When you’re dressed like killer clowns from a horror movie then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the conversation turns to classic horror directors. Mark Bestford talked to Gaspard, Ashe, and Old Sparky from The Injester about their upcoming album and taking their circus show on the road.
You’ve pretty much just started out, there’s not that many songs out yet. Are there any plans to expand that out into an album anytime?
Ashe “Yeah, we’ve got an album coming out on Halloween. So the tracks that you see online at the moment raw, introducing EP tracks, we just released the first single from the album, which is Jack’s Box. But yeah, you know, we’re not, we haven’t just appeared out of nowhere, we’ve all been in various other bands and bits and pieces. So we’ve not managed to get on Download through lack of paying our dues. We’ve all been in other bands and you know, the album’s a melting pot of that.”
Gaspard “The EP we did back kind of pre COVID We released it, we launched the band, and then the world stopped. So in the meantime, like you say, lack of material available online or available, we took that time to write an entire album, record that album. And now we have the release date.”
I can see there’s a big love of horror going through here, what are your main influences from the horror genre?
G “So I mean, obviously, It and Pennywise the clown, he obviously is a very obvious influence. That’s very cool.
A “I’m a bit of a Wes Craven fan, I like a bit of that sort of action.”
Sparky “Anything from classics like, you know, Children of the Corn, David Cronenberg, The Thing. You know, anything that takes the body and twists it and shapes it into things that maybe it shouldn’t be, or maybe it should be, who knows.”
A “And throw Rob Zombie in, as well.”
G “The aesthetic of people like Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper, that kind of aesthetic as well.”
So I’m guessing you’re more into body horror.
S “Yeah, to a point, I think, you know, we obviously, our appearances are distorted, but at the same time, it’s more about the theatre of it all. It’s more about not just going and seeing a band and they’re all standing there in combats and a black tee shirt, slamming away killing it, like, you know, doing amazing on their instruments and making everyone jump around, but it’s like, this is a visual thing. And, you know, we want people to have a visual and an audio spectacle to take in, you know.”
A “Yeah, it’s obviously that horror theme and stuff that runs through it. But at the end of the day, I think it’s a cliché, but we’re a little bit more than that. We like people to check the tracks out before they necessarily make the judgement based on a few latex masks because if it was then everyone would pigeonhole us into Slipknot, and then we’d be done with that. We sound nothing like that at all. So well, you know, maybe there’ll be hints here and there, but largely we’re completely different. So we want everyone to check out what we sound like. Yes, we’ve got that look, we’ve got a horror take on things but you know, in terms of the album, when that comes out in in Halloween it’s so dynamic, there’s so much going on, no one will just say it’s a horror album. Or they won’t say it’s a, you know, it’s another band that sounds a bit like Slipknot, they absolutely won’t get that. So we just want everyone to listen to it and then make their own opinion.”
With the theatrics, is the album’s going to be covering any theme or is it a mixture of things?
A “Yeah, it’s a mixture. There’s all sorts in there. It’s like, you know, thrash tracks, there’s a track in there with a ukulele, there’s a ballad. There’s a song about a short story by, it’s around a character called Tom Walker in there. I think it’s Washington Irvine, that the book the short story’s about, there’s all sorts of, you know, different layers within the output.”
G “We certainly draw our influences from a lot of different places. So we have a certain aesthetic, which we find like kind of, you know, oddly liberating to be able to put the mask on and get ready and perform, it’s what you do. But musically, you know, it’s a melting point, it is like a broad range that we do, which is, which was always the point of this. We’ve all done previous things. Other stuff, some of us still do other things like parallel to this, but this was a place that we can all bring all of our ideas.”
With the theatrics on stage I’m guessing it’s fairly limited at the moment. Are you planning to bring more into that stage show?
A “Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. That is, you know, that’s the goal. The album’s called A Spectacle To Behold, that’s absolutely what we want the live show to be as well. So bigger the venue, the bigger the opportunity, then absolutely, we’ll go after that. Because, you know, we’re in that for the fun and the pyro and whatever else we can get away with. So you know, we’re absolutely looking forward to that sort of stage show.”
G “As much as we take the music seriously, we write the best songs that we can and we perform as well as we can, it should be fun. But the whole point of this is we want everyone that’s watching us to have fun. And experience it, like there’s room, there’s plenty of room for serious bands, and we love them and we listen to them ourselves. But we want, I think that we all agree that we want the people to have a sing along to a chorus and enjoy what they’re looking at. And if we can add to that, as we grow, that’d be amazing.”
A “Exactly. There’s loads of cathartic bits in there, but it’s not all about a certain mood. It’s about, you know, taking whatever we happen to have written about, put a big swagger on it and have a big night out for everyone that comes down to a show. And, yeah, you know, that’s the type of vibe that we want to deliver.”
So very much to make it a show that people are going to remember at the end of the night. With all the clown aesthetics as well I guess you don’t worry about scaring away any fans with that.
S “I’ve had a couple of people today in here come up to me and were like, you’re really scary and just sidle away.”
A “For every one you scare away, you get an odd one that really, really likes you.”
G “We want the weirdos and the freaks in the best possible sense of the word to come and enjoy. Because, you know, that’s what we are, we wouldn’t do this if we weren’t.”
Are there any issues with taking something like this out on tour?
A “I think the anonymity bit is tough, because we’re not at the level where we you know, we necessarily get to have the most glamorous of surroundings when it comes to masks, etc, and putting the makeup on and retaining that. But we do our best with, you know, masks during soundcheck sometimes and things like that, but yeah, yeah, you know, we do the best, you know.”
G “We take it seriously. You take it seriously. And we try and do the best we can one hundred percent.”
A “Right out from the launching of the band, obviously, we could have posted it on all of our individual band social media pages, we haven’t done that. On our personal pages, we haven’t done any of that to push the band. So we’ve essentially been launching it a little bit with our hands tied behind our backs. But we’re doing it in the most honest way that you can, you can do it, because we were just building it completely organically with that, you know, aesthetic. And from the band’s pages completely. So you know, we’re trying to do it the hard way.”
G ”Yeah.”
Well, most bands, when they form, all their social media is like, the drummer, you’ve got to make a post today. The guitarist, you’re doing a post tomorrow. And you can’t do that, it all has to come from the band’s page.
A “Absolutely. And we can’t you know, some bands can go live ‘oh, we’re just doing this’, and we can’t go live instantly because you know, the masks or the makeup or whatever. So we try to make sure what we’ve put out there is important statements or whatever, so it’s not saturated of random whatever.”
G “We’re not spamming everyone. With meaningful, informative, entertaining, interesting, it helps get the word out there in a meaningful way.”
Interview and photos by Mark Bestford