INTERVIEW: Devilskin - Paul Martin (The LAGERFEST 2023 catch up!)

Devilskin has to be one of New Zealand’s finest exports and their last album ‘Red’ is quite frankly a bit of a minor Metal masterpiece to my ears though sadly in the music biz timing can be everything and a release just before the world was plunged into the ‘funless times’ of the pandemic meant it didn’t get the chance on the live stage it deserved. Devilskin is currently writing for the follow up but before that there’s the matter of another visit to Australia for the famed ‘Lagerfest’ that sees to immerse the east coast of our fair country in music and beer! There’s no other thing for it but to check in with our favourite Kiwi Paul Martin to find out all the latest and look back at classic vinyl!

Mark: Hey Paul, how are you?

Paul: Hey I’m good, I’m good Mark how are you going man?

Mark: You’re looking well, it’s been a while!

Paul: It’ has been a while, how you doing?

Mark: I’m good thanks mate, good to see you, always good to talk to Devilskin

Paul: Yeah let’s do that.

Mark: First I suppose we should talk about this Festival thing you’ve got going, Lagerfest, that will see you back over the ditch.

Paul: Oh man, well it’s an Aussie institution as far as I can figure, we’re just really excited to be on the bill with such a luminary bloomin’ cast you know.

Mark: Yeah what is it, The Halo Effect, Lagerstein, Beyond the Black and then the big one Devilskin.

Paul: (laughs) Oh man the Halo Effect I’m going to be bloomin’ shaking when I meet those guy’s holy crap that’s a Supergroup right there you know! So we’ve got music from Sweden, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. I wonder how many of these bands are going to be drinking beer out of their boots by the end of the tour!

Mark: Hopefully all of you, just in the spirit of things! (laughs)

Paul: I’m really excited to see Lagerstein oh man that’s going to be something else, so I think the crowd is in for a good night, a bloody good night!

Mark: I think so, its not far off now so we can’t wait to see you, sadly I can’t get over this time as they don’t bring it over to the West, I don’t think they think we drink beer over here! (laughs)

Paul: They know you drink beer man holy crap but yeah it sucks ay, you know its that great divide bloomin hell, we’ve done that heaps too. We’re walking around the streets here and holy shit Black Flag are playing in the pub down the road! There’s all sorts going on and yeah we don’t hear shit about it in New Zealand. They have just announced Iron Maiden for a New Zealand date so I’m pretty happy about that, you know!

Mark: Yeah that’ll be good, it’s been a while since Maiden were over for Soundwave which I think was the last time they were over which was a while ago now

Paul: Time’s flickin’ by man!

Mark: It is mate, if only that would come back. In the meantime we’ve got something to look forward to, we’re going to be sending someone out I think to the Melbourne show to catch up with you

Paul: Do that, totally.

Mark: After the Lagers though you’ll have to introduce everybody to Tequila!

Paul: Of course (laughs) I’ve got some here! (laughs)

Mark: We’ve got to do that! I saw you online commenting about Nazareth the other day.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Mark: What a great band

Paul: What a great band! Oh man, inspirational in so many ways, I kept discovering the albums when I was 14, 15 and I’d go to secondhand record shops. When I look back at them I’m thinking “Whoa that’s my next tattoo this album covers freakin’ awesome” and when I got ‘No Mean City’ I got half that tattooed on my arm, and then I discovered all these other albums, ‘Hair Of The Dog’, ‘Expect No Mercy’ so many great ones. I was a kid in a candy store like literally, and at the same time or probably earlier to that I was discovering Black Sabbath you know, and it wasn’t in chronological order it was just “Ooh, ooh that’s ‘Volume 4’, and oh there’s ‘Never Say Die’ and “Oh I like that one! What’s this one called?” It was ‘Black Sabbath’, oh my god that excitement you know, I still get that for music.

Mark: That’s how we had to do it in the old days though wasn’t it you’d see a cool cover and just dive in!

Paul: Yeah totally and you had such a big piece of, I guess you’d call it media now, to deal with – you know this record with a sleeve and a gatefold maybe and stuff like that, it all added to the excitement of it!

Mark: You couldn’t beat it, something to immerse yourself in! And it must be great to get your own vinyl out after that?

Paul: Oh yeah dude its surreal it really is, its surreal and sadly I loaned someone my really sweet turntable about 30 years ago (laughs) and they haven’t given it back yet and I can’t remember who it was! (laughs) So yeah I need a turntable but I’ve got a big vinyl collection, I’ve got like 800 or 900 LP’s and I hardly play them now, but they are still so precious but you know I lived with too many bloomin’ ding bat flat mates who might of scratched them and stuff like that and let their kid play with my imported Diamond Head albums and stuff so consequently I don’t listen to my records so much and then I did end up missing a turntable for ages but now I do want to get back to it because we’re releasing these new sweet bloomin’ vinyls!

Mark: I actually gave yours a spin the other day, someone bought me ‘We Rise’ the single that you did which is wonderful because I had the albums your Manager gratefully got them signed for me so I’ve got the signed ones up, played those. But I bought a nice Sony turntable that’s just Bluetooth so I get the old Marshall headphones on and you listen to that, so its all good.

Paul: You beauty, nice!

Mark: What I’ve got to ask you and I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while is, when will we have more new music from Devilskin? Tell us where we are at this moment?

Paul: Ok where we are – we are recording, we have recorded 2 songs we did ‘Let Me Breathe’ and a song called ‘Insects ‘which we haven’t released yet. We were sitting around going “you know we’ve recorded these songs and we’re really happy and we should wait for an EP or something” then its like “Nah get the songs out”. As you know I’m one of these people that’s just “Give me a song to listen to, give me a new song to keep me excited and keep it going”. You know our last album ‘Red’ came right at the start of Covid – the best timing for rock and roll ever! (laughs) So consequently the album didn’t get the attention that we thought it deserved but you can’t really go anywhere without something new so we are always writing anyway its just a matter of, you know, affording to be able to spend as much time in the frickin’ studio as we want to.

Mark: Sounds wort waiting for.

Paul: We’re proud of it. ‘Let Me Breathe’ has that angry little bloomin bass riff that I couldn’t let go of for months and months and months and pushed the guys about you know had to get them excited about it and once Jenny came up the this vocal it was done deal so I knocked up a little video for it with a mate and said to the guy’s we should put it out. Let’s not do a whole song and dance and all the “Ooh we’re releasing a single” and make a big announcement for an announcement about an up and coming something you know! We just thought “let’s just frickin’ put it out man”, so yeah, I don’t think our Manager was impressed but we just wanted the song to be heard but it got ignored by radio in New Zealand as well.

Mark: Did it, the miserable buggers!

Paul: That’s rock and roll but we’re happy with it and ‘Insects’ is another cool song and we can’t wait to release that. We’ve got a bit of a plan going on because next year its the 10th anniversary of our first Album ‘We Rise’ so yeah its all a bit crazy so yeah we’re planning all sorts of bits and pieces for that and we might even record one or two of the covers we were playing at the time of the tour that being ‘Holy Diver’ (by Dio) and ‘Barracuda’ by Heart.

Mark: Heart, fantastic, I love both of those!

Paul: They’ve both sort of been in and out of our set list for years you know since the early days so we sorta never really dropped them. There’s a whole bunch of songs we tried for 5 minutes and covers and stuff but these are ones that stuck around and felt good and Jennie smashes ‘Holy Diver’ she really does a good Ronnie James, and it’s fun stuff to play and ‘Barracuda’ you know, what a legendary song!

Mark: I can imagine Jenny’d be doing Ann Wilson proud on that one!

Paul: Yeah so its important to exploit your vocalists finest bloomin’ talents so covers are always good. I’d to record a bunch tomorrow if it was up to me if we had some endless studio time I’d record a whole bunch of covers, make the band do them, shit we did ‘Cherry Bomb’ by the Runaways when we first started at my insistence, but we kind of out grew it I guess, I don’t know. I thought it was good, one time we played Homegrown festival in Wellington we went “Let’s do something really whack, let’s do a cover like nothing that no one would think that we might do” so we did ‘Mother’ by Danzig

Mark: Oh wow! I love that song.

Paul: That was fun! that went off, the crowd went off. It was like “Are they gonna know this?” but everyone knew it, it’s such a cool song.

Mark: That would of been great.

Paul: So we are writing all the time and its just a case of affording studio time so we’ve got to keep gigging and keep selling t shirts and just keep working it until we can get the studio time we want and put the product out cause we’re a bit fussy Mark you know, we like to take our time and do it properly in the studio and it all comes down to hours at the end of the day and budget so that’s why we haven’t rushed anything out recently cause we are being a bit particular, but yeah we’ve certainly got the songs I think I’m pretty excited about the songs we’ve got! So talking of new songs, how’s this? – so we had a song that we demoed for the Red album and it didn’t make the cut there was like 12 songs that didn’t make the cut but one of them was ‘Unborn’ but we put a little refrain of the guitar in there so there’s this random track there’s a bit of an interlude between songs and its Nail picking out this nice little guitar piece that fades away and that was cause we wanted to sow the seed for the song cause we thought it was great. Nail wrote it for his daughter when she was still you know, 6 or 7 months in utero, and I wrote the lyrics for it and we gave it to Jen and it just became this freakin’ song so we started playing it and then seven years go by its like “Nail how old is your daughter now, seven?” Dude we have to record that song we wrote about her in the belly (laughs).

Mark: Wow, that’s crazy isn’t it!

Paul: We’ve been on this cycle of album then tour and then album then festivals, or whatever and we just haven’t had the time to focus on the recording as much as we’d like to but that’s what we’re doing now so we are addressing those issues, so its been a long way of answering your question Mark, yep we’ve got new music on the way and we’re excited about it, we really are. You’ll hear some of it on this tour we are doing for sure.

Mark: I can’t wait to hear it and yeah we’ll be there to cover the Melbourne show so fantastic. There’s so many bands announcing at the moment its crazy but its good to have something like this where you get to see a few great bands all in one hit.

Paul: Who would of thought Behemoth would come to New Zealand, that’s a thing! Wow what a band! I last saw them at Download.

Mark: And your old mate Slash just announced too, and there’s a few on the way to Japan as well so hopefully we’ll catch the tours at some point down under.

Paul: Man that’s a market I’d like to explore (laughs) that’s a country I’d love to tour, and Indonesia you know, I follow Billy Sheehan, I don’t follow him, as in stalk him around a few haunts (laughs) but might of happened once, but rather I follow him on Facebook and stuff and they’ve been touring with Mr. Big and going through Indonesia, Jakarta all these places like that, cities I’ve never heard of, huge crowds. Testament, same thing there seems to be this Metal bloomin’ resurgence of bands going through Indonesia and stuff which I think is frickin’ awesome.

Mark: Its crazy, a few years ago Whitesnake toured South East Asia but they didn’t come to Australia so I just hopped on a plane we went to see them in Singapore Indonesia and Kuala Lumpur, and the crowds, the crowds were insane they were absolutely passionate about the music!

Paul: That’s cause its Coverdale man! One of teh greats!

Mark: Well he was wasn’t he, it looks like one final album and he’ll be hanging up his Whitesnake boots. So one thing I wanted to do with you today and we want to put it on the radio cause if they’re not going to play your single in New Zealand we’re going to play it in Western Australia for you.

Paul: Oh you beauty, you’re a legend!

Mark: It intrigued me, you’ve talked about Nazareth and you’ve talked about a few of the bands that you picked up the vinyl all those years ago but lets come up with 5 that people can listen to, 5 bands that are worth checking out their back catalogue so we’ll take some Paul Martin recommendations?

Paul: Ok so Uriah Heep I think everyone should hear Uriah Heep and explore their vast catalogue, Nazareth while we are talking about it too.

Mark: ‘Abominog’ was my first I think that I got by Uriah Heep, not the best album to start on though.

Paul: ‘Very ‘Eavy Very ‘Umble’ was my first introduction to them and holy crap it was jaw dropping you know! And back in the day, shit man, you know we’re talking early 80’s late 70’s whatever, I inherited my older sisters record collection of you know ‘Sweet’, ‘Free’, ‘Uriah Heep’ and all sorts of bloomin great stuff like ‘Led Zeppelin’, it was a treasure trove for me but yeah, Uriah Heep really just rocked my world. ‘Slade’ as well back then you know.

Mark: ‘Slade’ were fantastic, what a great band – I think that gives us five.

Paul: Oh there’s just so many more Mark, Jesus!

Mark: Lets go with ‘Uriah Heep’, we’ll have ‘Slade’, we’ll put ‘Nazareth’ in there because Nazareth for me were the masters of a cover so they did their fantastic own material but they could take someone else’s song and see something in it that no one else could see and you think things like This Flight Tonight and stuff like that and even though its still a bit poppy its worlds away from that original song.

Paul: And it still sounds good after how many years, Jesus how many is it!

Mark: I don’t know, I’m not sure I was just about born then but (laughs)!

Paul: Ok so here’s another band that I came across, terrible album cover, the albums called ‘X-rated’ and the band is ‘Black Oak Arkansas’…

Mark: Oh right, Big Jim Dandy

Paul: Yeah Big Jim Dandy, Tommy Aldridge on drums.

Mark: Yeah, a fantastic band, and Jim of course is alleged to be the template for David Lee Roth of course!

Paul: Shit it’s good Mark, it’s so good!

Mark: I love it, but that was sort of the beginning of the end for the band really.

Paul: And here’s another one randomly. A while ago I discovered this band ‘The Boss Hoss’ from Germany. I found their version of that Sony and Cher song from about 1872 ‘A Cowboy’s Work is Never Done’ and I was going to sample it (Paul sings it) It’s a cowboy song, and for some reason I was wanting to sample that for a song I was writing and I found ‘The Boss Hoss’ by mistake, it’s not the same song. But The Boss Hoss blew me away, it was like being hit over the head!

Mark: I saw those guys live it must have been Soundwave 2014 and it was a crazy night, they were pouring beer over each other, everything it was huge!

Paul: I think they used to be a Johnny Cash cover band! ‘Dos Bros’ is such a killer album!

Mark: And they’re still going, new music this year I think!

Paul: Well I’ve only just discovered them so they better keep going now! I’d travel for that! And I’ll be over for Candlebox!

Mark: That will be great, there’s only one of them left I think.

Paul: But he’s the right one!

Mark: That’s right the singer, so many great songs. Always a pleasure to talk to you Paul take care of yourself and see you soon!

Paul: You too Mark! I look forward to catching up, thank you for your time and your continued support it means a lot it really does. We really appreciate what you do. Cheers bro!