As I’ve noted elsewhere on these pages, the Wildhearts have been a hugely important part of my musical DNA ever since I discovered a copy of Fishing For Luckies, hidden away in a Woolworths of all places. If you know the album, you’ll know it has a lenticular cover with a fish on the front and, on the back, a picture of the band. It was that band picture that caught me first – the sheer energy depicted in that one shot making me think that this was a band I absolutely should be listening to and, from the moment Inglorious clawed its way out of my little stereo, I knew I was right.
Over the next few years, I played that noisy little bastard of an album to anyone who would listen, and it became one of those records that a few of us would regularly put on when we gathered. Even today, it recalls one of my closest friends instantly to mind and, when the band dropped Endless Nameless in 1997, I played it so often, and at such volume, that it actually shredded the treble cone in one of my speakers.
Unfortunately, as history will record, the band ended somewhat ignominiously around the same time, and I didn’t get to see the Wildhearts until they reformed in 2001 – the experience proving so exciting that I I’ve seen them on many of their tours since – and almost always with that same friend from the mid-90s. It’s this, I think, that lies at the core of my love for the band (and not only my love, but for Wildhearts fans in general) – the fact that the Wildhearts are not so much a band as a community, and one that should be shared wherever possible.
It’s certainly this sense of community that Ginger refers to often and it’s clear that his love for the Wildhearts remains undimmed after all these years. The line ups may change, the music may evolve alongside his restlessly shifting interests, but that sense of wonder remains and, with stunning new album The Satanic Rites Of…, Ginger has once again proved that the band is bigger than merely the individuals standing on the stage. It’s an ethos that fans are proud to carry, and a shared experience that brings not only friends but families together.
Strangely, of all the interviews I’ve had the good fortune to conduct, this one (perhaps because the band has been such a huge part of my life) came with a few more nerves than most. Typically, then, it starts with Zoom malfunctioning, and it takes a few attempts to get the interview started – only adding to my jitters. When we finally are connected, however, Ginger is welcoming and disarmingly open. He starts by asking if I’ve heard the new album – something I eagerly affirm, and then we’re off, digging into the history of this very special band.
The first question I’ve got for you is that there’s kind of a fan’s misconception about bands that they stay together and that they’re like a band of brothers… I know that it can be like that, but it can also be very difficult when trust gets eroded. So, I guess, in this instance, you had to step away from what the Wildhearts had become to look after yourself as well as the band?
Well -it’s really that two of the guys didn’t want to do it and one of the guys had already been fired. So, it was my choice to either stop being the Wildhearts or keep doing it. And I go too deep in this, I’ve been doing it for too long, and the community is too strong. Anyone who’s followed the Wildhearts at all knows that this is a huge family. It’s bigger than a band line up, it’s bigger than whatever they think is the classic line up.
It’s no one person’s choice for this to stop. We’re three generations in and there’s people here who met at a Wildheart’s gig, got together and had a kid; and then the kid has grown up listening to the Wildhearts; they’ve had a kid, and their kids listen to the Wildhearts. I mean, who am I to say “well, I’m going to stop all of that now, you don’t deserve any more”?
You know, for two of the guys, it was their choice not to do it, but it’s certainly not their choice for me not to do it. So, it wasn’t really on the cards that we’d stop doing this.
So, how did you go about finding the new line up?
Well, when I was demoing, I wanted to put people together just so it sounded more like a band. There was record company interest, and I didn’t want it to just sound like me. Obviously, my chosen bass player of any bass player in the history of bass players is Jon Poole – so, we got him in. I wanted Kavus Torabi to come in and just play guitar, because I’ve always rated Kavus’ playing and he’s also a fellow Cardiac with Jon. So, I knew he’d be a good hand in the studio. Kavus brought his drummer and then we did the demos, and the record people said “yep, you’ve got a deal, on the proviso that you don’t have the last line up.”
So, I said, “fair enough”, and it wasn’t really on the cards. But I did, out of a sense of guilt and loyalty, ask the guys if they wanted to come along – against the record company’s wishes.
They both said “no”.
I fully get it, the last line up ended in a really ugly way, but there was a record deal on the table, so… I knew Jon was obviously staying. I knew Kavus wasn’t going to be a full-time guy because he’s so busy, but the one guitar player that everyone knows in the Wildhearts’ community is Ben Marsden because he’s played with so many bands. He looks like a Wildheart, he plays like one, he sings great, he knows all the lyrics – so, I was like “well, it’s a no brainer, let’s get Ben in!”
The drummer that Kavus brought in already knew the songs, so that was going to be better, cheaper, and more effective to just get him to play the drums. He’s an astounding drummer. And then, when it came to finding a full-time drummer, a good friend of ours recommended Charles Evans, whose face you know from the Troubadour Moon video, and he plays every bit as good as the guy on the record. So, we went out to Europe in December to test the line up out, and yeah – it worked a treat.
Even though, for a lot of people… we’ve been working on this for a while, but for a lot of people, it’s probably still a bit of a shock to have seemingly a different line up- but I’ve been working on this for ages, and it feels perfectly natural to me.
But bands are like relationships you know, if you marry the first love of your life then congratulations, but don’t go thinking it’s natural, you know. Relationships – people grow apart from each other and, of course, with a band line up- the excesses and all of the different egos and characters and stuff, it’s four times more likely to break up than a relationship with someone. So, it’s a very natural thing for things to move on and things to change. Not everyone is comfortable with change, but I am. I embrace it.
You put out a post on social media, a couple of weeks ago, saying how you had the best musical collection you’ve ever had in your life and you’re still absolutely in love with music as an art form, and I absolutely loved that post because it’s not an idea that is articulated enough – especially at a time when listening seems to be increasingly passive. And also, it sits at the heart of the Wildhearts, because you’ve never just sat in one genre, but you have something unique that flows from a place of passion.
Yeah – well, I’ve never done this for money. Or commercial acclaim. Or critical acclaim. I’ve been doing music for a long time, and you can’t keep that up for as long as I’ve been doing it without a love of music. I can’t understand why you would even do it without the love of music.
Not just playing music but listening to music – it’s saved my bacon so many times. And I just think that I find a lot of… I’m always asking people for new recommendations, and I always find something that’s new to me, that I obsess over and fall in love with. And it’s like a love affair except you get to have a new love every six months or something, you know. And I really do fall hook, line and sinker – all the feelings you have of love, I fall in love with an album or a band or with a sound, or just an attitude or approach. I kind of hope I’m speaking to a lot of people like that.
Now, I know that the Tik Tok generation probably don’t love music in the same way because they don’t listen to whole albums – a lot of them don’t even listen to whole songs – but, for my generation, albums are sacred and, working with someone like Dante Bonutto from Snakefarm – he’s just as much of a music fanatic as I am.
So, for example, when he’s doing the track listing for the new album – and I let him. I said, “I want those two first and that one last, and the rest of it is up to you.” And he put the track list together like it was side 1 and side 2. Now, there are a lot of people in this generation who wouldn’t even know what I mean by that, but for people like me, that was sacred – the order of songs. What song is track three on side two – because that was always my favourite. It’s a tradition I thoroughly endorse. It’s something I still believe in with all my heart.
I still fall in love – I’m always in a love affair with some band or some album – and it’s medicinal. Music’s been my therapist, my best friend, my medicine, my confidante, my comfort. I’m so grateful – so grateful for my love of it and so grateful for my ability to create it and to have that relationship with listeners of my music. It’s a perfect circle.
Yeah, and I love that idea of the relationship, because you do go back to the old loves. And you can move forward and explore, which is really important because it keeps it new and fresh, but you can go back to those old favourites and it’s like a time machine and you get the same feelings you had when you first heard them.
Fuck yeah! There are very few things that can elicit that response – that memory. Music and smells. Now, if you pass someone in the street and they smell like something, boom – you’re back. It doesn’t matter how big an impact it had, or how many years ago it was – a smell can take you right back there.
And music is every bit as effective as that. I listen to a piece of music and, it doesn’t matter how many years are between me and the first time I heard that music, I remember the smell of the bedroom of the girl that I was with at the time, or the feeling of the drugs me and my friends were experimenting with, or whatever it is. It’s a blast. You’re right back there.
And I think that’s where time… I find time fascinating because I think we’ve shoehorned the concept of time into our reality, and I don’t believe that time is linear. I do believe that the past, the future, and the present are all mushed up together, and that’s how you can get such a direct line to your memories. It’s not that your brain has to unload a whole load of computer-generated images to find that memory – you’re back in that memory instantly. And I think that it’s instant because you are that memory.
And a lot of times, especially with music, but a lot of times, I’ve been given glimpses of the future, because it’s happening right now. [Pauses] Someone listening to this is probably going to be thinking I’ve finally lost it through old age [laughs], but I do believe that, you know, it’s all linked. Especially with music – that whole time thing is linked, and the whole string theory – that the universe is built on vibrations in harmony. Nature is in harmony. If you listen to the sound of the wind through a drystone wall, the notes are in harmony. If you listen to the recording of a planet, it’s in harmony. They’re all different sounding planets, but their sounds are harmonised. Music, harmony, vibrations, and the real concept of time – I think they are the same thing.
That’s why there’s such a deep relationship with music and with memory because it encapsulates everything that we ignore or take for granted in life.
It’s amazing – I was speaking to someone who’s an ethnomusicologist, and they argued that music predates language, and that it allowed the opportunity to express emotion before there were ever words for it – so it’s such a primal thing for people and the relationship is so pure in that regard.
Well, who’s to say music isn’t language? Just because we’ve invented a different type of language, who’s to say that sign language is any less definitive than vocal language? Or that animals speaking or birds chirping is any less of a language.
Music was language – the difference being that it predates everything because the universe is made of music. But the difference is that it’s a universal language, so there are no barriers. A lovely piece of music translates to every person in the world – every human being.
I was speaking in a Japanese interview the other day where he was saying there were a lot of Japanese fans that learn English through my version of the English language. So, music’s even promoting language in a very definitive sense of language.
But it is a language. It speaks to people – it’s a connection.
And, let’s face it, the only reason why we invented language is that we wanted to connect. We only communicate because we want to belong. But music predates all of that, and it’s more effective.
So, yeah, I believe music is not only language, but I personally find that music is the language of me and my connection to whatever it is – the bigger picture. If you believe in a bigger picture, whether you call it the universe, God, consciousness… the connection I have when I’m writing, that’s a language that we’re speaking. It doesn’t need to be in English. It is a language. An ancient language and the most effective one, I think.
Thinking about the writing of the album, I spent a long time just sitting listening to the first track, Eventually, because it’s this huge, flowing epic – it’s got a little bit of everything, some punk, some, metal, that huge melodic chorus. So, again, it feels like you have a lot of fun writing and arranging these pieces and I was wondering how much of that track came from your original demo and how much of it came together with the band?
Well, I don’t even feel comfortable taking credit, because that song came almost finished. It just came through.
There was a period where I had no music in me. I couldn’t listen to it, I couldn’t even read music magazines, which I used to love. I wasn’t looking for songs, and this song came through. And I thought, “oh, that’s weird, I wasn’t even trying to find something”.
It came through like that. All of the parts joining in like they did. Obviously, the sound of it – everything is the sound of the musicians playing it. You could get another four musicians, and it would sound completely different. But, again, the language between all the people in the studio was exactly in tune with one another, so the performance was – well, the proof is there in the record. It’s exciting. It reminded me of the first Wildhearts album in as much as “wow, listen to that, that sounds good!”
I’ve done a lot of Wildhearts albums where you have to shoehorn a final mix in, you’ve got to edit things, you’ve got to tune things, you’ve got to play some bits yourself to make it sound like a record. This was a band playing pretty much live in the studio, so that’s why I think it sounds exciting, and it also reminds people of the first album, because that’s how we approached the first album.
You gave an interview a couple of years ago where you said something along the lines of “good lyrics come from bad times” and there’s a particularly important song on this album, for me at least, called Hurt People Hurt People – and, of course, you’ve been very open over the years about the mental ill health struggles that you’ve had, so creating very open lyrics is clearly something that’s important to you, but also something that can be very vulnerable. When you’re working on those lyrics, how much time do you spend trying to make the message as universal as you do, without, I suppose, exposing yourself too far – or is it a stream-of-consciousness approach that you take?
Exactly. I think there’s a massive strength in appearing vulnerable. It’s something that I never used to really appreciate. I always let my aggression kind of walk in front of me. And that was just fear. Fear of situations, fear of other men. I’ve been through a lot of my life being aggressive and being violent – you know, learning things like boxing because of my fear of being in a confrontation. I came away and I realised that it’s a fear and I have to work on all the fears that I have, and my fear of vulnerability was – I realised – quite high in the list. Accepting that you are as strong as any person and as vulnerable as any person, I think, is a massive strength.
But that’s personally speaking. In the lyrics, I’ve always been pathologically honest about the message I’m trying to get across, otherwise it’s going to confuse the message and it’s not going to connect with someone directly. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t appreciate people getting the song wrong and loving it. That’s also great and I’ve done plenty of that myself with the music that I love. But, when you write a song that’s got a specific meaning to you and that specific meaning is picked up by someone else – and they get in touch with me and they tell me that they’ve been going through this or that and it echoes my own experiences so much – my God, thank God for vulnerability! You know, it could save someone’s life – I’m told that it already has. So, although I’ve been vulnerable, I’ve never been comfortable with it in the past. It’s just been an honest language.
Now, though, I’m very comfortable with it in as much as I pride myself on it and I look for the vulnerability in other people. It’s just a beautiful thing and the honesty of finding your own truth – it’s the most beautiful thing. It’s one thing people don’t do, and I suspect that’s why people are living their lives wrong. I know I was living my life wrong. By having to put up some kind of a front, you know, you have to be directly involved, you know, in whatever it is – you know – the extremities of life. But I realised that focusing on the extremities of life, it’s lazy, it’s a comfort. There is a comfort in the extremities of life.
The dangerous stuff, the scary stuff, I’ve found, is where you get away from the extremities and end up in the middle where all the real stuff’s going on. You know – swapping your hate for an understanding of love. Swapping your aggressive stance for an understanding of vulnerability and what it is to be a human being with the duality – the opposites. It’s been a fascinating road to discovery, to tackle my fears and to embrace things like vulnerability.
And I guess from that – this album, the overwhelming emotion I got from it was joy, and while the songs tackle dark themes – Hurt People Hurt People being a case in point – there’s a strength that comes from it – especially the final song, Failure Is The Mother Of Success, which is a lesson you don’t get from many bands.
The joy? Well, yeah. The album was a process. It was pretty much written in the order, in as much as the first two songs came first and the last song came last. The first song is a defiant, kind of, “stay away from me, I’m broken, and you’ll be broken if you get anywhere close.”
The last one is where I come out with the realisation that it’s up to me. This whole thing is up to me. Anyone can improve their life; it just takes a lot of work. But, not improving your life also takes a lot of work, but it’s unpleasant work. I think, the road to discovery, the road to finding your own truth, it is joyful, because everything you’re learning is a school day. You’re almost thickening your armour as you’re exposing your open flesh so, again – it’s the duality of life.
I think there’s a joy in learning things, even if it’s an ugly lesson. So, the message in this album, if there is one, is joy. Life is yours; you can have the life you want. You create the life you want. As the theories go, life is what we see and how we see it. The energy we put out. I think it’s really uncomfortable and there’s a lack of joy just staying in the habits that you have – the habits of ego, and things like that.
Breaking out of that, distancing yourself from your ego, opening up your consciousness, there’s nothing but joy there, you know. I’m glad it shows!
It’s what you were saying earlier about your idea of an album as a journey – and that’s always been something very important to me. You don’t have to get that from the lyrics, you can feel it in the music and in the ebb and flow of how the pieces fit together. I mean, towards the end of the album – it’s crushingly heavy in places, but there’s this enthusiasm underneath it that’s impossible to ignore. And that’s always been at the core of the Wildhearts – for me at least – no matter how much you batter us over the head… even on Endless Nameless (still one of my favourite albums) – there’s something underneath it that makes you want to get up and move around the room and there’s something cathartic. It’s that old blues idea that you can take something dark and something personal and create something from it.
It’s all back to the fear, you know. You hear a lot of music that is scared of what it can do, of what it’s capable of doing… Then you get music that doesn’t give a shit – it just embraces everything that it wants to embrace. It doesn’t matter what it is – it could be noise. That childlike glee of “we can do that, let’s do it!” There’s nothing but rejoicing in that, you know.
And I like a lot of different types of music. It doesn’t have to be happy pop to sound happy, to sound great. Some of the most brutal music… Big Black, one of my favourite bands of all time, that just… if you’re not listening or if it’s not speaking to you, it just sounds like a racket. But, to me, it sounds like a joyful exploration in minimalist noise. I imagine how delighted they must have been in the studio to get something that. Probably everyone who walked past the door went “what the fuck is that?!” But it’s the joy of kids jumping in a muddy puddle, you know. It’s getting into the journey and getting stuck in.
And, again, like everything with life, you could look at a lot of uncomfortable subjects – Hurt People Hurt People for example – hurt people usually drag around a big bag of hurt, a bag of memories that are rooted in the past. Yeah, looking into that is terrifying, it’s ugly, it’s stuff you don’t want to look into, but there’s a joy in facing up to it and facing up to all those fears. The abandon in the studio of tacking everything, I just see that as freedom.
You worked, once again, with Jim Pinder – and the relationship with a producer is so important, because they can change the whole sonic characteristics of the record no matter how engaged the band are, so obviously having that relationship is important.
I’ve made a lot of albums and some of the experiences – not the music – but some of the experiences have tainted the music for me, because of the producer. Sometimes, producers aren’t really people – people, you know. They’re kind of, by definition, in the industry of service, but not a lot of them seem like that. There are a lot of narcissists working in music who think they’re the expert in someone else’s creativity.
A brilliant producer is essential and he’s just one of the best producers I’ve ever worked with. He’s amazing, because he gets involved and he cares about the people in the studio, and he’s not putting himself above or below anyone. It’s very much a team effort. He’s very much a delegator when that seems to be the right approach. And, obviously, if he’s got an idea, he’s going to let you know the idea. And, you know, seven times out of ten, it’s a great idea, even if I can’t hear it, because he’s involved in the process. He’s involved on a microscopic scale.
I love working with Jim to the point where I think I can’t imagine doing an album with anyone else now, because he seems to understand the language that I’m speaking. And the other people in the studio too. He’s just got a lot of patience and a really good work ethic and great ears. You can tell he’s got great ears, because he’s the one that makes successful records, not me. I listen to the experts!
You’re right, it can be very difficult – if you get the wrong producer who just doesn’t understand the music, it can push bands away from their own sound in search of success, but it’s not their sound. So, you have to have that trust right from the outset, I think.
Well, there’s a song on the album called Troubadour Moon which is kind of about this. About musicians who are starting off, and they’re trying to create their little world within the music world and people like managers, people like record labels, and very much people like producers… they can derail this person’s ambitions to the point where a producer will tell you “If you do it this way, it’s going to succeed”. And if you’re not thick skinned like me, you could end up going “I’m going to trust him, he’s made ten records”. And then, if it doesn’t work, the artist is left with a record that isn’t even what they wanted to make.
The producer couldn’t give a fuck, they’re on to the next record! So, I think listening to producers is a double-edged sword. If you trust the guy and you’re on the same team and it feels like the same team, then great.
We used to get a lot of producers telling us to turn the guitars down, and I was like “no way!” But the music at the time was all vocals and drums. And I was like “I’m not going down that road, I might never get another chance to make another record, so we’re having loud guitars mate!”
And I’ve fallen out with producers and had them leave the studio before because of arguments over guitar levels. Obviously, you listen to the records now and it clearly was the right idea because we’re a fucking guitar band! You’ve got two guitars and one singer, and the guitars should be a s loud as the fucking singer [laughs].
Again, it’s about relationships – you can get with someone, and everything looks nice and works on a superficial level but then, if you dig a little deeper, you find you haven’t got anything in common at all. Band members, boyfriends, girlfriends, producers – you’re not always on the same team.
My final question is about the live dates. As I understand it, when you head out on the road, you’re going to be playing some of the old favourites of course, but you’re also planning to air some things you’ve not done before – are you looking forward to revitalising the set list and is that partly the influence of the new members?
Well, the new members – the difference between this line up and the last line up is that everyone is in it for the music in this line up. Everyone, and I’m not putting anyone down or throwing anyone under the bus, I’m just saying that the music wasn’t the main priority with the last line up and that’s all I’m going to say about it. With this one, I can tell people “Can we learn this song?”
I can tell people that in the afternoon, and they understand the importance of learning the songs and not looking like the only person on stage who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
As a song writer, with as many songs as I’ve got, it’s more than important – it’s the way that it should be done. I’ve said it before, but in the end days of the last line up, someone posted a setlist from ’93 and it was almost identical to the setlist we were doing. How depressing is that? I don’t care if everyone just wants to hear the first album, I don’t!
I’ve written a lot of stuff, and I demand the right to play the fucking songs that I want to play.
Obviously, I understand the importance of playing the songs that people want to hear, and there’s a happy medium. And the musicians playing the music make that happy medium. I feel really lucky that I have musicians now who can learn new songs. Without even having heard them.
But I think the audience deserves that as well. It’s not a jukebox. It’s an experience and I want to be part of the experience. I want to tell them what sounds good. So, we structure the set now where there’s enough new stuff and enough stuff that we haven’t played before, and then there’s a lot of old stuff. And, you know, if people want to hear more of either side, we’ll just… make the set longer!
The Wildhearts dates in full:-
March instore signing sessions
8th Relevant Records, Cambridge
9th HMV, Manchester
12th HMV, Newcastle
The Wildhearts UK Tour, March 2025
07thLeadmill, Sheffield
08th Junction, Cambridge
09th O2 Ritz, Manchester
11th Epic, Norwich
13th Garage, Glasgow
14th KK’s Steel Mill, Wolverhampton
15th Rock City, Nottingham
16th 1865, Southampton
May
04th Bonfest, Kirriemuir, Scotland
07th Wolf, Barcelona, Spain
08th Loco Club, Valencia, Spain
09th Nazca, Madrid, Spain
10th Psilocybenea, Hondarribia, Spain
24th The Big Yard Party, Old Woollen, Leeds
July
06th Time To Rock Festival, Knislinge, Sweden
25th Steelhouse Festival, Ebbw Vale, Wales
Tickets for the UK tour (7th March – 16th March) can be ordered here: https://www.gigantic.com/the-wildhearts-tickets
The Wildhearts is
Ginger Wildheart (vocals / guitars),
Ben Marsden (guitars),
Jon Poole (bass),
Charles Evans (drums)
