PlanetMosh Keeping it Metal
Ahead of their headline show at the Road House in Evesham, Planet Mosh caught up with the brothers Hampson from one of the best bands around at the moment Sinnergod. In their tour van we discovered what they think of the band name, what new releases are coming our way from the band, album artwork and discovered, like many of us they are their own worst critic. We definitely didn’t find out what ice cream flavor they would be, but here is what we did learn.
Your music is very heavy yet quite melodic, what are your musical influences?
Mark: I’d say from the start Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeath and then I think gothic wise it’s mainly Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails. It’s hard to distinguish if it fits in with the sound wot we’ve got.
Chris: See, I’m not in to Marilyn and never ‘ave been, so in the writing process I bring a different kind of approach to it. I’d say we’re into the same stuff but I wouldn’t consider myself very into the gothic music, so an interesting mixture.
We believe there is an album in the pipeline, what can we expect from it?
Mark: Yeah, we’re demoing at the moment, we’ve got five or six tracks, which is, to be fair, without giving too much away it’s only the start of it track count wise, so hopefully we’ll try and get it out before the summer.
Chris: It will follow on from, maybe very similar to the last album, but we’ll probably try and push our influences a little bit more. It won’t be too far away from the last one, because we were happy with the reception to that one, we’d be crazy to try and mix it up too much.
You mentioned it earlier, but what is your album writing process?
Mark: Music mainly. I demo a lot at home because I’m got me little mini studio, so it’s just churning out riffs and bring it to the band, we’ll go to the rehearsal room and jam it out, if it sounds good we’ll keep it, if not, ditch it.
Chris: The lyrics are normally the very very final thing that we do, we’ve literally put a guitar solo down before we’ve done the lyrics. We’ve just always been that type of band. We’re not lyricists really. If you listen to our songs their not exactly…they’re shit y’know, that’s not our strongest point.
You recently re-released ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ in special packaging, are there any plans to re-release your EP’s?
Mark: Yeah, yeah we discussed it a few months ago. We’re in the process of mixing again, re-mixing and mastering and we are doing a three package deal, we’ll be sticking ‘Seven…’ on as well as a multi buy thing.
Chris: D’you know what it was, it was they’d been extremely popular and we are well aware that people want to pick up copies and we’ve never re-produced them because at the time when we had this plan that we were gonna re-release ‘em, we were in negotiations with a record label and labels being as they are, they wanted to grab hold of everything and we didn’t want that and because the negotiations were going on that long at the end of it we didn’t sign with them and we were just restricted to what we could do, so even though we wanted to re-release them we were stuck, we couldn’t so it, so they’ll definitely resurface.
Who is your greatest influence outside of music?
Mark: That’s a hard one to answer because we just live and breathe music.
Chris: We love our films so, horrors and directors always come into it, Rob Zombie, Joe Carpenter, stuff like that.
Mark: When I write songs I am in to image and I’ll put a horror cover on me laptop while I’m writing and it just inspires me, so outside definitely directors of horrors.
If you could learn to play any musical instrument that you can’t already play, what would it be and why?
Mark: Mine would be piano, I play bits and bobs on the recordings but I can’t play it proper, I’d love to play.
Chris: See mine would be guitar because you won’t believe how frustrating it is to be a song writer but can’t actually play guitar because the main body or ideas come for a song from guitar, so I can ring up and I’m singing down the phone to ‘im [looking at Mark], saying I’ve got this amazing riff which goes “Whahabablah”, so mine would definitely be guitar. I’m so impatient for guitar though, I mean I’m not very good at drums so….
You’ve mentioned being influenced by the visual image, how do you approach the artwork for a new release? The latest album had a more sleek look to it.
Mark: The latest release, it was an outsider who did it, normally I’ll do all the graphic design and stuff like that. I think we had an idea of what we wanted the cover to be like and then we….[looking at Chris] what was that website called?
Chris: Deviant art.
Mark: Deviant art, we was having a mooch on that and we found this image and it was like wow, that’s really good so [Chris] contacted the bloke.
Chris: It’s so weird because this guy was from a small part of Brazil and was actually a fan of the band, which considering we are just this minute band from Wigan, he was a bit like in awe, he was like “you’re kidding?” like that and I was like “can we use your artwork?”.
Mark: What he did was, the original artwork what was on Deviant that was really cool, but he repainted it just for the band.
Which song do you most enjoy playing live and why?
Chris: See with me it’s the easiest, you can see the amount of beer in ‘ere so….I actually enjoy playing ‘Gun’ because it’s got a swingy feel to it, but there’s not much thought that goes into it and again you can play it drunk!
Mark: To me it’s ‘Burn’, it’s the opening track and I think a lot of people will know it because of the video, it’s nice seeing people sing it so that’s me favourite one.
Music can often be poignant for people for different reasons is there a song that is particularly important to you guys with a reason that you are prepared to share?
Mark: ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica, I think it just covers every aspect.
Chris: It just opened everything up. We are into music but when ‘Enter Sandman’ came out and we heard it from our friends bedroom window, it was a hot summers day and it was blaring from the window and we were already into Metallica, but were unaware they were actually releasing anything, this song came on and your ears prick up and you think “oh my god what the hell is this?”.
Mark: We were so young, I think I was like eight or something.
Chris: That was just a complete game changer for us. That made us from being into music to wanting to play music, the defining factor y’know.
What is the biggest misconception about you as a band?
Mark: The name.
Chris: Yeah.
Mark: When people hear the name Sinnergod, they think it sounds like black metal or dyslexic Jews and I think the fan base we’ve made is basically people just showing up at gigs listening to us and thinking “bloody hell, they’re alright them” y’know and I don’t think the name suits the band with the style of…
Chris: In hindsight we wouldn’t have it but when you are starting off and you are young and you think yeah that’s it! Probably Dave Mustane thinks the same about Megadeath.
Planet Mosh: Dave Grohl does of Foo Fighters.
Chris: I hate the band name, I’ve always been quite open about that, but we are too far into it now to change, I think.
For the musicians amongst us are you able to give us an idea of what kit you use?
Mark: We’re very simple with regards to gear because we’ve done that many gigs and obviously it changes with in-house sound engineers, you can turn up with the best rig ever but it the engineer doesn’t portray that rig to be good so we are always in the house kinda thing sound wise, so we use line 6 because it’s got like cab simulators on it, so if the engineer is shit, from source we are fine y’know.
When question have you never been asked that you would like to be asked and what would you answer be?
Mark: Oh my god.
Chris: What car do you drive?
Planet Mosh: And what do you drive?
Chris: Mercedes
Mark: That’s a good one, it’s a banger but it’s a Mercedes.
Whilst we eagerly await those forthcoming releases from the band, you can catch Sinnergod live on the following dates:
2017
27th October – The Old Courts, Wigan
28th October – Mavericks Bar, Burnley
4th November – The Parish, Huddersfield w/Bad Pollyanna
2018
11th February – Pure Nightclub, Wigan w/Anvil
26th June – Rebellion, Manchester w/Pist-On
