My Dying Bride: Tired of Tears

How long does something have to exist before it becomes ‘an institution’? One decade? Two? Since forming in Halifax in 1990, MY DYING BRIDE have been a landmark of the UK metal scene; progenitors of the gothic-doom movement, their morose, funerary stylings have earned a die-hard international fan base, and seen them firmly established with a longevity and consistency that other bands can only dream of.

However, the intervening years between 2015’s Feel The Misery and the present saw line up changes and personal tragedy that were almost the band’s undoing. Frontman Aaron Stainthorpe’s young daughter was diagnosed with cancer, and the band went on a necessary hiatus so he could focus on supporting her recovery.

Now sailing out of these turbulent waters with their fourteenth full-length, The Ghost Of Orion, what does Stainthorpe credit with keeping the ship afloat? “Probably Andrew Craighan [guitars]. There’s only me and him left from the original line up, and he just kept on going”, the frontman explains. “When we got the bad news about my daughter everyone took a hiatus. I had completely disconnected myself from MY DYING BRIDE, and I wasn’t really interested in whether I re-joined or not. Nothing meant anything except my daughter.”

What would become The Ghost Of Orion was fast taking shape without Stainthorpe. “Andrew had written and recorded most of the music, and eventually I thought ‘there’s a lot of progress being made on this record without me.’ Even though there was no deadline for the album I realised that ‘if I’m going to get back into it, I need to get back into it now,’” Stainthorpe says. “I listened to the music, I put it on proper war volume, cranked it up. And I needed to do that, because what hair I’ve got left stood up on end, and I thought ‘this is amazing, it’s awesome’, and I was inspired from that very first listen. I needed Andrew, because if he’d have taken as long a break as me this album would still be a couple of years off yet.”

For many, music is an outlet – a form of catharsis, taking the weft and weave of the personal and spinning it into healing art. Did Stainthorpe use the new album to channel his feelings around his daughter’s battle against illness? “You write about what you know, so there was obviously going to be a point on this album where I was going to touch upon what I’d been through. Tired Of Tears is that song, but I couldn’t fill the entire album with my experience of that time, because I would never have wanted to listen to the album ever again, and I would never have wanted to play any of the songs on it live – it would have been too much,” he says. “But I had to get it out of my system, so I wrote Tired Of Tears as a direct connection with what I’ve been through. But I continued on writing about typical MY DYING BRIDE subjects; love, sex, religion, death, grief. I’m sure that the next album will contain one or two songs relating to my daughter’s cancer, but I’ll never sing those songs live. I will drip feed it because I have to get it out of my system or my brain will explode, but I just didn’t want to do it all on one album because it would ruin that album for me, and I don’t want that.”

Stainthorpe found some of the new techniques the band were trying out more of a challenge; “Mark wanted me double tracking and triple tracking the vocals, and he wanted a choral harmony going on, so I had to sing in different octaves, and this is all anathema to me and left me thinking ‘I’m not sure I can do this, why are you taking me out of my comfort zone?’ It took ages for me to do it, and if it wasn’t for Mark and Andrew bashing my head off the wall it just wouldn’t have been done. If they’d have let me get away with the stuff I’d been doing, the music still would have been great, but the vocals would have let it right down. So I’m so glad for their hard work and their encouragement.”

Finishing the recording process was an immediate relief for Stainthorpe, but also felt like a step in his search of getting back to a semblance of ‘normality’ within the MY DYING BRIDE fold. “Because it was so hard there was great relief when I did the final few vocals. It was a sort of ‘thank fuck that’s over, I’m out of here.’ I’ve never done an album like it, and I don’t want to do an album like this again – it was hard, hard work. I feel like I’ve been crawling and crawling up this steep hill, and I’m still not quite at the top. I’m nowhere near the bottom, which is brilliant, but I’m nowhere near the top yet. I don’t know if there’ll be a moment where it clicks and I’m like ‘yeah, this is me, I’m back in, doing what I do best’ or if I’ll just slowly evolve back to the person I was and become comfortable with the band.”

MY DYING BRIDE are no strangers to an evocative album title, with lines like A Map Of All Our Failures and Songs Of Darkness, Words Of Light evoking the mood of their music perfectly. The Ghost Of Orion is a similarly weighty and resonant title. What’s the story or meaning behind it? “There’s a little bit of a secret about the title, and we’re trying not to give the game away,” Stainthorpe explains. “The title is linked to the artwork on the cover, and if I give it all away now there’ll be no mystery. Our fans are great at putting two and two together and reading between the lines and coming up with their own interpretations of what MY DYING BRIDE have put on the table, and I’m intrigued to see what they’re going to come up with for this one. In a year or two years from now if you ask me the same question I’ll blurt it all out, but I don’t want to give it away just yet.”

Three decades is a long time for anything to persist, let alone a band, especially when considering the amount of adversity MY DYING BRIDE have faced down. Is there a secret formula, something Stainthorpe credits their supernatural longevity to? “The band was, for a very long time, and to an extent still is a hobby. We don’t take it that seriously,” he explains. “We rehearse whenever we can be bothered, and when it’s roughly time to do an album we roughly do an album, and then we go about living our daily lives. Other bands are doing hundreds of gigs a year, it’s their livelihood – we don’t want to do a hundred gigs a year, to me that’s a bloody nightmare. I’m happy doing fewer than 20 shows a year, and I’m happy darting in and out of MY DYING BRIDE when it suits me.”

The Ghost of Orion is out now via Nuclear Blast Records. 

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