INTERVIEW: James Andrew Lee – Mastiff

MASTIFF represent the newest version of anger fuelled musical hatred to be spewed from the cold north of Britain, and now that their debut Plague album is finally unleashed to the world, we present our full conversation with guitarist James Andrew Lee to pick his brains a bit. We’re sure you’ll be as shocked as we were to discover that he’s actually quite a positive bloke, all things considered.

How cathartic is it to write music as miserable as Mastiff do?

James: MASTIFF are very well known for being the ‘miserable band from a miserable town’, but if you happened across any of us in a bar (quite a likely scenario) and struck up a conversation with us, you’d probably be a little taken aback by how not-miserable we are. The main reason for that is that we have this band to act as our garbage dump for all the negative shit we carry around with us. We try to stay positive in our day-to-day lives, but the fact is that the world we live in right now is a big broken mess, and it would be impossible to not let that weigh upon you, so having MASTIFF allows us all to vent every frustration, every blood-boiling impulse straight into the most foul, aggressive music possible, and that’s is a very healthy and important thing. We might not be the jovial, smiley chaps we are otherwise.

How was the process for writing and recording the debut?

James: Plague was written over the course of about 10 months, starting pretty much right after our last EP, BORK, was released at the end of summer 2017. BORK was a bit of a patchwork of old and new material, and both myself and Dan [Dolby, bass] had only been in the band for a fairly limited time before recording it so we’d not really fully imparted our influence on the band’s sound yet. With Plague, though, we’d been playing together for a little while and had started to figure out what we actually wanted this incarnation of Mastiff to be when we started writing, so there’s a very concrete, cohesive sound across the new material, even if it does vary quite wildly in speed over the course of the record. Our writing process isn’t fixed, some songs were pieced together over a few practices riff-by-riff, whereas others just appeared out of nowhere in a single night. Vermin, the track we just did a video for, was the last thing we wrote for the record, and from start to finish took us about an hour.

How did the process affect the outcome of the record?

James: Having all five of us in the same creative head space for this release made it much easier for us to really focus on crafting a proper album, not just a collection of songs. What Plague has that our earlier releases were missing is a real ebb and flow, it feels like the songs all belong together and play in the order they do quite intentionally. We also knew that Plague would be a more extreme record than BORK in every sense – we pushed as far in each direction as we could, so you end up with ridiculous bursts of grind like Brainbleed, and on the other end of the spectrum there’s Black Death, a nine-minute funeral march. Nothing was really off-limits for us, other than it had to be completely disgusting and heavy as sin. And I think we achieved that pretty conclusively.

Where does the thematic inspiration come from?

James: Our singer, Jim [Hodge] writes all of our lyrics, but we all came up with the Plague theme for the album fairly early on in the process. Mostly we liked the imagery that conjures up, but Jim took the idea and spun it into a long-form meditation on the destructive and corrupting power of social media in the modern age, and how that is the real plague on modern society. We’ve all had incredibly negative experiences with people online; having this digital curtain to hide behind just does something to people – it removes the personal aspect of communication, and with it I think morality goes out of the window a little bit too. People disconnect from the idea that they’re interacting with other actual people, and just turn into monsters.

Outside of music, how do you channel your negativity?

James: I don’t! [laughs] I think I just bottle everything up and save that dark energy for the band. It spurns on our writing, and it fuels our live show, which is always a harrowing and draining experience, but in a cathartic, positive way.

What do you want Mastiff to be remembered for?

James: I’d like to think our music is impactful, not just because it sounds like a bulldozer falling down a set of concrete stairs, but because of the feelings it stirs up. As I said before, we all very much treat MASTIFF as our personal punching bags – our stress relief, our therapy – so if other people can find that same emotional purge in our music then I’d be happy with that. Also I’d like to be remembered for being the most obnoxiously loud and aggressive live band on the planet. Because we are, obviously.

What bands are MASTIFF listening to at the moment?

James: The guys in the band have a fairly varied taste in music, but obviously we all gravitate towards heavy music in general. One band all five of us are fairly unanimous on is CULT LEADER, I’m actually listening to them as I do this interview, they’re just the most interesting and affecting hardcore band on the planet right now. They do dissonance and flailing aggression better than anyone, but then can write something like To: Achlys or The Broken Right Hand Of God that is still heavy, but also achingly beautiful, and there aren’t many bands in the world who can veer between those extremes and make it all work together. Then there are some of the old staples that continue to get heavy rotation – at any given moment you could probably put money on at least one of us having either an Integrity or CONVERGE record on, I’ve been on a little bit of a classic MASTODON kick recently, I don’t think Jim can sleep unless he’s got THE ACACIA STRAINS blasting on his headphones.

What can we expect from MASTIFF in 2019?

James: Plague is out on February 1st, so that’s the main focus for us this year; pushing that nasty little record in as many faces as humanly possible. We’re playing a couple of shows that weekend. On the actual release day we’re in Nottingham with our brothers and label-mates WIDOWS, then the next day is the second annual APF Records showcase at The Bread Shed in Manchester, where we’ll be playing the album in full for the first time ever, so that should be a jolly good day out. We’ve got shows booked up and down the country for the rest of the year, and are heading to London a couple of times which is always a riot. Ideally we’d love to play some festivals this year, and if the opportunity for us to fuck off to Europe or the USA to play some shows came up, we would be all over that.

Would you rather be miserable and motivated or happy and content

James: I mean, nobody wants to be miserable, right? I’d like to think that we’re not like Brian from Spaced, and that our artistic creativity and general contentment aren’t mutually exclusive. If I was forced to choose though, I would have to do the un-MASTIFF thing and be happy, because that’s what life is about, right? There is a loophole though – despite feeding almost exclusively from negativity, actually being in MASTIFF is something we all very much enjoy, so it’s win-win!

Plague is out now via APF Records. The band are featured in our latest digital issue, subscribe to our Patreon Page to gain access. 

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