Venomous Concept: Sailin’ On The Good Ship Lollipop
VENOMOUS CONCEPT, the band started by Kevin Sharp [BRUTAL TRUTH, LOCK UP] and Shane Embury [NAPALM DEATH, LOCK UP, BRUJERIA], over the years has acted as a musical vehicle to salute their hardcore punk influences. When the band do bring out an album, it’s always a chance to revel in their sardonic take on extreme music. Their new album The Good Ship Lollipop is another blast of what VENOMOUS CONCEPT do best.
Kicking off with how the making of The Good Ship Lollipop went, Kevin told us how strange the whole experience was as they actually did it during the pandemic. “Making the record was fucking weird man, every bit of it. A lot of was written when everything fucking kicked off. I came over to Birmingham in September after everything shut down. I flew over on a plane and I filled out all this paperwork to come in to to the UK, and it was super weird.”
Musically, The Good Ship Lollipop takes the hardcore punk elements that VENOMOUS CONCEPT are known for and injects a whole host of melodic and anthemic moments to create an album with so many powerful songs. Kevin told us that as with all their albums, music from their youth came to the fore as he opened up about the subjects the album tackles. “With this band, it’s sort of stuck in the 80s. Shane and I always have written music that interested us back when we were kids and got us started and there’s a lot of melodic stuff because there was a lot of stuff that crossed platforms a lot better back in the day. People could listen to THE EXPLOITED or HUSKER DU and there wouldn’t be a huge debate over it. That’s what we grew up in. My early days consisted of early CORROSION OF CONFORMITY and a lot of old west coast hardcore like BLACK FLAG. There’s all these elements that we grew up on and we wanted to do a melodic record about depression and mental illness.”
Kevin then opened up about the title of The Good Ship Lollipop and how it refers to the subjects it tackles. “Well, I was in a really toxic marriage for years and years and I was talking about it like, ‘yeah, she’s way off on the fucking good ship lollipop’, meaning that she’s just lost her mind. Shane was like ‘that’s a great name for a record’ and we took that whole concept and wrote a record about mental disorder, depression, narcissism, adultery, all the good things in life!”
With The Good Ship Lollipop already recorded a while back, Kevin divulges the great news that VENOMOUS CONCEPT are already well underway with a new album called Seeds and also that he has a new band as well, reiterating that he’s always working when it comes to music. “I never stopped! I’m halfway through the next VENOMOUS CONCEPT record, I have started another project with with Bill from MASTODON and Dave Witte. Dave actually plays on the next VENOMOUS CONCEPT record. There seems to be an endless supply of lyrical content in the current state of everything, it’s all completely engulfed in flames.”
The sound of the new record also includes a few more influences for the band as Kevin expands further about its creation. “We turned around a bunch of ideas and there’s five or six songs demoed out, Dave‘s coming down and we’re going to fuck around until we’ve figured out what we like, so it’s coming along nice. The Seeds record is super weird. It’s totally different. It’s more like a psychedelic, hardcore punk cross between HELIOS CREED and BUTTHOLE SURFERS.”
Kevin then expanded on the freedom that he and VENOMOUS CONCEPT have with their music and how it allows them to be themselves. “Well, that’s the cool thing about this band is that there’s the freedom to do this. There’s a lot of freedom in being unsuccessful! There’s a lot of freedom. There was a lot of expectation for us to do this, that or the other with the band, but that was never the concept. The concept was always just to relive our childhood.”
With such a history in extreme music from BRUTAL TRUTH, VENOMOUS CONCEPT and beyond, Kevin Sharp has had a very storied career. To end off our chat, the subject of Kevin writing an autobiography telling his life story comes up and he tells us while he has no plans for it as yet, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility in the future. “You know, I’ve had so many people talk about that because there’s so many stories from so many periods of my life where I experienced so much. I’ve lived an interesting life. I’m dating a gal right now that writes books. I think I would have to leave it to her to figure it out because I just have these snippets of periods of my life that all of a sudden I remember something and it seems like someone else’s life. I need someone to untangle it because these things come in flashes and I’m not exactly sure how to collect my thoughts.”
Kevin Sharp‘s story would be a fascinating one indeed and one that would be amazing to be told but for now, he is very much in the present with his music and with The Good Ship Lollipop and beyond, Kevin and VENOMOUS CONCEPT are grinding ahead with their own take on the music that they love.
The Good Ship Lollipop is out now via Extrinsic Records.
Like VENOMOUS CONCEPT on Facebook.