One should never interview one’s heroes, or so I discovered at this year’s Bloodstock. Having witnessed Anathema put on one of the shows of the weekend, SonicAbuse was lucky enough to track down Daniel Cavanagh for a brief interview. Approaching the amiable guitarist, I immediately told him they’d performed a great set at which point he asked me what had been my favourite song. Faced with a mental block of epic proportions I promptly said the name of the wrong song, aaaagh twat! Having got over that embarrassing preamble, I was able to ask Danny a couple of questions in a somewhat informal setting.
SA: Right, so first question then, what was the highlight of Bloodstock for you?
DC: Playing with Nick Barker, who’s the best drummer that I’ve ever seen, never mind the best drummer that I’ve shared a stage with, and also Martin who’s a really, really natural musician, he’s an excellent player and it was great playing with them guys because we’d had one rehearsal and we really didn’t have to tell them what to do; it just came so easily to them. I loved playing ‘Sleepless’ and I loved playing iron Maiden at the end.
SA: That was fantastic, that was really, really cool, I wasn’t expecting that at all.
DC: Yeah, I don’t think anyone was
SA: You started out really metal and you kind of developed your sound over the years, was that a natural progression?
DC: Yeah, totally natural, nothing is contrived. There’ve been conscious decisions made, but they came very naturally, they came from within us, we’re not trying to be something we’re not, we’ve only ever been ourselves musically, so it is natural, yeah.
SA: You’ve got a new album coming out very soon, I believe?
DC: yeah, very soon, it’s being mixed quite soon, hopefully by a Grammy-award winning mixer, and it will be stunning, a really stunning album and it’s going to get a world-wide release and I hope it’ll open a lot of doors for us.
SA: That’d be great
DC: It’s a special record.
SA: Is Lee going to be on it again?
DC: She is, yeah
SA: Are you going out on tour in Europe any time soon?
DC: Oh absolutely, we never stop, we never stop for very long.
SA would like to thank Daniel for giving us this interview, especially as it was an on-the-spot job, straight after their performance.
