PHAROH

Take a Swede, an Italian record label and an American heavy metal band and you have the recipe for an interview with new hopefuls Pharaoh. I knew from the minute I heard “After The Fire”, Pharaoh’s first album, that this was going to be something more than just another heavy metal record (see review). So not doing an interview with the band wasn’t an option. I got hold of drummer Chris Black and he had a thing or two to tell.

-Anders Ekdahl

Since I know so little about your past, could tell me something about what you’ve been up to before Pharaoh and why you decided to start Pharaoh? 
Before Pharaoh, I was playing in a variety of bands and projects. Maybe you have heard of Dawnbringer? We released two and a half albums during the late 90s. Dawnbringer was playing a kind of modern speed metal, and I wanted to try writing some more traditional metal stuff. I was friends with this band called Final Prayer, who was a death/thrash metal outfit, but their guitarist Keith Barnard is a maniac for classic metal like Saxon, Metal Church, Mercyful Fate, etc. So he and I came up with Pharaoh as a way for us to play traditional metal together, since these elements didn’t really suit either of our main bands. He left the project a little while later, unfortunately, but he’s very busy with a lot of projects still. Check out Blood Vomit or www.metalrebellion.com.
Our other bandmembers come from various backgrounds. Matt Johnsen is best known for his writing in Metal Maniacs, and Tim Aymar of course comes to mind as the vocalist on Control Denied’s Fragile Art of Existence. Our bassist Chris Kerns is of unknown origin. Just ask anyone who has met him.

Given the great distance between the US and Europe, how does an American band end up on a relatively small Italian label?
We ended up on an Italian label the same way we ended up doing an interview with a Swedish guy for an American magazine. Heavy metal culture is an international language, and heavy metal music knows no boundaries. The album was supposed to be released on Icarus, a small label from Argentina. They signed Dawnbringer, and shortly afterward they made a very nice offer for Pharaoh. This was in 2000, I believe. Icarus paid for the recording but Cruz del Sur ended up with the rights to release it. It was a deal between the two labels. Especially now that so many people have access to email, borders between countries and continents are no match for the progress of heavy metal.

What does it mean, both to you as a band but also generally, to have bands like Armored Saint, Warrior and Icon in the past history of American heavy metal?
You’re referring to the more “hard rock” side of American metal, right? I never really cared for any of those bands that you mentioned, except maybe Armored Saint. I like old Riot quite a lot and even some of the Shrapnel “shred” stuff. These acts wanted to be professional, that is, financially sustain themselves and their organization. So you’re going to end up with some goofy music and promo shots. The flipside to this is that you get better production value on this type of album. Have you heard of Vomitor? One of the smartest things I’ve read in an interview recently was this guy saying that Vomitor is metalheads playing music, versus musicians playing metal. What an important distinction to have in mind! I think Pharaoh falls somewhere near the line, slightly on the “musicians playing metal” side. But the metal market must have been quite attractive to the professional musician in the 80s. Does that answer your question?

If I tell you that in some ways I think your music is like a cross between the 80s works of Dio and Iron Maiden, what do you have to say in response to that?
Maiden, yeah. But Dio, I don’t know. That must be Tim’s vocals that make you think of Dio. There are a lot of 80s influences contributing to Pharaoh’s sound, and most of them aren’t so surprising: Helloween, Omen, Saxon, Metallica, Manowar… But we have some favorites from the 90s and beyond as well. Especially the early-90s power metal classics like Running Wild Death or Glory, Gamma Ray Insanity & Genius, Blind Guardian Tales From the Twilight World, Rage, Scanner, Angra… all that stuff is pretty juicy in the ears of Pharaoh. Classics like Riot, Blue Öyster Cult, and Thin Lizzy are also essential.

To me there’s always been a difference between European and American heavy metal. If you were to pin point the major differences between the two what would you answer be?
This is an interesting consideration, and for the purposes of my answer, I have to include the UK and the USA in the same category, with continental Europe on the other side. As rock culture was developing in the 1950s and 1960s, it became manifest much more quickly and to a much greater extent in the UK and USA than it did anywhere else. The USA’s consumer culture and the UK’s fashion culture (and vice versa) contributed heavily to the growth rate of rock’s popularity and perhaps the English language to some extent contained it in these territories. Of course mass media structures were developing at the same time, and this only heightened the effects I’m talking about. Thus, rock music became highly commodified in these areas.
And by my estimation, this commodification affected all of the forms of rock music that have proliferated since these formative times. Including heavy metal. The best marketing tools during the 1970s for music were radio and live performance. So a band wanting to succeed (and let’s face it, they ALL do on some level) would be well-advised to produce a few radio-ready tunes and get the bugs out of its stage show. Perhaps at the expense of mastering their instruments or getting the most out of their studio time where an entire album is concerned. Then in the 80s, all of a sudden, you have MTV, and the visual elements of a band really go through the roof in terms of priority. The emphasis on writing singles is still there, but now there is an entirely new conceptual level in which the band has to play. And it’s a wonder anyone’s in the rehearsal room at all!
I have never lived in Europe. Especially not in the 1950s. So I can only speculate on the genesis of heavy metal music and culture over there. But it seems that the performance aspect of a band’s career has always been esteemed in the European market. The closeness of so many countries makes it easy for a band to reach many different audiences in a short amount of time. MTV probably took root much later in Europe than it did in the USA, so anyone wanting to see his or her favorite band actually perform was forced to go in person. This, combined with the fact that Europe has many “high art” traditions dating from many centuries, leads me to think that musicianship and performance rank much more highly in the minds of the European audience than do a hit single or video. And while not all bands even think about the pressures an audience’s expectations might represent, it leads me to think that some of these guys may have been in the rehearsal studio while some of their English-speaking counterparts were holding press conferences. Of course it’s also easier to sustain a career as a musician in certain countries just because of differences in government.
In short, European audiences, and perhaps therefore artists, will value musicianship, craftsmanship, and authenticity. American audiences are looking for new fashion ideas and a stupid phrase they can yell at passing cars!
But what do I know? This might all be bullshit. I haven’t done any research, and my opinions above may well be useless generalizations. I can only call it from where I sit. And of course there are plenty of bands whose ambitions aren’t dictated by “market conditions” or whose priorities entail different types of successes than simply achieving a career. But what we’re talking about here is trends over time.

Something I’ve been wondering is, when you pick a title for your record, on what basis do you do so?
In this case, we chose the song that not only was a memorable phrase for an album title, but also whose lyrics had some imagery that would be useful in making the artwork.

When you track listed “After The Fire” did you do so with the intention of creating the perfect album?
Actually the track order could be a little better. We shouldn’t have put “Flash of the Dark” right after the title track. It’s a little Maiden-heavy in that section of the album.

When you write songs is it an easy process or do find that you have to scrap a lot of stuff because it doesn’t work or because it has already been done?
Speaking for myself, I probably edit out 30% of what I write musically and maybe as much as 50% lyrically. Revision is the most important phase of any writing process. However, it’s pretty easy to know whether a riff will work for Pharaoh. We don’t worry too much about whether something has already been done, because once we do it ourselves it becomes ours. Given the quantity of metal music and other music that has been recorded, it is difficult to function if you hold originality as the ultimate goal. Pharaoh’s priority is quality.

Back when Hammerfall released their debut album a renewed interest for heavy metal blossomed. Do you feel that there still is the same level of interest for heavy metal today as there were a couple of years back.
Yes, there is still some kind of heavy metal revival in place. Some younger guys and girls think it’s funny to wear an old Iron Maiden shirt or something. Like you have rock and roll credibility. But there is definitely a stronger base for melodic metal than in the last decade. The ProgPower festival is sure proof of this. And I guess it’s to HammerFall’s credit somewhat.
Of course internationally there is definitely an interest in this kind of classic metal, as you can tell from bands like Wolf, Metalucifer, Hellish Warfare, Lost Horizon, and Pharaoh.

With “After The Fire” released, where do you see Pharaoh going from here?
The next step is to record our second album. We haven’t done any gigs yet and there aren’t any plans for that. Maybe once we have some more material to choose from, we can think about Pharaoh as a live act. But for now, we are busy preparing songs for the next studio session. So you can look for the new album sometime in the beginning of 2004.
Meanwhile, if your readers are curious to learn more about Pharaoh, they can check out www.solarflight.net.