Phil Campbell And The Bastard Sons: Riding Straight To Hell!

When former MOTÖRHEAD man Phil Campbell unveiled his newest venture back in 2016, many wondered what the newly-christened PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS would sound like. Comprised of Campbell and an instrumental section rounded out by his sons Todd, Tyla and Dane, along with vocalist Neil Starr, the band soon garnered critical acclaim for their self-titled debut EP, and for their 2018 debut album The Age of Absurdity, touring the world and sharing stages with the likes of GUNS N’ ROSES and AIRBOURNE in the process as they dished out their brilliantly riffy signature brand of classic hard-rock.

Set to carry on their hard-touring ways into this year, plans of course had to change due to the current global situation, and faced with the prospect of all their plans being postponed indefinitely thanks to COVID-19, the band instead decamped to their own South Wales studio to begin formulating what would soon become their sophomore album We’re The Bastards. We spoke to the band’s bassist Tyla Campbell just ahead of release day to get the lowdown on writing and recording in lockdown, widening their musical canvas and the year of touring that never was.

“So Todd [Campbell, guitars] has been recording bands for fifteen years now probably, maybe even longer. He recorded our first EP, but then for our first album he wanted to kinda sit back and enjoy the recording experience as just an artist, so we had Romesh [Dodangoda, producer] do that first album, and he did an amazing job,” Campbell explains to us via phone from South Wales, one particularly stormy evening. “But for this album [he] kinda wanted to go and do it in our studio; and I think this was a couple of months before the idea of lockdown was looking quite likely, so it made perfect sense. We booked the studio time for April, started recording in Todd’s studio, which we all live like five miles away from. And yeah, I think it was a lot more of a relaxed atmosphere – it was different because social-distancing and that meant there was only ever one or two people in the studio at a time, whereas usually you’d be able to have the majority of the band in there whilst everyone’s doing their parts. So it was very different, but for me personally, it was easier to record my parts because it was just me in the recording room and Todd in the other room and I was able to just concentrate on my parts.”

And what an album it is that they’ve crafted this time around. We’re The Bastards stands as yet another emphatic statement from the band; building upon the template set out with their prior output, whilst still leaving space to expand sonically. Despite being for the most still very much rooted in the high-octane rock & roll Phil Campbell first made his name crafting with MOTÖRHEAD, there remains an experimental edge within what PHIL CAMPBELL AND THE BASTARD SONS do; firstly with the moody almost-bluesy stomp of Dark Days on The Age of Absurdity, and continuing on in several places across the runtime of We’re The Bastards.

As Tyla puts it to us, “I think Dark Days was like the guinea pig on Age of Absurdity because we didn’t know how the reaction was going to go to that song, but then it ended up being our most popular song I think off that album. So then, I think we’ve all been developing as songwriters and getting to write with each other for the songs on this album, and due to the response to Dark Days we knew we could kind-of spread our wings and experiment a bit. And so I think, like, you’ve got Desert Song bordering on southern rock vibes but then Waves is just like another level of that; it’s hard to describe that song. I think that always fit on the album though; as soon as we wrote it, it was like ‘that’s the album closer’, it wouldn’t have fit into like the middle of the album I don’t think.”

Of course, we couldn’t talk about the record without discussing that censor-baiting title, which, as it turns out, came to the band almost entirely by chance. “Well, it was interesting, we wrote the album and I think we had time still and we were either in the studio or going into the studio soon, and one of our fans tweeted us saying something about looking forward to it and put the hashtag #We’reTheBastards,” Tyla reveals. “And Todd was like ‘Oh, that’d be quite a cool name for the album’. Y’know, it already says ‘bastard’ in our band name, so what difference does it make putting ‘bastard’ in the album title as well?”

You’d think that being more or less completely unable to play live in support of their new release might have affected release plans in the PHIL CAMPBELL AND THE BASTARD SONS camp too, but as Tyla explains it, thoughts of putting the record back were never really on the cards. “It’s been a really hard year for everyone. There was a point where we knew the UK tour couldn’t happen, and there was a small discussion like ‘do we delay the album?’, but we thought, the fans can’t go to any concerts now, the least we can do is give them some new music. So we were all adamant to stick to the original release date, and I just can’t wait for all our fans to pick up a copy and have some new headbanging tunes to listen to and sing-along to and yeah; it’s a shame we can’t play for you but hopefully fingers crossed everyone 2021 we’ll be back on the road and I can’t wait to see all the faces back in front of me, as Neil quoted in our song We’re The Bastards, which was very appropriate I think.”

We’re The Bastards is out now via Nuclear Blast Records. 

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