I Went to the English Seaside to Watch Napalm Death Destroy Art With Their Riffs

all photos by Robert Forster

About a year ago, Napalm Death had plans to blow up an installation by ceramicist Keith Harrison at London’s fancy Victoria & Albert Museum. The premise was rows and rows of speakers would be hidden beneath clay and ceramic tiles and the band would attempt to rattle them all off. Of course, I wasn’t totally surprised when the whole thing got cancelled; the V&A had pussed out and the one-off event was now homeless like the first wife of an 80s sitcom star. Still, it was cool that a band that can “damage the historic fabric” of a building that survived two wars and the douche traffic of a Sir David Bowie retrospective still exists.

Thankfully, a year later, the collaboration was back on. This time, at the De La Warr Pavilion, a revamped modernist building in Bexhill-on-Sea, about nine million light years out of London. So, under cover of darkness (around lunchtime on Friday), a tour bus full of metal press took to the road. The time flew by, thanks to junk food, Watain anecdotes and heated nerd-offs over fantasy novels/Euronymous/most obnoxious metal logos (Cult of Fire in Sanskrit comes to mind). At one point, I prayed for more traffic.

We arrived at the venue and got our mingle on with the other 493 attendants (the 500 free tickets ‘sold out’ in twelve minutes). It was the hottest mess of a lobby filled with art world power gays, confused teenagers, horsey women and drunk dads in greying Napalm shirts chugging wine and fingering bowls of earplugs. I felt buzzed. Would metalheads and terracotta-pot-heads come together as one? Like the scene from Ghost, but with English teeth and “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” instead of “Unchained Melody?”

Napalm Death came on stage in their sensible generic footwear and plugged in their weaponry. Singer, Mark “Barney” Greenway, said something about noise and social change that made sense and then they started playing. My butt fell out. I’m a lot deafer than most people (thanks, Carcass), but they were the loudest band I’ve ever heard, and for two whole hours. If the PA, which was filled with liquid clay and speakers hadn’t been inanimate (I mean, literally made of stone), it would probably have been shitting itself.

Did the towers blow up in the gratifying dramatic style our instant gratification generation has come to expect from years of suckling at the teat of Michael Bay while playing Call Of Duty on crystal meth? No. A bunch of little liquid cement jets bubbled out of the top like a Vegas fountain on food stamps and about 6% of the blue and yellow tiles fell off at a rate of one for every 27th brown note.

There was a great bit when this guy jumped over the barrier and started kicking off tiles himself before being gently tackled to the ground by security. He started something of a micro-trend, with a Dutch teenager and a Suicide Girl following suit and dislodging a few more. If you’re into metaphors and finding meaning in art, you could have said a bunch of stuff about anarchy and the working classes and the power of the people and transcending your environment. But I wouldn’t hear you. I’m totally deaf.

We caught up with Keith Harrison and Napalm Death, the Guinness Book Of Records holders for shortest song ever (John Peel favorite ‘You Suffer’), afterwards to see if any/all/none of this was meant to happen and if so, why.

Noisey: So how was that for you?

Keith Harrison: It was amazing. For me, it’s about the ferocity, intensity and integrity of this band- and what they’ve stood for all these years. I’d been to see them in a small club more recently and it was just so intense. I thought, if there was one band I could work with… and here we are.

What were you expecting to happen?

KH: I knew there was liquid clay in the top and that would set things off at the beginning. We knew some tiles would come off. We tried to tile it as light as we could. We just got a good tiler!

Mark “Barney” Greenway: Of course, we were like, it’d be great if it explodes. But we couldn’t have an explosive charge in there, because that obviously wasn’t allowed. So we had to rely on physics.

What did you think of that guy running in and trashing your work?

Shane Embury: I almost joined him.

KH: I could see the band was really gunning for it at the end, so he just helped them along.

That set was brutal. How did you pick the songs?

MBG: We had so much to choose from, but we tried to pick the most feverish, breathless songs. To me, the whole idea was to create this soundscape, so we did the songs that fucking hammer the most.

SE: The quicker songs and also the short, stabby moments. And we added some extra guitar frequencies. Our producer Russ was manipulating feedback too, so we were eventually overlapping that, making more noise.

It was fucking loud.

SE: We always start and just go, go, go; but this was even better, because I wanted that structure to come down, so that was making me hit the bass even harder.

KH: A big part of it was the incredible power of the band – as a kind of force for social change, as well as a change of material. To a certain extent, tonight was about that being contained and a gradual deterioration.

SE: Which was good, because it’s kind of how an estate like Bustleholme would just get run down over time and left like that.

What made you want to take on an art project?

SE: We liked that it was pushing boundaries. It’s an extension of us, not fitting into any particular scene musically.

MBG: For me it was the physics of it. And the noise factor. Noise is a natural byproduct of music, but so much music has tried to clip that away. To me, that’s part of the ambience of music. I want to hear those different frequencies on top. To me, that sounds totally exciting.