Max & Iggor Cavalera are set to bring two iconic Sepultura albums to Australian stages this month with a selection of tracks from Beneath The Remains and Arise being performed live. Max Cavalera has been a regular to The Rockpit pages over the years, always being cool enough to give us his time to chat about everything that’s going on his career. With the heat wave scorching the country right now, Max turned the interview around by asking us about the weather. His response? “It’s just going to get hotter with us!”
We caught up with Max to find out what this tour will bring and go back in time to where it all began.
Andrew: So how’s things with everyone? I guess you guys are getting ready to come down to Australia pretty soon.
Max: Yeah we are very excited man! I just finished a Soulfly tour in America and I’m home right now but we are coming to Australia. It’s really exciting, we did this hybrid Beneath The Remains / Arise tour right here in South America and Russia and the fans lost their minds, it was one of the best tours I ever done and Australia shouldn’t be no different. We had a blast on the Return To Roots tour and I think this one is even better, these records are even more powerful live than Roots so it should be just [an] amazing experience. Just very happy to be back in Australia to play these records and me and Iggor are very excited and very much looking forward to it.
Andrew: Yeah we are looking forward to it as well and obviously we caught you on the Roots tour a year and a half ago and by the sounds of it, it must have been a fantastic tour.
Max: Yeah the Roots one was great with a lot of sold out shows, we’re hoping for the same with the Beneath The Remains and Arise tour. The shows itself I like it better than Roots myself because I think this era, this period of Sepultura is a bit more exciting, it’s a bit more energetic. I just think it translates really great live and those records are timeless, they don’t get old through time and they just get better. The way that we are playing it is the best of Beneath The Remains and the best of Arise with a couple of surprises in the end. There’s something really cool about that nostalgic feeling, there’s something really cool about me and Iggor together doing this after so many years. I think it’s fun for the fans that were there in the beginning and who get to see it again and there are a lot of fans who weren’t even born when those records were made so they need to see it too. It’s really cool, there’s a whole new generation including my son that discover these albums now and are impressed by them and they realize how cool they are. Because those records really were exciting and they were really crazy how they were made, stuff like “Desperate Cry” and “Dead Embryonic Cells”, “Infected Voice” and “Altered State” and “Mass Hypnosis” and “Slaves Of Pain”. It’s amazing, it’s so powerful man. When we play that shit live the place just explodes, it’s just a great feeling.
Andrew: Beneath The Remains has always had a special place in my heart because I’ve always considered that to probably be my favorite Sepultura album over the years. Even to this day 30 years later it still blows away most of the thrash metal that comes out today and I guess you feel the same way I suppose.
Max: I love those records and I think that era, ’89-’91 which is what we cover on this tour, it’s a special era in metal. To me it was kind of like a little bit of the golden era of death and thrash metal with all the stuff that was coming out like Morbid Angel’s “Alter Of Madness” and Death “Scream Bloody Gore” and Dark Angel and Possessed. It was just a great time in metal, it was exciting so to get to go back and play these songs now is even cooler. I don’t know how else to explain because the songs now are older and we are doing justice to them and playing them good, there’s no short cuts! We work very hard, we learn note by note, it’s quite an amazing feat to do it this way. I said to Iggor that if we’re going to do this, we’re not doing it halfway, we’re going all the way. We’ll give them as good as we can get and we’ll play them as well as they can be played. We did that and South America was crazy for it, Russia went crazy and now it’s Australia’s turn so it’s going to be insane.
Andrew: So let’s go back to the time when you wrote and recorded Beneath The Remains and that was obviously a pinnacle point in the bands career at that time because you did have a couple of albums that came out before that with Schizophrenia and Morbid Visions. But when Beneath The Remains came out it seemed like you went in a different direction and really sort of went really heavy on that one, do you remember writing that album and what was the idea behind it and what you wanted to achieve with those songs at the time?
Max: I remember we were just very excited because we had a contract with Roadrunner and I never thought we would be able to be on an international label be it European or American and then have a shot. This is our shot, we had to come up with something good and as much as I love Morbid Visions and Schizophrenia, I think Beneath The Remains is special. That album in a way is where we kind of found our own style on that record, a combination of everything that we love. Because we love a lot of death metal and we love a lot of thrash metal and we put those two together so it’s a real death/thrash record and it was recorded in difficult conditions. It was recorded at night, we couldn’t afford the studio during the day so we recorded it between midnight and 7 in the morning so it’s a nocturnal record. I’ve never done one of those ever since, I should do one now, I think it would be really fun doing another nocturnal record. There’s something very obscure about that, there’s the darkness about that recording! We found our own voice, especially with me and the lyrics. Stuff like “Inner Self” to me was very personal, ‘walking these dirty streets with hate in my mind‘. I was writing about my life, almost like a diary. It’s like, ‘Wow meet the diary of my life’. And then you have the anti-war stuff like “Beneath The Remains”, that was influenced by U2. A lot of people don’t know this but I was reading a lot of U2 lyrics and Bono is a really great lyricist, he wrote some of the stuff with U2 like “War” and “The Unforgettable Fire”. That’s some great stuff on Bono’s lyrics and so I just totally ripped out of him [laughs]. “Beneath The Remains” is actually made out of U2 lyrics believe it or not!
Andrew: [laughs] There you go!
Max: Then you got all this shit like “Stronger Than Hate” was great. It was just a powerful record and then you put Arise on top of that with “Dead Embryonic Cells” and “Desperate Cry” which is kind of the maturity of the band. Beneath The Remains was the beginning and Arise was the formation coming into adulthood so when we play those together it’s amazing, that’s why I say these concerts are really strong from beginning to the end. It’s a powerhouse man, everybody who is there is going to be moved by those songs and they’re going to leave the venue feeling very happy because they saw something special.
Andrew: Good to hear, looking forward to it. The Arise album was obviously a big one for you and for many fans across the world but putting together the two albums in one concert, who’s idea was it and why did you decide to do it? Was it an anniversary thing?
Max: No I think it was Iggor’s idea. Actually I don’t know where the idea came from but when I first heard it I was like, ‘Wow that sounds crazy’ but it’s kind of cool and kinda makes sense because he would be talking about some of the leftover songs and to him it would be like better if we play two records of the best songs instead of playing the whole record with some of the fillers. I kind of understood what he was saying and then I think it makes sense with those two records because Beneath The Remains and Arise were made for each other. Even the names, you have a name like Beneath The Remains which is going down and then you have a name like Arise which is going up. It’s almost like full circle so I think it makes sense, it was Iggor’s idea and we just digged in and made a great setlist out of it and now it just flows perfectly. We play the first part of Beneath The Remains and then there’s a little break and there’s an intro and then Arise comes in and it’s fucking great [laughs].
It feels really good playing this stuff now, I think it’s more special now than it was when it first came out. Now that we are older and grow up and a lot of those songs and those records are people’s lives, those records are soundtracks to a lot of people’s life. So a lot of people that grew up like yourself who say Beneath The Remains is one of your favorite records, that kind of stuff is heavy. I think that people really want to hear how it was, this is the closest they will get to hear from the original and we play them really good. It’s like a perfect combination of the time, of the era and with the sound right now that we have, it’s heavy as fuck and it sounds great. So it’s really striking, it’s really better now than it was. For me to be playing those songs now, they’re more meaningful right now than when I first wrote it so it’s a really exciting thing.
TOUR DATES
Sunday 17 March – Metropolis, Fremantle
Tuesday 19 March – The Gov, Adelaide
Thursday 21 March – 170 Russell, Melbourne
Friday 22 March – The Valley Drive In, Brisbane
Saturday 23 March – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Sunday 24 March – The Basement, Canberra
Tickets: Destroy All Lines
