ARCH ENEMY – Interview with Sharlee D'Angelo

So have you had a good reaction to The Root Of All Evil after bringing it out on the road?

Yeah, some of the songs go down better than others, and one of the reasons we did the album in the first place was to be able to put some of the old songs back in the set, and some of them worked and some just leave people confused!

Did you choose your favourite songs or the more popular ones?

I think our favourites tend to coincide with the popular ones. When we chose songs from the album there was a lot of battling within the band because everybody's got their own favourites. So you have to just let go of one song and say “Okay fine maybe we don't have to do that song”, and then you feel a little bit hurt like “That was my favourite!” But it boils down to a shortlist and some of the other songs might actually come back in, so it came down to a very even selection, I think.

Did you find that a lot of people were new to the old stuff? When you're playing it are there a lot of people like “What's this?”

Yeah, definitely. At least now they've heard it, even if they had heard it before it might not have been something they'd liked because to them it was a different singer which might not have been to their liking, they didn't feel like it was the same thing. So with Angela singing it and a bit more up to date production and what have you, it's a little bit more accessible to people. So the reaction's been pretty good with some, but some have just left people in utter confusion!

What's your favourite 'old' song?

If you look back at the original albums, one song I campaigned for for a long time is from Stigmata called Tears Of The Dead, but it didn't really make anybody else's list. A lot of songs from Stigmata I didn't like as much, so I think it's a little bit of performance, production and everything like that. Some of those songs I started liking when I joined the band and actually played them. Dark Of The Sun is another one that I love because we only played it on that first tour I did with the band back in 1999 and since then we have not played it at all.

So after this tour you're going back in the studio?

Yeah, a week from today!

Have you got many ideas and riffs floating around?

We've got about twelve, thirteen songs I think, but there's still a week so things might change. It's an ongoing process until you actually have to stop it. It's very organic, sort of like it's just moving by itself like some sort of abomination that will rear its ugly head! So when we started writing songs seriously and putting riffs together into pieces of music – like the first two songs, they don't exist anymore. They've been stolen and stripped for parts basically! So some riffs from those songs have found new homes in other songs!

Apparently there's going to be some really brutal stuff, blastbeats and whatnot?

That's a typical Angela thing to say; she's the one with the most extreme and brutal taste in the band so she's just like deliriously happy when we've been rehearsing and she's been sitting at home trying to pen lyrics and stuff. She gets like the day's rehearsal sent to her and she's like “Oh man! Fast, brutal, I love all that!” There's not a lot of it, but there's a bigger portion of blastbeats and things like that than we've ever had before. It's not like blast all over the place. We've tried to put more in some songs and then we went back and it's like it just feels a bit forced and it feels like we just did it for the sake of it, as opposed to for the sake of the song. But yeah, there's a little bit of this and a little bit of that!

When do you think it'll all be finished and when will it be out?

Well it's gonna be out in May. We have extremely strict deadlines. But I think we have to otherwise we would have gone on touring and kept on writing, kept on touring, kept on writing, and we've proven ourselves to work better at gunpoint actually. Otherwise you just keep on fine tuning things, and then there's more shows coming in so basically we finally said no to some offers to play live during the spring because at some point we need to have new music as well. Otherwise we're gonna burst from within! But it's just because we love playing live, things are coming up like offers from places of the world we've never been before.

What new places have you been playing?

These past one or two years we've been playing places like Asian countries that we've never played before, like the Phillipines, Indonesia, Hong Kong…

Is there a big metal scene in those places?

Funnily enough, yes! We had one of the craziest shows ever in Manila. We heard before from the Shadows Fall guys who have been down there that it's just absolutely amazing down there, and when we came, it was really really amazing! And also it's a beautiful place to visit as well. We played the Maldives as the first international rock band ever! Just amazing things like that, we get offers to go to India for the first time for example, but we had to postpone that a little bit until after new years, because it's better to just get in the studio, make the album and then take it out there.

Are there any places you haven't played in yet that you'd like to?

I've never played the African continent. There's South Africa, you can do things in Morocco for example, some of the northern parts. I don't think there's a huge extreme metal scene in Ghana or Zimbabwe! But if there were, I'd be willing to go! We've done South America a couple of times but there's so many countries there that we still haven't played so that's also been in the books for the next couple of years. We like to pin new little flags on the map on the wall.

What about Spiritual Beggars, how has it been starting that up again?

It's good, it's good! But it happened at the same time that we were trying to write an Arch Enemy album so at some point it was like “Ah man, should we really be doing this right now?” But once we did it, it was exactly like it was the last time – right in the middle of doing Doomsday Machine, Demons came out. It just felt like it happened when we didn't have time for it, but once we did it both me and Michael were like, it's a mental/musical vacation! Clear your head of all the AE stuff and just go into something completely different and then you come back a lot fresher actually.

It must be quite good to be able to go from playing the death metal with Arch Enemy to something completely different with Spiritual Beggars?

Definitely, because Beggars is actually closer to the type of music that I grew up listening to, like before all the extreme stuff came along. Especially as a bass player, there's a bit more room to branch out a little bit here and there. It's gratifying in a different sense. There's more accuracy in Arch Enemy, there's so much going on, but Beggars is a bit more loose, like “Do whatever!” It's just a bit more relaxed – everybody in the band all has their other things, their main things, so it's a vacation for everybody involved.

Do you think you might do a tour over here with them?

I don't know yet, we're gonna do festivals next year and apart from that I don't know but we'll see what happens.

Have you always wanted to do music, be in a band?

I didn't know if that was the thing that I really wanted to do, but I liked music so much and it wasn't until I got my first guitar that I was like “This is actually fun playing as well! I'm not very good at it but I can bring these two notes together, that's pretty awesome!”

Do you play much guitar? Or just bass?

I do when we're writing songs, it's easier to, we're a very guitar-based band. I'm not like Steve Harris, but I do write some on bass as well, if it's just melody, but mostly I write on guitar. But I'm not a very good guitar player, at least not compared to the guys that I play with!

What's your bass setup?

I have an Ibanez Iceman which is my signature model and I play Aguilar amps and cabs – a 751 and the cabs are DB810s I think, and that's about it!

With your signature bass did you have a lot of input during the production?

The shape itself existed before, it was a guitar shape back in the 70s – Paul Stanley had it. But apart from the shape of the body, the rest of it is to my specifications, like the neck shape, what type of frets, what type of pickups, inlays, the type of wood, everything like that. It's pretty cool to have that, you can actually go into a shop and it's like “That's my bass there, it's got my little autograph on the back!” I'm just happy getting stuff for free, they actually make the stuff that I tell them to do. That's mindblowing to me. But then they sell that and give me money, it's like “So let me get this right, you're actually paying me to get really nice instruments for free?” I can work with that!

One more question, what happened to the United Enemies?!

I don't know, I wasn't personally too involved in it but there will be something else coming up in its place. It just didn't work out quite the way we thought it would, just how it was handled didn't quite work out, but there will be something in its place. When the new album comes out, a lot of new things will come out and we'll try to really step it up when it comes to communicating with the nice people that listen to our music!

http://www.archenemy.net