HELMET: Keeping Left (2023)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

IT’S mid-morning in Switzerland and Page Hamilton hasn’t had much sleep. The Helmet frontman is on a day off on his current tour but he’s been struggling with insomnia. Despite that, he’s friendly, gregarious and extremely talkative, about a great many things. Conversation with the intelligent and erudite 63-year-old can go almost anywhere, but it begins with Helmet’s new album, LEFT. Their first since 2016, it’s been gathering a mixed bag of critical opinions.

“People tell me good stuff,” he says, “they rarely tell me bad stuff, and I have no control over that. So I’m not going to worry about it. I know it’s a really good album, but it’s not for everyone. We never formed Helmet to be a band for everyone. I would always say, back in the day, if everyone liked everything, Michael Jackson would have sold 10 billion albums instead of 210 million.”

Helmet’s sales figures have never been anywhere even close to that, but the band has been able to maintain a strong cult following that has allowed them to pursue a long career. Growing out of the New York noise and hardcore scene in the late 1980s, Helmet became one of the most influential acts on the ill-defined “alternative metal” genre with their first three albums remaining cult favourites to this day. Opinions varied widely on those releases too.

“People are always going to complain,” he surmises. “When we put out Meantime, there were people who were like, ‘Oh god they’ve really lost it. Strap it On was so good!’ I was like, ‘Really? OK’. It happens with every fucking album. At this  point – someone sent me something where someone wrote, ‘This is the best album since Size Matters.’ Well, I got so much shit for that album.

“You can’t let it worry you,” he continues, into a story about Prong’s Tommy Victor: “[he] said to me, ‘I admire that you’ve never strayed from your path. You’ve never sold out. When we got signed to a deal I thought we had to accommodate somebody’. He said he didn’t like some of the stuff we did, and I said you’re not going to love every song you write, but it’s part of the process.”

LEFT, he says, “just poured out” after working on an orchestral piece for a music school in Memphis. 

“I started writing this album the next day. I always keep copious notes for lyrical content and I read a lot, and because of the internet, phones and iPads and whatever, I read more political stuff than ever, unfortunately. So it just gets you angrier and angrier.”

The album title represents Hamilton’s political viewpoint as much as his fondness for the way the word itself is so triggering.

“I love that it stirs such anxiety, or anger or controversy, because it’s so innocuous. It’s a fucking word! My manager came up with the idea from a Clash song, “Look Left, Look Right, Look Left”. In England they have Look Left sprayed on the pavement because dumb Americans are going to get mowed over. I like that! I had that title for 10 years. I love the word, and it also represents my political perspective.”

That leads to another tale about his conservative mother freaking out about him going to Sweden to work with Entombed.

“My mom was like, ‘They’re socialists, aren’t they?’ and I was like ‘Yes, they have a lot of socialists there, but so do we, and if we had more, we’d be fucking better off!’ What a strange concept, that a woman should take a year off to have a child and not lose her job! How dare she be allowed to have time with her baby!”

LEFT’s lyrical topics cover many of the subjects Hamilton has written about on previous albums. “Gun Fluf” continues the discussion about the US gun culture he explored on Dead To The World. Sonically, there are musical variations like “Tell Me Again,” which came about when Hamilton picked up an acoustic guitar he’d used to teach a student how to play “Friends” by Led Zeppelin. He holds up a hand to show the finger he broke when he fell over a coffee table in the dark in Perth on Helmet’s last tour – “I’m glad that finger wasn’t broken when I was trying to teach that song!” 

“That guitar was still on the stand”, he recalls, “and I picked it up one day and I was like, ‘Oh that’s still in the Zep tuning!’ And bam, it came out just like that. I tried it on the electric, but Led Zeppelin had a lot of acoustic songs that were cool, and I love that. Then I had the idea that I had to find the money to hire a string quartet. Things just happened naturally. I wasn’t forcing anything.”

In spite of string quartets and acoustic tracks, LEFT is distinctly a Helmet album. Whatever form their music takes, there’s no doubt that Page Hamilton is behind it somewhere.  

“Some longtime Helmet fans who are students of mine will say,’That’s my favourite Helmet song. It’s really different to anything you’ve ever done’. But it’s not really! The orchestra director in Memphis, when they had done my piece, he said, ‘That’s so weird, it sounds like you’. My harmonic concepts have been developing for 30 something years, or more – when did I start guitar? ‘77!”

Hamilton’s thoughts and opinions about topics unrelated to his music wind their way through his discourse. As a liberal raised in a conservative household, a lot of his talk turns to society and politics. He has little time for ideas of nationalism or even national identity.

“I’ve travelled the world for 35 years or more – more, since 1982 – and I’m more in touch with the world and Planet Earth and the occupants of other countries and the borders that Man made that are continually shifting within my lifetime. Yugoslavia, when I was studying, is now Croatia, Serbia… Czechoslovakia is the Czech Republic and Slovakia… these are man made borders,” he declares. 

On the state of the US, he offers: “Our country’s a fucking disaster right now. It’s really frightening,” and, a few minutes earlier, “My health insurance is going up another $200 this year. 200 dollars! That’s $1200 a month! For health insurance. It’s amazing. It’s a mess.”

About speaking up on topical issues, he says, “I’m 63 years old, I don’t have any kids to leave anything to, but I feel a responsibility to read and be informed about what’s happening, because I have nieces and nephews and three godsons, and I don’t want to completely fuck this place up.”

That of course leads to some of his strongest disdain – for Donald Trump:

“We were lucky [in 2020] to have people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr who wouldn’t allow him to take that extra step, but now those guys are on his shitlist and he’s talking about imprisoning people – Biden, anyone who doesn’t agree with him. If he wins, it’s going to be scary. It’s bad. He’s an asshole. He’s a piece of shit. He has no interest in the United States of America. He’s always talking about the Constitution and ‘Make America Great Again’ – for himself.”

And: 

“Hopefully, Trump will die. I keep hoping that someone will shoot him. My girlfriend’s like, ‘No! Then he’ll become a martyr!’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care’. He lit the fuse, man. I mean, there’s assholes all over the place. I love that Trump, in one of his stupid speeches, said that Viktor Orban was the president of Turkey – no he isn’t, you fucking idiot! He’s so goddamn dumb!”

Like many others, he pledges he’ll flee the US if Trump becomes President again, but unlike most he even has an actual plan.

“One my options is Canada – Vancouver. The mayor is apparently a huge Helmet fan, and a friend of his is a huge friend of mine. My girlfriend is Italian, so that’s another option. I just want to live out my golden years, as Bowie said, in peace.” 

On music, he observes the phenomenon of “bands trying to jump on trends… I have friends that are still doing that. They’re in their 50s and they’re still trying to make it, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Just do something you believe in and dig. That’s all you gotta do!’ There are no guarantees. You can make a great album and no one will hear it. Some of my favourite albums are albums that none of my friends or family have even heard of.”

His favourite albums are still by bands most people have heard of though, and he has no apologies for it.

“I remember the first time I heard ‘Highway to Hell’. I was 20, so it had to be 1979 or 80. It was the same day I first heard ‘Running With the Devil’ by Van Halen. They were both really cool, but AC/DC really stood out. It just left its imprint on me for life. I have a mix of songs I listen to before and after I go on, because I don’t want to hear music I’m accused of influencing, and ‘Riff Raff’ came on after the show last night [after a pause, he realises he means the night before last]. It was playing in the club and it still gives me goosebumps! Is that crazy? It’s crazy that somebody could be that good. That’s how I feel about Beethoven’s 7th symphony, 9th symphony… Mozart, Charlie Parker, Coltraine… it just stops me in my tracks. For that matter – Gordon Lightfoot! I was in my bunk the other night, couldn’t sleep. Put on Gordon Lightfoot and I thought, ‘What is this? Something so powerful?’ It’s not just the chords and the melody, the voice and the instrumentation, there’s something magical that happens, and people that are technical musicians – they miss that. You have to tap into something. And AC/DC, they don’t give a fuck. And I don’t give a fuck, so maybe that’s why I feel aligned with them.” 

In the end, the west coast hippie is still there underneath all the cynicism and angst.

“All you need is love, man. Why can’t we all get along? Why can’t people have their own fucking religion and sexual orientation, and don’t hurt people, and don’t hurt animals? Just live.”

LEFT is out now.