Q and A: John Gallagher (Raven)

By PAUL SOUTHWELL

NEWCASTLE (UK) power trio Raven helped lay the groundwork for not just the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but the genres to follown with their wild and energetic metal chaos. A pre-COVID Australian tour with Girlschool and Tank showed they still have the goods and right now they are back on our shores for a quick three-date stand that winds up tonight in Sydney at the Steel Assassins Festival. Paul Southwell caught up with bassist and singer John Gallagher.

Hot Metal: Raven has chalked up 15 albums thus far – that’s pretty impressive.
John Gallagher: “Yeah, 15 albums, 50 years and a lot of grey hair. There you go.”

HM: How are you feeling?
JG: “I’m feeling good. I feel better now than I have in the last three and a half weeks. We came back from South America and my body clock was absolutely buggered. I’ve been on vampire hours for the last three and a half weeks. But it’s a packing day today because we’re flying tomorrow, so I’m getting it together.”

HM: So if you look at going way back to, you know, 1970, whatever it was, when you started out on a small acoustic guitar shared with your brother and tuned it down, would you have imagined that you’d get this far?
JG: “Nope. But we were naive enough to try and I remember early on when we decided to form a band, right. All we had to start was one guitar. I think Paul Bowden was getting a guitar on layaway, a few weeks later, and he’d mentioned it to some of the friends at school. Of course, you know how you have these guys who are full of BS and they’ll just have anything to say. ‘Who says you could form a band? You can’t form a band. You have to go in front of the 12 judges,’ and all this nonsense that make it work with a look, and we’re going, ‘Ah is that right?’ So, then when you delve through truths and you thought, ‘No, it isn’t’, and this is much of life, people who say you can’t do that or you shouldn’t do this but they haven’t got a clue. They’re just upset because they’re not doing it. So, make your own rules, make your own look and, you know, work hard and you can be as damaged as I am.”

HM: Well, I saw your show with Tank and Girl School here several years ago, and you’ve still got a lot of energy.
JG: “Well, it’s got probably more than we did before. The Sydney show, which was fun. Yeah, that was fun, that was a good one. The next night was the Melbourne one, and Mark [Gallagher] had jumped off the drum riser and landed on some electrical connector and nearly broke his leg. We spent all night at the hospital after that, which was great.”

HM: He seems to have a thing for leg injuries.
JG: “Yeah, well, he shouldn’t be jumping around like that, but he does. He’s a very lucky guy. Yeah, he really is. He should have died in that accident back in 2001, when an entire building [virtually] fell on him. If you look at his legs, they’re horrifying. They’re all scrapes, scratches, scars and whatever. Both his feet were disconnected. His calf muscle was ripped off one leg. The other one had a piece of metal bar all the way through it. Initially they didn’t know if he was going to make it. Then it was like, ‘We’re going to have to cut your leg off,’ type of stuff, and then it was, ‘We’re going to have to cut your right leg off,’ and he just told them to f**k off every time, and, ‘You’ll never walk again,’ and luckily he proved them wrong. So inspiring, and it proves what a pain in the ass he is too.”

HM: I gather, hence the subsequent album title, Walk Through Fire, when he recovered.
JG: “Yeah, that was it. Yeah. Walk Through Fire to get the way you’re going. That was a plant-the-flag moment. It was like, ‘Okay, we’ve been through all this. This is step one. Boom!’ We’ve worked from then on, and it’s almost been like a third act, so it’s working out really well for us.”

HM: Indeed, and has your songwriting approach changed with the last album, or is it the same as it’s always been?
JG: “The same, just more kicking the ideas around between the three of us. Mike [Heller] brought ideas in. Mike started learning guitar and came up with some cool riffs, such as on ‘Turn of the Screw’, so that’s awesome. That’s always good. When we did ExtermiNation, we just started being hypercritical and really taking time in the writing, in the arranging department, a lot more than we’d done before. Rather than just doing stuff on the fly, it was like, do it on the fly and then leave it, then come back and go, ‘Okay, let’s really go to town on this track; this part here, what’s it doing there? Do we need to play this four times? Could we play it twice? Could we play it six times? What would make it better? What would make the song better?’ That’s kind of the mantra today and we basically work with that. For this album, All Hell’s Breaking Loose, It was a little more organic in that it was really just the three of us. Mike recorded and engineered the whole thing as it was done at his studio with only the three of us in there. We did get an outside guy, Lasse Lammert, who’s a fantastic mixer and he did the mix for us. But otherwise, it was just us and the pressure cooker of, ‘Come on, you can do better than that, push it a little bit.’”

HM: You’ve fluctuated over the years between using a producer and self-producing. What do you prefer?
JG: “Well, the last time we used a producer per se would have been The Pack is Back. Everything else, we’ve had an engineer in who co-produced. Like we, you know, at best, co-produced. We figured out at that point we know what we want. Yeah, and we just need somebody with technical expertise to get that down on the tape, as it were. Luckily right now, Mike is a fantastic engineer. He knows his stuff and he’s got stamina. We used to burn out engineers and producers but he’s burning us out. You know, ‘You want to keep going?’ when we say we’re done, so that, that’s a good thing. We have had instances in the past where we worked with an engineer who took it upon himself to go, ‘Well, I don’t like this,’ and started editing stuff out of the drum patterns and stuff. And it was just like, ‘Nah, not going there. You’re fired.’”

HM: It’s amazing how much has technology has changed those options, though with the way software can just cut and paste. To do it well, it’s quite incredible.
JG: “Yeah, we used to do our cheat version when it got to the second album [Wiped Out]. For the second album had a guy called Keith Nichol [producer and engineer] who was engineering, and he was green. It was like his first real production. They put him in there because I guess they got him cheap, what have you. We hated the process of play until you fall apart and then start again, you know. Take 42. Yeah, we got all the way through it, and at that point, you know, you’re basically looking for a halfway decent drum track, and it’s all on the poor drummer to play it from top to bottom, where everyone else can kind of jerk around and make bum notes and it doesn’t matter, since you’ll redo it later. Well, back then we’d go, ‘Can’t you just punch in? I don’t know, let’s try it.’ So, you’d punch in on like a cymbal hit and you wouldn’t hear it and that way you hear in the first take, you know, we play and maybe make one mistake. So, okay, wind back, the whole band will play along, hit record, and you finish the song. That was a revelation. That was our cheap Pro Tools long before Pro Tools because the whole process of, ‘Damn it, you know you screwed up,’ or ‘You screwed up and you put me off.’ So, it was just horrible. Now, of course, you’ve got the option of scratch guitar things. Mike will sit down and craft a click track which has got the push and pull. It’s not just dump on. It’s might sit back in the verse, push a bit on the chorus, push a bit further for the solo, come back a bit, you know, maybe 20, 30 ups and downs. It’s so real, it’s crazy, then he can use drum cards. He can say, ‘Okay, what kind of fill do I want here?’ We’ll go, ‘Nah, that’s too crazy. Can you do something more signature?’ or ‘That’s not crazy enough,’ you know. We’ll create the drum part like you would create a vocal or a guitar player spaced piece, and it works. At the end of the day, you hear it and it sounds like three guys going nuts in the studio, and that’s what we want. If it didn’t work that way, we wouldn’t do it.”

HM: Yeah, certainly. I mean, that scream from Bruce Dickinson in Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” is real because Birch was just pushing Bruce take after take.
JG: “Yeah, it’s good to have someone do that because you’ll come up with what you think is good and someone will go, ‘Nah, come on a bit more in there or just try something else.’ That’s always a good thing. We leave that 20, 30% of try something else, as that’s where the magic is, you know? Mark, on the last album [Metal City], he had a couple of signature parts, but inevitably he wings his solos and it’s just like, maybe you’ll crash and burn and then he’ll re-listen, ‘Okay, try it again. Try something slightly different.’ Or people go, ‘Why don’t you, instead of going down there, go up here or, you know, go crazy here.’ So, we’ll all just throw ideas at each other. They did that with me with the bass stuff. There’s one song in particular, I think “The Far Side” [from All Hell’s Breaking Loose] has some outrageous fills in it, and they’re just like, ‘Kick it up. Go crazy, go crazy. Really? Yeah, yeah.’”

HM: Nice. Well, if you go back to when you were starting to make waves, you were seen as the precursor to thrash metal. Plus, you were on the same label as Venom, who are seen by many as the precursor, essentially, to black metal. So, is that like a strange situation to be in, if you look back at it over the years?
JG: “Well, it just shows the amount of crazy talent and energy that’s floating around that area. That has always been music in Newcastle, you know, from way back when. You had The Animals. I mean, they were huge. They took over the world. You had Hank Marvin with the Shadows, and Cliff Richard, he played with Cliff Richard. He lived like two streets away from me when I was a kid. That’s where he grew up. Brian Johnson, Sting. I saw Sting at school. They had a poetry reading, had a guy playing guitar and a guy playing bass. And my girlfriend at the time knew Sting, who played in a jazz band called Last Exit. And that was the band he played in before The Police. He had the stripy rugby shirt. It was in like 1974. Crazy, all those people. Mark Knopfler, even the damned Pet Shop Boys, for God’s sake. So, I mean, the amount of music just in the UK in general, it’s so out of proportion. So, to have some, you know, looking at that background, to have, you know, bands like Venom, Fist, Avenger, Blitzkrieg and Satan and what have you, you know, I guess it’s just the way it is.”

HM: You also initially covered a couple of The Sweet’s songs [“Hellraiser” and “Action”]. How did that go over with the English audience? I gather, they probably just lapped it up.
JG: “Loved it, I loved it. That was a huge point for Jeff Barton and his review of the first album, because he loved The Sweet. They were like the guilty pleasure. But they shouldn’t have been a guilty pleasure. They were a fantastic heavy rock band, if you listen to the B-sides and the heavier albums they did later on, very much in the mould of Deep Purple. That was our roots, listening, watching Top of the Pops and seeing Slade, The Sweet, Status Quo, T-Rex, Mud, all the glam rock stuff. David Bowie, what have you, all that. It was loud, bombastic, great songs, loud guitar, just cool. That’s what it’s all about. Great songs, loud guitar.”

HM: So, when you got out and about and were playing Workers Clubs, did people just want you to play The Sweet covers or did they accept your new material?
JG: “No, by the time we’d done that, we weren’t playing the clubs anymore. We were, you know, playing proper rock venues. The Last club date we did was early in 1980. We played right up the street from where my girlfriend lives now. Actually, it’s knocked down now, but it was a place called the Excelsior and we’d never played there before. But famously, back in the day, I remember my parents coming home after a night out, all mad because they went to see John Miles. Remember John Miles? Music is my first love. He had a great ballad [“Music”] and then, like, hard rock, and he ended up playing guitar with Tina Turner for years. Anyway, so he was a local hero, and they got paid off. They would play two sets and after the first set, the committee went in, goes, ‘There’s your money, get out of here,’ because you’re too loud, you’re too heavy, you’re too whatever. So, we played this venue, and the same thing happened to us. We were all laughing, going, we’ve made it. If it’s good enough for John Miles, it’s good enough for us.”

HM: When you joined Megaforce Records and ended up touring with Metallica and Anthrax, could you see just early on that they were going to be the huge, monster band that they became?
JG: “No, not a chance. No, that was their first ever tour opening up for us. They were very green, but they were very attentive. I talked to James [Hetfield] relatively recently and he said, ‘I don’t remember much of those days, but I remember that tour. I remember every night we’d sit and watch you guys and go, how do we get from here to there?’ So, they were like a sponge. They soaked it all up. Somebody asking me, after watching them or hearing their second album [Ride the Lightning], I would have said, ‘Yeah, these guys are destined to go somewhere. Absolutely right.’ The first album [Kill ‘Em All] was very bombastic, very thrashy and very heavy. But that band with that, was never going to get the way they are now. It just wasn’t going to happen, you know, they had to have broader appeal, and it was the same with Anthrax. I mean, we’d known Scott [Ian], and I mean, there’s loads of photos from the first shows with Scott and Danny [Spitz], like, hanging out backstage, and in the crowd and whatever. So, you know, we heard their demos and what they were doing. They did their first album [Fistful of Metal], so, we said, ‘Yeah, come on out, let’s do it.’ That was cool, having them out with us. Absolutely nice.”

HM: By the time you came back from New York, after leaving Atlantic, and after Life’s a Bitch in 1987, you had also been doing European festivals with bands such as Stryper and Testament. Was that an interesting experience or was it just like doing another show?
JG: Really, it was just another show. I mean, we had played with Stryper, I think it was with Anthrax back at the Country Club in Los Angeles, back in 1984 or 1985, and that was bizarre because they had their roadies reading Bibles backstage and we thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ We met Michael [Sweet – Stryper frontman] again recently on one of the rock cruises. He’s a fantastic guitar player and singer. He is a great guy and that was just their schtick at the time, I guess that’s what they were doing. We actually opened for Testament after we did our Nothing Exceeds like Excess album in 1988. You know, this was part of us climbing back after the debacle of dealing with Atlantic Records, and yeah, that was cool. We’ve played with Testament on a number of festivals. It’s always great to see those guys. They’re awesome.”

HM: You’ll be touring here as part of Steel Assassins, at least for the Sydney show. What do you envision will be the set list given you’ve got so much material?
JG: “Yeah, you try not to look too deep into that, otherwise you’d never put anything down. There are a few songs we love playing and we always play them, so we’ll put them in. We tried to mix up the opener a little bit and this one song, we’re doing one of the first songs we ever wrote, and we haven’t been playing that for about 40 years, so we put that back in the set. So that’s fun, and then we’re playing a few off the new album. So, it’s a good mishmash and we have a fun jam at the end where we’ll maybe throw in 30 seconds of a cover tune here and then just to mix it up, anything goes. You never know what’s going to happen.”

HM: Excellent. So, what got you into finger style bass as opposed to using a plectrum?
JG: “I started on classical guitar. That’s what I had, and I could never get away with a pick. Whenever I wanted to play pick style, like I’ll do now, I’ll just do that [uses fingernail] and go and cheat, you know, but then I’ll go backwards and forwards one finger, like basically you were doing [moving two fingers on picking hand]. Sounds the same, pretty much. So, I can cheat and get away with it. If anything requires that kick articulation, I can do that. You’ve got your finger, so you can do, you know, finger picking and stuff as well.”

HM: Getting that fingerstyle speed takes some work, it’s the like Steve Harris thing, right?
JG: “Well, not to cast dispersions on Steve, who’s fantastic player and writer. I try to get rid of the noise. The clacking drives me crazy. So, if you’re doing more up and down, as opposed to down on the strings, you reduce the noise. I’ve spent literally years eliminating that because that would drive me crazy, man. So, it’s trying to get the notes rather than the percussion, the clacking. That’s one of the things for playing a [Fender] Precision bass like Steve does, it’s very prone to that. The strings, the way it’s set up, the angles, how the strings hit the frets. So, you’ve got be really careful with that. But that’s just me. I mean, there’s a lot of people love that sound. To me, it’s verging on slap bass. But also, that’s what’s cool about music. Everyone has their own approach, and they all bring something different to the table. I love that Maiden stuff, like “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” that’s fantastic. I love it. Great stuff. He’s a straight up good guy too.””

HM: You also have an eight-string bass, which to most appears as the bass equivalent of a 12-string guitar.
JG: “Yeah, I’ve got a few of them, actually. I made a few during the pandemic. One if an Iceman Bass I got, which is that shape [Paul Stanley’s staple Iceman guitar shape]. But I converted it into an eight string. Even when it’s not plugged in, you can hear it. It sounds distorted and loud. It sounds like a tank. But this is what’s on, “Tyrant of the Airways” [from first album Rock Until You Drop]”

HM: So, you made them yourself?
JG: “Yeah, I saw that bass and it’s got such a huge headstock. I thought, ‘Oh, this is a perfect, test bed for an eight-string. So, I just blocked off all the holes, figured out the angles, cut the nut, got the bridge. And I’ve done that with like three of them. I have other guitars that I’ve done it to as
well. It’s cool because usually a lot of the standard eight strings, they’re based on like a
five string bass. They have got a much wider neck and it’s not necessary. But I started that. I had the second Ibanez Musician eight string ever in England. I think Sting had the first one, and that’s on a couple of the tracks of the first album. Then the guy at the shop says, ‘Oh, I’ve got this Kramer one coming in. You’re going to want to swap it out, I bet,’ and I did. I got the Kramer eight string. I used that all the way up until the early 90s, then I had a bunch of stuff stolen. I had insurance, so I got the Hamer 12 string bass, and I played a Hamer 12 string for quite a while until it nearly got stolen. I had another bass get destroyed by the airlines. So, I thought, ‘I’m not taking a five-thousand-dollar bass around with me.’ I ended up getting a couple of different ones. But these are fun, they sound awesome. I did an awful lot of customisations and building during the pandemic because what else you going to do, right? I did a lot of Bass videos, and I built a lot of guitars. So, I built three Flying V guitars for my brother, one with a tremolo, a copy that’s heavily modified that I’ll be bringing out with me on the tour. That is cool as that’s got a tremolo on it, and a hot rod pickup so basically, it’s just the wood and I got rid of everything else.”

HM: Very nice guitars. If you look back over the vast discography of Raven, is there a particular track, or at least particular album perhaps that you’re most proud of at this point in your career?
JG: “Oh, geez, you’re asking me to choose between my kids. It’s a tough one. There are so many different landmarks. I mean, the All for One album was a big landmark back then [1983] because it was like the first album in a real studio with a real producer, and it worked. It was a magical time to go back, and I’m extremely proud of the recent album, All Hell’s Breaking Loose, because, again, it’s all thanks to us, because it was all on our shoulders, and we made it happen. So that was cool.”