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We Took Baby Godzilla to a Museum to Look at Dead Children in Jars

"When you’re sitting there and you and the floor is covered in broken eggs, with maggots crawling out and up your arms, you think ‘What the hell am I doing?’"

Nottingham’s Baby Godzilla have risen out of British hardcore underground alive and dangerous. Their explosive aural assault and their notoriously hyperactive live shows have, consciously or not, made other new heavy bands seem about as hardcore as the sort of girls that used to tip-ex the Black Flag logo on their pencil cases.

Their music videos are sometimes disgusting and always wild: the video for "Pig" stars the band covered in blood and wearing pig masks (obviously) and in "Don't Touch That Dial" they're clingfilmed into chairs and tortured by some sort of used car salesman from the 70s. One band member gets waterboarded. Because the boys seem to enjoy weird stuff, I thought I'd find out how grisly they actually are by taking them to the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London to gawk at some dead things in jars.

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Armed with a strong stomach and pumping their two self-released EP’s through my iPod in what felt like a self-prescribed attempt to get tinnitus, I met them in Holborn and lead them into obscurity.

Alright lads. I’m Jak. Who are you?

Matt: We are Baby Godzilla and we play noise.

Hello Baby Godzilla! Your live shows are pretty infamous. How do you approach them?

Matt: We just go up there and feel it. You look back on the gigs and think - shit, that was dangerous!

Johnny: It’s easy to spot bands that do things live to look a certain way. The bands that are the best at it, like The Chariot and Dillinger just go up there and do it.

Paul: I just hear the music and Lose. My. Shit.

Have you ever felt you’ve gone too far live?

Matt: We’ve had people with blood spurting out of their head that come up to us after the show and say - That was amazing!

Johnny: It’s usually a case of apologising to them afterwards really, but they’re always cool. I call it the ‘splash zone’. If you’re in that bit you have to be willing to get involved!

Matt: If you put yourself in that position at our gigs then you’re going to get caught up in something!

But it’s not literally a ‘splash zone’ is it? You don’t actually piss on your audience?

Paul: Not yet.

Have you guys ever hurt yourselves at shows?

Johnny: I fucked the ligaments in my leg on the first night of our tour. I landed awkwardly and spent the rest of the gig laying or sitting on the floor. I’ve injured my ligaments for life now because of it, but you don’t think of it at the time.

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Matt: I often think ‘How am I going to get over the barrier?’ then I just throw myself over it. It’s only after the gig that I think ‘Oh shit, that could’ve gone badly’.

You seem like proper rockstars. Do you live rockstar lifestyles?

Matt: Haha, we all work shit full-time jobs.

Paul: The Co-op is my jam.

Matt: Every time we get a lump sum of cash we set it aside to go on fixing equipment or fixing the van.

What sort of shows do you guys play? You seem too metal for the punk kids and too punk for the metal kids…

Matt: The scale of bands we’ve been billed with is mental. We’ve played with comedy bands, glam rock bands, indie bands, acoustic bands…

Johnny: But all of this doesn’t matter. It’s harder to earn your fan base, but you do earn it. It’s always 50/50 at our gigs, half of the people will hate it.

Matt: We go for one thing or the other, we don’t want people leaving the gig thinking ‘They were alright’.

Paul: You either hate it or you love it!

Your videos are pretty wild and weird, are they always your ideas?

Matt: Yeah they’re always our ideas. The video for "Don’t Touch That Dial" was the hardest because we were clingfilmed to chairs and actually tortured for hours.

Johnny: We got pelted with 300 eggs, which surprisingly really fucking hurt because when they don’t break it’s like being hit with a brick!

Matt: The part where I think we went too far was when I was bound to the chair and they tipped it back and poured five litres of water into my face and water boarded me. I came out and was shivering and delirious.

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Paul: We got whipped.

Matt: Because we’re not actors we had to put ourselves physically through the pain for the reactions to be genuine.

Tom: We were getting punched in the head.

Paul: When you’re sitting there and you and the floor is covered in broken eggs, with maggots crawling out and up your arms, you think ‘What the hell am I doing?’.

Johnny: We hired a gunman that can shoot a ridiculous amount of paintballs per second and got him to shoot us for 20 seconds. He shot us all once in the chest each so we knew what to expect then he just went for it.

Paul: The worst was when it got your hands, they just bust open.

Johnny: It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.

Jesus. At least now that you’ve felt the worse, every other pain won’t feel as bad. Your other videos feature you guys vomiting and also a lot of blood. Are shock tactics part of your ethos?

Matt: We do these things because they’re funny.

Johnny: We just think trying to do ten shots of Jager in 20 seconds is funny, or jumping around in pig masks covered in blood is funny. There are some bands that you watch and they constantly pump out inventive and interesting music videos, Reuben are one of them. All Reuben videos are great, none of them are boring.

Matt: We also haven’t got any money, so we try and do something that is cheap to make but our personalities can shine through. Our ideas are always pretty ridiculous.

You went on tour with LIMP FUCKING BIZKIT, that must have been a dream come true, how was that?

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Matt: It was so surreal. An amazing experience but it was completely different to how we might have expected. We were playing these big stages that we had never had any hope of playing in the first place! We were playing to 5000 people.

Johnny: We just did our thing. Some people seemed to enjoy it but a lot of them were wearing red caps and looking confused, haha.

Tom: It was amazing and we really appreciate everyone and everything, sometimes you’ve just got to take it.

Paul: Some of the YouTube comments after we played that tour were incredible! This one guy had written an actual paragraph where he individually slagged us all off. Not just saying we were ‘shit’, he was saying really mean things! “Get some singing lessons, get some guitar lessons, don’t put your crotch in people’s faces like the teenage boy you are!”

Johnny: I saw it and thought, ‘I’m 28 years old, I’ll put my crotch in whoever’s face I see fit!’

So the album, how’s it coming along?

Matt: We’ve just about finished writing and we’ll be recording really soon! We’ll be dropping bits and bobs of new stuff into our gigs over the summer.

Tom: This time round we’re much more prepared for recording.

Johnny: We’re simplifying things because if we can’t physically play it live, then there’s no point in it being on the record.

Paul: It’s not a completely different vibe, but every release we’ve had has been an evolution. There’s point in doing it if you’re just going to do a Nickleback and churn out the same sound over and over again.

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What would be your ideal line-up to play on be?

Matt: Nirvana, The Chariot…

Johnny: Dillinger Escape Plan, Queens of the Stone Age.

Tom: Led Zeppelin.

Matt: Enter Shikari, but us to open it.

Paul: We’d do it in the Chameleon in Nottingham! I can’t think of anything better.

What do you think of this museum?

Matt: The dead children in jars are really weird.

Johnny: There’s a video upstairs of an Arthroscopy, which I’ve had done, it’s an operation on the cartilage round the knee. I thought that was really interesting.

Matt: I’ve been looking at things and feeling guilty that I haven’t been more weirded-out. I’ve been looking at the dead monkeys in jars and wanting to touch them and take one home!

Follow Jak on Twitter: @Jak_TH

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