Interview by Jason Guest

• Kev Bower: guitars / keyboards
  
• Andy Sneap: guitars / producer

Jason: It’s been over 25 years since Hell almost disappeared from heavy metal. What was it that sparked the reunion?

Kev Bower: After Dave died and the band broke up we all just went our separate ways, we got jobs, got married, got divorced – all the usual stuff. The only original member who continued playing was Tony Speakman (bass player) who spent quite a long time touring on the covers/tribute circuit. Tim Bowler and myself just drew a line in the sand and stopped playing practically overnight. My attitude was essentially that HELL was the best band I was ever likely to be involved with, and as a person who always had a hard time accepting second best, I just quit – I sold all my gear and moved on without a backwards glance. During the ensuing two-decade hiatus, I went through a messy divorce, resulting in me losing contact with my son Tom for almost 5 years. By the time we were reunited - the short, chubby kid I had last seen, had transformed into a six-foot metalhead who started playing me all these CD’s by Trivium, Exodus, Opeth, Nevermore and many other bands who I’d never even heard of. Whilst casually leafing through the sleeve artwork, I saw that they had almost all been produced by this ‘Andy Sneap’ guy who I immediately realised must be the same 14-year-old kid who Dave Halliday had given guitar lessons to, who I had known so well back then, and who was a permanent fixture on the front row of every gig HELL played 20 years previously – having spent so long out of the frame, I had absolutely no idea that he had gone onto achieve the production success that he had,  it was obvious that Andy was my son’s absolute hero, so – just to impress him in the way Dads do, I told him all about Andy Sneap the young HELL fan kid back then – and of course he didn’t believe me, so he contacted Andy on a forum to find out if it was actually true. Andy was so pleased to hear from me after the best part of two decades’ silence. We met up the next day, we had a beer or several, we talked about old times, we gelled again almost instantly, and within a few days, I found myself sitting in the control room at Backstage Studios holding a guitar in anger for practically the first time in 23 years, putting down a few HELL song guitar guides to a clicktrack, just for fun……….but the buzz it gave me was just immense and it was extraordinary how it just came flooding back.  Then - before I really knew what was happening, phone calls had been made to Tim Bowler & Tony Speakman (the drummer and bassist), the band was back together, we were doing the album and I was out spending every penny I earned on guitars, synthesizers and other gear. It’s great!! It has been literally like being born again – that one phone call has transformed my whole existence.

Jason: Since Hell’s unfortunate demise, have you had much involvement in heavy metal? Have you been following the scene since then?

Kev Bower: No – none at all, nothing whatsoever, but that’s turned out to be a total blessing. Andy has said that for him, the greatest aspect of the new album is that it’s completely pure and untainted by any outside influences, so as a consequence it just doesn’t sound like anything else out there. Throughout the whole long recording process I made a conscious decision to hide away and not to listen to anything else, because I didn’t want this originality to become compromised in any way – like when you hear a great guitarist play a fantastic riff - it sticks in your mind - you learn how to play it – and before you know it, there’s a diluted version of that player’s riff incorporated into your own music almost subconsciously. It’s simple human nature to emulate what we like, but I always tried very, very hard to keep it pure so the finished result was completely non-derivative. The ‘timeless’ aspect of it is what’s really exciting people.

Jason: How do you think the metal scene compares today with that of the early- to mid-80s?     

Kev Bower: There’s absolutely no comparison – today, anyone with a guitar, a laptop and a half-decent audio recording programme can churn out an album, cut & pasted into perfection one note at a time, whereas back then, a band actually had to be able to play. And to me, it really shows -  by virtue of the fact that there seem to be a hundred bands out there who all sound exactly the same. It’s kinda depressing – you just hear the same drop-tuned guitars playing the same swept arpeggios, drummers doing the same blastbeats, the same growled vocals with lyrics you can’t decipher – it’s all become a bit stale and uninspiring, and when you take this stuff out - there’s just no song there..... And I hate the obsession with pigeon-holing bands into genres, sub-genres and sub-sub genres which serves only to cruelly limit a band’s potential audience before they even get off the starting blocks. How many kids out there won’t even listen to a Dimmu Borgir album because “That’s symphonic black metal and I don’t like that - I only like category 4 subsection 3 pro-death anti-grunge emo non-symphonic melodic Viking part 3 (subsection 2) metal-grind-thrash-speed-core?” One über-significant thing about HELL is that we have always been totally impossible to hole or label like this because there’s so much variety, so many extremes of light and shade in what we do – so you either have to just accept us for what we do, or take a walk. Maybe that’s why no-one could get their heads round us back in the day. This, to me, is also exactly the reason why record labels each have about 100 bands who all sell around 5,000 units each worldwide. It’s just too formulated, too generic, and I just can’t understand why talented young players spend years learning their craft – only to enter a band which sounds identical to dozens of others. What’s the point?

Jason: Are there any bands that stand out from today’s scene for you that capture the spirit of metal from that era?

Andy Sneap: There seems to be a new wave of new wave of British Heavy Metal. Kids that wern't even born in 81 – 82 are buying bullet belts, stripey jeans and trying to recreate what was happening back then. Its kinda funny to see that but nice at the same time. With HELL it’s never been a case of trying to recreate anything, except for trying to remember the songs. You have to remember 3 members of this band are close to 50 and alzeimers is a cruel disease. 

Kev Bower: Seriously, I believe there’s a change coming – when you see the reaction we’re getting, along with the upswing in popularity of bands like Ghost, it signifies a return to proper songwriting, and a focus on melody, depth and emotional involvement, rather than riffs, aggression and speed. I guess the real standout has to be the last ACCEPT album, but just like his work with HELL, Andy approached the production of that record from the mindset of Andy Sneap the teenager missing his school chemistry exam so he could get to the record store to buy the clear vinyl ‘Restless And Wild’ on release day – and that’s a true story, incidentally. He put passion and love into the thing – and the guys from ACCEPT saw it immediately.

Jason: Responses to Hell’s reunion and the album have been overwhelmingly positive. ‘Human Remains’ has been referred to as “the blueprint of the finest true metal”, as “timeless”, and a “metal masterpiece”. What do you think of these responses?

Kev Bower: Any feelings of euphoria about finally releasing the album have already been almost totally eclipsed by the extraordinary reaction it’s had from those who have heard it. We knew it was special, but to hear seasoned (i.e. jaded and disillusioned) European journalists saying ‘best metal album for 15 years’ is just wild. It’s just mental, scary, humbling and amazing all at the same time. We were rehearsing at the studio last week – and all of a sudden, there we were up on the studio big-screen TV (Scuzz channel), with our video sandwiched between Metallica, Machine Head and Korn. Life doesn’t get much freakier than that, and it’s just one of the things which has happened recently which have contributed to the whole ‘beyond our wildest dreams’ scenario.

Jason: Hell has been cited as a huge indirect influence on heavy metal and occult metal in particular. Are there any bands that you’ve heard where that influence stands out?

Kev Bower: The two which spring particularly to mind are SABBAT…

Andy Sneap: We totally ripped HELL off and don’t mind admitting it!

Kev Bower: …and PORTRAIT from Sweden. SABBAT were just young kids when they first met each other on the front row of one of our gigs, and I think it’s fair to say that they modelled themselves on us, borrowing a few riffs along the way. The connection with PORTRAIT I only discovered recently through contact with one of their guitarists, Christian Lindell, who told me all about how the band’s songs had inspired him to write some of PORTRAIT’s stuff, which I have to say is pretty killer. It’s certainly been said many times before that HELL were extremely innovative, and what’s meant by ‘indirect influence’ is that the acknowledged influence on SABBAT  then translated through the metal generations into the influence SABBAT then had on bands like CRADLE OF FILTH and many others. So – in that sense, it’s almost like looking at someone’s family tree, but it stops when you reach HELL. I’m flattered, humbled and very proud that other bands are emulating what we did back then, and may probably continue to emulate what we have done now.

Jason: What it was like in the early days of Hell? What were the responses of the crowds and critics like?

Kev Bower: I have to say that although the time spent onstage in front of audiences was always a blast, the rest of it was, in all reality, pretty grim and completely alien to the fantasy of cool ‘band life’ imagined by many people – freezing rehearsal rooms with fingers too cold to move, no money, sleeping on top of equipment in the back of a van, stupid hours, trying to hold down day jobs, it was all incredibly unromantic and hard work. But every band did that back then – it’s just how things were. There was no internet, no mobile phones, no modern communication technology, so the only way to get your music and your message across was to get out there and do it. The crowds loved it, the press hated it and just didn’t understand it. At all.

Jason: When it came to finding a singer, what were you looking for? Did you audition many people before you decided on David Bower?

Kev Bower: What happened here was that Andy spent ages trying to find a singer whose voice would come somewhere close to replicating Dave Halliday’s – he tried Rush tribute bands, he thought about asking John K from BIOMECHANICAL – just all sorts of straws were being grabbed at with no result. So eventually, we decided to try something different and Martin Walkyier (from SABBAT) recorded all the vocals for the album in its entirety, but as he’ll freely admit himself - he really, really struggled with a lot of it, simply because he’s a vocal brawler whose style just didn’t mesh particularly well with a substantial proportion of the HELL material which required high-pitched, defined melody, along with the kind of light and shade which Martin just doesn’t do. The other issue was that his sound and style are both so individual, and the singer’s voice is the instantly-recognisable sonic signature of any band. So, after a great deal of work, we ended up with an album which no-one was really 100% happy with, and which sounded more like an unreleased SABBAT set than a HELL album. We therefore decided amongst all of us that it wasn’t to be – sometimes you try stuff and it just doesn’t work out. David first became involved when I invited him along to do a small narrative – a voiceover on ‘Plague and Fyre’ in fact. In between takes, he just started casually singing along with the track, and Andy (wearing his ‘producer’s hat’) immediately realised there was something special going on. I had no idea David could sing like that, honestly, and once I’d heard him do a try-out on some other tracks and agreed that it was worth pursuing further, it was then just a question of him working alone with Andy to capture what you’ll hear on the album. He’s done a killer job and I’m very proud of him. He’s also dropped into the frontman role brilliantly well, which is largely as a result of his extensive acting career and the acquired ability to be totally comfortable in front of an audience whilst doing wacky stuff.....David was absolutely the perfect final piece in the jigsaw, and the straitjacketed lunatic-behind-the-microphone was exactly what was needed to really kick this material into 2011 and give it the original HELL vibe. One of HELL’s key objectives was to put on a show, and he does that in spades, as do we all. We’ve rigged him up with a headset mic which basically frees him from the conventional mic and stand, so he’ll be able to do things which would normally be out of reach for a metal frontman – but like anything else he’s done, it took him some time to get his head around this performance and really get ‘into character’ for it.

Jason: His voice is uncannily similar to Halliday’s. Was that a factor in choosing him?

Andy Sneap: Of course it was. I was looking for someone that could fit into that higher range all along but we couldn’t find anyone. Dave had seen the band nearly as many times as me back in the day and totally understood what it needed. He’s very creative too and from a theatrical background he's the perfect man for the job.

Jason: When preparing for the recording, how did you find revisiting the songs? Given the history of the band, was it difficult in any way to go back to them?

Andy Sneap: Although the whole process was tinged with great sadness at the fact that Dave Halliday wasn’t around to take part and enjoy all of this, the actual mechanics of it wasn’t difficult at all – I was just euphoric at being able to finally let these songs be heard in all their glory. The hardest part for me was listening to the old rehearsal tapes and hearing Dave Halliday on there and also the despair these guys were going through with the lack of response from Mausoleum. I had a pretty firm idea of what songs we should record and with kev, we worked through a couple of arrangement ideas. I also suggested we join all the songs together with soundscapes, which is what they did a lot live and Kev really went to town on that. Its just another little detail that harks back to the mindset of the band in the 80s.

Kev Bower: We’ve tried hard to strike the perfect balance between kicking this material into the new millennium, but whilst retaining the original spirit of the band without compromising either, and I have to say that Andy’s input as a producer has been exactly what you would expect of someone paying homage to his former best friend and to the band he saw 20 times as a young kid. The level he went to in keeping it as authentic as possible was ridiculous at times, he spent ages on internet guitar forums trying to track down the original ’79 black Hamer guitar I used with HELL back then (he joked that finding that guitar would speed up the recording because ’that guitar already knows all the songs’) and he was very adamant about retaining the characteristic oddball moments of the band. I suppose one of the major HELL ‘quirk’ moments on the new album is the vocal intro to ‘Macbeth’, which is a 28-year-old recording of myself, Tony and Dave performing the Shakespeare ‘three witches’ soliloquy in full-on Monty Python style. I cringe every time I hear it, but Andy reprocessed and cleaned up the original recording and used it as the intro to the song. I practically begged him to remove it, disguise it or at least shorten it, but he was adamant. The whole objective of this was to produce a killer album which was 100% relevant and 100% viable in 2011 – but to retain the essence of HELL in a totally undiminished and undiluted way, and I think we have totally succeeded in doing that.

Jason: Have you made any changes to the songs or did you stay faithful to the originals?

Kev Bower: No, it’s structurally all pretty faithful to the original as I explained already. Some of the songs were shortened slightly, some were extended – for ‘The Oppressors’ we went all the way back and used some lyrics from the original RACE AGAINST TIME version in the middle. The most significant additions are the new keyboard parts which add real depth and scale to this. You’ll hear thunderstorms, battle chaos, horses, vomiting, bagpipes, a mental asylum, an alien invasion craft, choirs, ethnic bells, just everything imaginable going on against the backdrop of this guitar-driven metal thunder.

Jason: What was the process for recording the songs?

Andy Sneap: Lots of people have already asked me about this – but it was business as usual, I just did an honest recording with no cutting & pasting and no messing about. The thing you have to remember is that the whole feel and vibe of this is driven by the songs.

Kev Bower: The recording process was a very, very long one, though – almost three years in fact. The reason for this is that Andy’s obviously a top-name producer at the top of his game, he spends half of each year in the US, and he’s had the small matter of albums by Megadeth, Exodus, Testament, Nevermore, Dimmu, Accept and many others to deal with……..so ‘Human Remains’ was literally pieced together a day here and a day there over that extended period, as and when free time became available. I guess if you added it all up, it would come to about 10 weeks in total, but spread out over this extended period. I’d get these phone calls from Heathrow Airport and it would be Sneap, saying “Be at the studio tomorrow and bring your guitar…..”

Jason: Andy Sneap’s a long-time fan of the band and his production work on the album is fantastic. Was he first choice for production duties? And for guitar?

Kev Bower: ‘Choice for production duties’ never came into it because this is something Andy’s wanted to do for 25 years, he’s lived and breathed this, he’s funded the whole thing out of his own pocket, he’s worked his nuts off making it happen, and he’s turned down some incredibly well-paid and highly prestigious work to focus on this – and why? For the LOVE of it, that’s why. He hasn’t done this for the fame or fortune, for guts or for the glory – he’s done it because he had belief in the band which he says set him on his path, and as a tribute to Dave Halliday. Plus – his Plan A was always to be a player, with production being his plan B, and it’s only now that he’s got the chance to enjoy some Plan A again. As for his guitar input - there then came a point when I moved into the studio for two weeks to track all my guitar and keyboard parts. Replicating my own stuff was simple enough, but I really found myself in trouble when I started trying to play Dave Halliday’s guitar parts. He had this very individual style of fingering and playing runs which were totally alien to what I was used to doing, and I really struggled with it. After a while, Andy grabbed the guitar off me and nailed most of Dave’s parts in one take - and I think the penny dropped with both of us that HELL still had to be a two-guitarist band with two players having diametrically opposed playing styles. These weird, spiky, disjointed Halliday guitar parts came totally naturally to Andy – because Dave Halliday was the guy who had taught him to play from just 12 years old. So it was really at that point that Andy became more involved as a player, and ultimately as a permanent HELL bandmember.

Jason: Are you planning to tour in support of the album? And the UK?