CENTURIONS GHOST – Interview with Rich

London’s CENTURIONS GHOST have gone from strength to strength. They have been bringing us heavy, crushing metal for almost five years now. The band mixes elements of doom, black and death to devastating effect. The band has spent the last year touring America and Europe and has just played a support slot for CANDLEMASS. Rich from the band was kind enough to answer some questions for metal centre.

Could you start off by telling the readers a little bit about the band members and how you all got together?

Yeah sure, the band has been together for almost five years now. The current line up is myself on bass guitar, Milly on drums, Jonny and Fed on guitars and Mark does the vocals. In my opinion the current line up is the strongest we have had to date, and we have had a lot of different line ups in our brief but eventful five year history!

Centurions Ghost have a fresh sound. You have doom elements, but also a black metal and more aggressive side to your music. Which bands have been an influence on the music you make?

Wow, that’s a difficult question to answer, obviously we’re all into the likes of Sabbath, Venom, Motorhead, Vitus, Pentagram, etc, etc, but we all bring different influences to the bands sound (and not only metal influences) which I think is the key to why our sound seems to diversify from the norm of ‘heavy’ music.

Who in the band is responsible for the song writing? Is it a collaborative effort or down to one member?

On ‘A Sign Of Things To Come’ myself and Milly wrote the majority of songs with additional parts being added by other members of the band. Now all five of us contribute with the writing process. The best way we find to do this is we each record rough demos of our compositions and we all learns the riffs and rough structure from these demos, we then expand upon these basic ideas in the rehearsal studio until we’ve hammered each song into shape.

Your album, “The Great Work” was delayed. What exactly happened there?

There were various problems we encountered, first off we had to re record some of the guitars due to a hard disc corruption, then the mixing stage was delayed because our mix engineer was snowed under with other work, on top of this we were auditioning new guitarists for the upcoming tour with Earthride/The Gates Of Slumber so, you could say everything happened all at once and there just weren’t enough hours in each day! Better late than never though eh? hahaha.

The last album was very good. How have you built on that with “the great work”?

The band has developed as musicians and songwriters since ‘A Sign Of Things To Come’ don’t get me wrong the debut album is a very dark and heavy album but ‘The Great Work’ is a much stronger and more mature album, therefore ‘A Sign Of Things To Come’ is exactly as the title suggests.

Your drummer Milly is involved in Lord Vicar. How is all that coming along and how does it fit in with Centurions Ghost schedule?

It seems to be working out nicely, I’ve heard the rough demos for the upcoming 7” single and it sounds really fuckin heavy! I recorded Milly’s drums last Sunday, they are being edited this week and will be sent over to Peter next week for him to lay down the bass and guitar parts. With regard to fitting in with the CG schedule then so far there has been no problem at all, we all have our own side projects which we work on so I can’t see this affecting CG any differently than any of those.

You’ve toured Europe and now America alongside the gates of slumber. How were you received on your travels? Any interesting stories or anything to say about the people you toured with?

We have been treated like royalty everywhere we play, its so cool to meet people across the globe who are into what you are doing, it really makes all the hard work worthwhile. And the bands we have toured with have been totally amazing, and there are sooooo many stories ranging from the usual drunken escapades including broken bones from stage diving, van engines exploding, fights, obscure/dirty tour diseases to the burning looting raping and shooting! haha

You have support slots coming up for candlemass. That’s an impressive support slot. How did you manage to get such a good support slot?

I saw the tour advertised so I emailed the promoter sayin that we’d be up for the playin if the opportunity was there and she emailed me straight back sayin that she was literally emailing us to ask us if we wanted the tour…spooky!

Carrying on from that. What do you think of Robert Lowe as the new singer?

Rob Lowe is the perfect singer for Candlemass. His style sits somewhere between Linquist and Marcolin which really suits all the old material and on the new album he has really put his own stamp on things. I was fortunate enough to be at the anniversary show in Stockholm and Rob really impressed me then.

So now after touring with some big names; candlemass, orange goblin, slough feg and the having split with gates of slumber who else would you get the chance to work with?

Wow, theres so many hundreds of bands we’d love to go out on the road with…when all said an done we just wanna play, give us a gig and we’ll be there to blow the fucken doors off the place! hehe

So the last year you’ve had a lot of success. What is on the horizon for Centurions ghost?

Well, we are already writing our third album which will hopefully be released late 2008/early 2009. We’re planning on doin a live EP and various other 7” releases. We’ve been asked to play the States again next April but this all depends on finances.

Any final words, websites, other bands you’d like to mention?

A massive thanks goes out to everyone who has been with us so far, without your die hard support our journey would have been infinitely more difficult. Cheers! Thank you for doing the interview – It’s been a pleasure.

http://www.myspace.com/centurionsghost