Interview with With The Dead vocalist Lee Dorrian | By Hutch
Lee Dorrian is a master of brutality, harnessing darkness and harvesting rebellion throughout his life in music. Dorrian sang for Napalm Death on their menacing first two albums – well, half of 1987’s Scum and all of 1988’s From Enslavement to Obliteration. He then formed the titans of doom metal, Cathedral, and he runs Rise Above Records, which boasts an impressive roster of bands who revel in occult, Satanic, and serial killer celebration. In 2014, he began a new venture: With The Dead.
Dorrian is reporting after a jovial day of dinosaur golf with his daughter and his mum, who traveled 100 miles south to London from Dorrian’s hometown of Coventry. After teeing vibrant colored balls through brontosaurus’ legs, the trio went to the park. Dorrian refers to this as “a pretty chill day,” and after a slight pause, quietly adds, “not very doom, I know.”
The disclaimer is amusing after enduring the 77 minutes of cathartic sonic punishment that is With The Dead’s sophomore LP, Love From With The Dead. The album slithers into speakers on Sept. 22 via Rise Above.
For Love From With The Dead, Dorrian and guitarist Tim Bagshaw lost a member of their original trio—drummer Mark Greening—but expanded with two new musicians: drummer Alex Thomas and bassist Leo Smee. Bagshaw has wrangled down-tuned strings for giants of doom such as Electric Wizard, Ramesses, and Serpentine Path. His guitar work here continues to mangle riffs of desolation and despair. The opener, “Isolation,” is a draining, twisting eight-minute track with thick, sludgy chords. The work of Smee and Thomas coalesces as a thunderous foundation for what Dorrian refers to as “pure nihilism.” The second track, “Egyptian Tomb,” picks up the tempo while managing to balance the agonizing atmosphere of regret and sorrow.
Dorrian’s day with his family inevitably brings up his youth. He explains that Coventry was “completely annihilated in the second World War by the Nazis, and I’m not sure it has ever fully recovered from that. After the war, when it was first rebuilt, it was the most futuristic city in the world. Then, in the ‘70s, it became a concrete jungle. Before it was bombed, it was one of the most beautiful cities in the world: medieval like Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick, cobblestone streets and such.”
“I still love the town. It’s where I grew up,” he adds. His growing up was diametrically opposed to the idyllic setting for which Coventry was known. Dorrian’s youth was painted with strokes of poverty and struggle and the tainted innocence most ghetto youths suffer, but he explores his memories with nostalgia and a reckless tone. “At age 12 or 13, I started hanging out in town with gangs,” he says. “I knew the streets inside out, every nook and cranny of the city center. I knew the streets where you could sleep, where there was heating, the places where you could do the things you weren’t supposed to do, the pubs you could get into when you were 14.”
Dorrian sees Coventry with a fondness only time can allow, fighting for it like a mayor or diplomat. “It still looked nice up until the early to the mid ‘80s. Then, they started messing with the architecture,” he recalls. “Then, it was a town notorious for violence, lots of racial violence. Lots of Asians—as in Indian Asian—[and a] fair amount of African people. Jamaican people as well. The racial tension was unfortunately between the Asian community and the racist right-wingers.”
An unanticipated The Specials reference is interjected. The Specials also came from Coventry and offered a message of unity. Dorrian lauds the band, saying, “[They did] bring the city together. It was the one thing that happened in the late ‘70s that Coventry could be proud of,” but one Two Tone ska band could not battle the deep divisions on their own. Coventry fell victim to its own legacy. Once the U.K.’s Detroit—and maybe still—Coventry was a manufacturing epicenter for Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Triumph, and more, but when those jobs disintegrated, so did their hope and security.
Dorrian’s parents were Mods, and that alluring scene hooked him into music. The punk, skinhead, and Teddy Boy scenes all attracted him, and he took his turn in those subcultures. He loved G.B.H., Discharge, and especially Motörhead. “I was into bands that wanted to change the world and had a message,” he says, adding that the bigger arena bands “just wanted to change the size of their bank accounts.” Once he heard Metallica’s Creeping Death 12” in 1984, his destiny was cemented. “Ride the Lightning was a monster album. I used to play it out inside out for years,” he says. He attributes his attraction to Metallica to their “raw aggression. They stripped everything down to basics.” The jeans and Discharge t-shirt approach was an enticing dichotomy to Saxon and Van Halen and Twisted Sister. It wasn’t long until he was screaming on the B-side of Scum.
Back to the present. In 2015, when With The Dead dropped their self-titled debut, the band had to halt. Bagshaw and Dorrian were excited and energized by this power product of their enmity and spite, but despite always challenging each other, the road was not quite clear. Then, Greening’s departure created a new obstacle. Dorrian reflects, “We did not know how far it was going to go—another record or live shows? We just didn’t know. We like the way we worked with each other, but on the other hand, we didn’t want it to be a novelty band. So-called ‘project bands,’ I’m not a fan of them. I’ve done a few, but unless you put 100 percent into it, I don’t see the point in doing it. It dilutes everything else you do. It takes away the energy from your main band. Then, you have a load of OK project bands. You need to do one killer band.” Goal established.
Despite Greening being gone and Dorrian and Bagshaw’s other commitments, Dorrian reached out to an old friend who was close. “Having shows and festivals [booked], I called Leo Smee,” he says. “He spent some time in Cathedral as a bassist. He lives close. He was up for doing it. That was easy.” Smee had been in bands with Alex Thomas, who drummed for Bolt Thrower on their seminal 1998 release, Mercenary.
The new quartet went to jam for rehearsal. “In one evening, literally, we had the set nailed,” Dorrian recalls, but the band had prepared for three additional rehearsal days in the space, booked and paid for. “We didn’t even need them,” he says. “So, instead of canceling the rehearsals, we worked on new material. We came up with the last four songs on album. We recorded them the following Monday in February 2016.”
In three days, the behemoth band had half an album. They then toured Japan and Europe and played some U.K. shows. “We left Tim to think about it,” Dorrian says. “We gave him a few suggestions of what [the music] needed to not be so meandering.” Bagshaw went home to New Jersey to write a few more songs in November and December, then returned to London in January. The connection remained. “We rehearsed them in one night and recorded the next day,” Dorrian says. “That’s it. There’s the album.”
Dorrian feels exonerated by this approach. He has found true mates in creating With The Dead’s brand of doom metal. “This band is pretty cool,” he shares. “We think about things a lot, but we don’t physically spend too much time working or writing the songs. We spend a lot of time thinking about how they should be and how to digest certain atmospheres just from being alive to channel back into the songs, but when it comes to the actual physical act of recording, we don’t spend much time. I did all the vocals in three hours for the first time. Straight-off. One take.”
In contrast, Dorrian is forced to recall the days of Cathedral, who disbanded in 2013. “We never used to do that before,” he says. “I used to spend too much time torturing myself over certain words or getting certain melodies. With this band, it is more about a primal instinct, a good feeling that you get. If it feels right, go for it—instead of spending too much time thinking about it.”
On Love From With The Dead, “Watching the Ward Go By” is an odd tonal piece; a dissonant strum vibrates and echoes through a hospital, and the listener pictures a medicated mind drifting as its vessel of a body is fettered to a wretched bed at all joints. Their eyes peer deep into ill green concrete as the restraints grow tighter. Dorrian rants of his character’s predicament for two-thirds of the 11-minute trek. “Anemia” reverberates a haunting, cavernous miasma as crashing cymbals and ringing basslines cloud the sound. Heavy, plunging low notes pound the audience’s chest. Each song—including the 17-minute closer, “CV1”—bandy between swamp snail pace and mid-tempo. Mostly just the former.
“CV1”—a nod to Coventry—battles against its 17-minute runtime, ending in a noise barrage assisted by hometown electro musician, Russell Haswell. The power lies not within galloping speeds, but the plodding desperation. The suffocating loss entrenched in each calculated bombing of saturated riffs eviscerates any hope.
Jaime Gómez Arellano’s production on Love From With The Dead is dedicated to a muddy quagmire of distortion and destitution, but the approach never obfuscates the musicianship. Dorrian’s vocals follow no traditional path, riding his emotions and impulses more than any predictable trajectory. Dorrian accepts this assessment of his vocal approach, explaining, “It’s just me, where I am now. I spent too much time worrying about things in the past. The best stuff I do is when I don’t think too much about it. I should always just follow my own instincts. When I do that, it turns out better. It’s more convincing. Being in Cathedral for—God, 20 years, halfway through that, you got these expectations. […] They start superseding what you are doing. Your thoughts get carried away about what you have to live up to, as opposed to being in the moment. We did always do what we felt like, but there is always pressure, whether there was a producer involved or something from the last LP hanging over you.”
“This band, it’s like starting from scratch all over again. I can throw away those shackles that were there from before. That’s not to sound arrogant. That’s just the way it is,” he offers. That sounds liberating. “That’s exactly what it is: liberating,” he agrees.
The mixing on the record gathers all the elements, stewed in a cauldron of distortion and feedback at equal levels. Obviously, this approach is intentional. Dorrian wanted this album to be “as live sounding as possible.” He expounds, “The first LP we did, the main focus was to—and I hate to use a word like ‘crushing,’ ‘cause it’s so lame—but we wanted to make the most intense, pulverizing record we could. The heaviest, most soul crushing vibe that we could conjure.”
Mission accomplished. “But after doing that, where do we go on the next one?” he muses. “We wanted to make it even bleaker. Why do we do that [with the mixing]? Well, why not? Why [form] a band like With The Dead in the first place or be in a doom band? If you don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, you have to question why you’re doing it. After all these years, I’m not 19 anymore, I’m fucking 49! It’s a long way away from doing the Napalm records, a long way away. I still want to do music that’s uncompromising. To get to the level of intensity that we did on this record, we actually went through a lot of personal traumas. My life hasn’t exactly been a bowl of roses these last couple of years: a lot of health problems, a lot of personal problems. Life’s not been much fun, really. Only way you can get anything out of that or make sense of it, is—if you can, if you are fortunate enough like me to have a platform—to get all that stuff out. You’d be foolish not to put it into your music.”
The moment settles. Dorrian reignites upon the mention of the world’s last few years. “Hello! Life got heavier since last album,” he establishes as he chuckles. “I’m not laughing ‘cause it is funny. I’m laughing because it’s kind of ridiculous how things have been. Everything in this album, I have lived and breathed it. That’s what we wanted to achieve, that level of sincerity. However you mix it, that’s the technical side of it, but you have to convey a feeling. And that feeling is one of intense brutality.”
Purchase Love From With The Dead here.
Photos by Ester Segarra
