ORANGE GOBLIN: Strange As Fiction (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

LONDONERS Orange Goblin are the latest rockers to craft their own beer. Long time champions of the amber fluid, the band’s own brew, Rocket, celebrates their 30th anniversary and coincides with the launch of their new album, Science, Not Fiction.

Unfortunately for gregarious front man Ben Ward, Rocket is off limits to him.

“The timing of it is bad for me, because I’m sober now,” he says with a smile and shrug. 

Ward gave up the drink a few years back. Three decades of being surrounded by booze every night on the road finally took its toll on the singer. His drinking was affecting every aspect of his life from his performance on stage to his family

“I’ve reached a point where I suffered with alcoholism throughout my adult life. It’s damaged my health and I’ve tried and failed to stop drinking in the past. This time it got to a point where I was becoming aggressive, I was having bouts of depression and just upsetting people closest to me: my wife, my bandmates, my son, and I just wasn’t a pleasant person.

“Being in the music industry is difficult,” he continues. “It’s the only industry where you turn up to work and there’s a fridge full of free beer and you’re encouraged to have a drink before you get on stage. My only regret now is that I didn’t do it sooner.”

He’s had to leave it up to the rest of the band to make sure their beer is a good one. It was a project that Orange Goblin had wanted to do for some time, “but we had to do it right,” he says, “because we didn’t want a shit-tasting beer.

“We met with the head brewer and discussed what we wanted, and the band decided what they wanted was a fresh, crisp German style pilsener that you can have five or six pints of, and still feel pretty good.  It’s going to be interesting to see what people think of it, and I hope it does us justice, because we’re a band that championed alcohol – beer especially – in the past.”

As mentioned, the band also has a new album, their 10th. 

“I think this new album is a good representation of Orange Goblin and where we’ve been throughout our career,” Ward says of it. “It may sound a bit familiar, but it’s some of the strongest stuff we’ve done.”

Behind the music of Science, Not Fiction is a “loose concept” contrasting the world of science and religious thought. It was an idea that developed after the strangeness of the COVID pandemic, but something Ward had been thinking of exploring for many years prior.

“[It’s] not so much a concept, just an observation,” Ward begins. “It’s where you put your faith, really. Do you believe in science which is proven with experiments and has helped us advance in technology and medicine and everything since the dawn of time, or do you put it in religion, which is just fiction? I don’t believe it, that there’s some imaginary guy in the sky, old scrolls that were translated…”

 Yet while it’s clear religion isn’t for him, he quickly points out that he has nothing against religious people.

“That said,” he continues, “I’m not anti-religion. If people want to believe in a deity, whichever deity it is, and it installs some morals and gives them direction and steers them through hard times, then that’s great. But for me, personally, and for most of the people around me, I’d rather put my faith in science and proven events.”

The imagery, themes and concepts of the world’s religions – primarily Christianity and its off-shoots with their bloodied iconography and fatalistic obsession with punishment and guilt that far surpasses the New Testament’s core teachings of humanity and forgiveness – have been central to heavy metal’s mythology since Black Sabbath’s demonic tri-tone first thundered out of a club in Birmingham.

“I think religion is one of the biggest causes of war and death since the dawn of time, because no one can agree about who should be the one true god,” Ward argues. “It’s something we wanted to touch on. We’re not a strictly political or religious band in any way, but it makes good fodder for a heavy metal album.”

The state of the world during the COVID crisis played a part in Ward’s decision to explore the themes of Science, Not Fiction, along with being close to 50 years old, with 30 of those spent in Orange Goblin.

“Lyrically we always used to tap into the whole fantasy thing with dragons and wizards and things like that – which is still cool. If it’s cool enough for Ronnie James Dio, it’s cool enough for anyone. But we wanted to showcase other sides of us and me, personally, I’ve been on a journey for the past couple of years. I got sober a few years ago and I see the world through different eyes now. Just observations and trying to make the world a better place for those around me. Obviously too the world has been through some drastic situations in the past few years. They’re watching us, and the COVID thing…I’m not denying there was a pandemic, a lot of people lost their lives, it was a sad reality. But the way the government handled it was kind of strange. It was almost like an experiment in control. We were all told we had to stand two metres apart at the supermarket and stay at home. It was population control. We only get a short period of time to live our lives on this planet. We all lost a year or so being told what to do. It was definitely strange, and it fuelled the kind of material we wanted to put onto this album.”