sound even if there were some new and maybe even some weird elements injected in there. But the one thing that I took away from it from a positive point of view is that even on first initial listenings, it was clear that the songs came across as if they were designed for the live shows. There was a certain groove and bouncy, live aspect that seemed really prevalent through out the album and listening to this album now 4 months later, it just seemed even more apparent than before that they had a very lively feel to them.
Robb: Definitely. “Kaleidoscope” is awesome live, “Beyond The Pale” is awesome, “Volatile” is awesome. It’s a lot of songs to just go down great and it makes us feel good when, let’s face it, we’re no spring chickens here. We’re on our ninth record, we’ve been Machine Head for 25 years now and it’s a great feeling to go out and know that, this is not the oldies, this isn’t the Burn My Eyes show, this is us moving forward and people are still reacting to that in a fucking super positive way and that is not the traditional arc of a band this far into their career. It makes us proud, it makes us feel a sense of pride on the music that we’re doing and what we do because I think a lot of what music is for us, music is a feeling. Music is something that you can’t even put your finger on, it’s something that transcends explanation and I don’t know where the inspiration comes from. I just write and I just write about what I feel like and sometimes it’s political and sometimes it’s just really fucking negative and sometimes it’s stories about my past and sometimes it’s about what I think about the future. Sometimes it’s happy, sometimes it’s party fucking songs, let’s get hammered and wasted and fucking rage! It’s all over the map and for me it’s a great way to express and release this stuff and I think a lot of times metal has this surprisingly pretty conservative slant about what you can and can’t do and it gets a little annoying.
I think Robb is right on point about the conservatism of the metal community, I think sometimes as open minded as some are, the majority seem to be quite picky about what bands should be doing and what they shouldn’t even try. Robb does elaborate a little more on the whole criticism and fitting in thing as he discusses the early days which as hard as it may be to believe now, was a struggle when they first started out.
Robb: I think that for the longest time when we first came out, we just never fit in, we didn’t fit into the thing that was going on at the time. We were taking metal but we were blending it with thrash and hardcore and hip hop and industrial and even gothy shit and nobody really knew where to put us and we didn’t know where to put us. At first it was weird like, you want to fit in, you want to belong to something and especially in America man, the metal press out there wouldn’t give us the fucking time of day, like nothing. Even during the Burn My Eyes and The More Things Change era, [they] just wrote us off and I feel like that really just toughened us up and thickened up our skin and in doing so made us more confident in our own skin and after a while that not fitting in became a good thing and it became our thing. And here we are 9 albums later, survived so many more bands that were big or were going to be big or should have been big and we’re still here and literally doing the best we’ve ever done. It’s rad, it’s a great feeling.
It’s always a good time when Machine Head come to town, I’ve lost count how many times I have seen them live over the years but they consistently deliver every time without fail. These days the live show has become the main drawcard of any band, especially for established acts like Machine Head and they capitalise on that fact by not only giving you a bang on show but in recent years they have been providing shows that border on 3 hours of pure Machine Head and nothing else which doesn’t get much better than that. But when I look back on all the memorable shows that Machine Head have done in Australia, I look back at one particular epic night in Perth back in 2010 on the second run of The Blackening tour where the city of Perth was hit with some of the wildest weather we had seen in quite some time. Sandgropers will remember it well, the effects of the hail stones that reigned down that night can still be seen to this day with people’s battered cars showcasing golf ball size dents spattered all over their vehicles, giving insurance companies the mother of all headaches.
My little adventure started from the flooded street outside my house trying to reach the venue at Metro City about 30 minutes away and which upon my eventual exit from my neighbourhood through what seemed like literal rivers coarsing through the main streets, I discover a blanket of darkness right across the southern part of Perth as the loss of power hit everywhere I drove through. Of course I pushed on, careening through the streets of black, blasting The Blackening album through my car stereo, windows down and headbanging in what seemed like a surreal drive through a virtual wasteland of nothingness filled with floods of water. Epic and crazy doesn’t even seem to begin to describe that drive but then getting to the venue, waiting in line with a bunch of metalheads – in the rain I might add – and not knowing if the show would still be happening due to the severe power cuts that were affecting Perth. Eventually the show went on, late, and Robb came on stage later that night to tell us what a wild night this had been in addition to that particular show going off like a bomb. Robb remembers that night too as he grins and chuckles a little before telling me his thoughts on Perth before we ended our conversation.
Robb: I remember that, that was a rager. Perth is always a rager, that last show we did at the Astor Theatre, oh my god it was fucking insane. It’s awesome because motherfuckers were starving and wasted [laughs], it was a great fucking time. It’s like everybody is there to rage and fucking party and we love that, that’s what makes a fun show. But like I mentioned, we love coming down to Perth, we’ve had some amazing times in Perth. We’ve had more days off in Perth than any other place in Australia so we’ve raged in Perth and it’s a fucking awesome city man so can’t wait to get back.
Machine Head: Catharsis Australian Tour Dates
Tuesday 17th July: Adelaide, HQ
Wednesday 18th July: Brisbane, Eatons Hill Hotel
Friday 20th July: Sydney, Enmore Theatre
Saturday 21st July: Melbourne, Forum Theatre
Tuesday 24th July: Perth, Astor Theatre
Tickets from: https://metropolistouring.com/tours/machine-head/
