Dead Rhetoric: Do you have fond memories of touring with Annihilator in support of this record? I’ve heard that there were many sold out nights across Europe… and the infamous pranks with you guys posting ‘Canadian Wankers’ across the side of their tour bus…
Rockett: (laughs) Yeah, it was a good tour. It was a lot of fun. Jeff (Waters) is a great guy, but back then he ran a pretty strict regime within the band. Obviously everybody is quite aware of Randy Rampage’s love of alcohol, he was a regular on our bus or slipping into our dressing room to get his drinks in. Jeff posted some posters on our tour bus. We saw Jeff last year on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, it’s the first time I’ve properly spoken to him since that tour, and we did some reminiscing since then. He’s lightened up a lot; he was very focused back then.
Dead Rhetoric: You and Sy decided to reform Onslaught in 2004- what prompted the reformation, did you feel like a new generation was ready to hear one of the veteran acts from the UK deliver more thrash material?
Rockett: Yes, that was it really. Even though thrash hadn’t made the full comeback back then that it has today, around 2007-8 it had kicked in – and we found out the first two albums had been re-released in 2002. We found out 2 or 3 years later and we didn’t know, nobody had paid us. We spoke to the label who re-released them, and found out the sales were incredible. There was some kind of interest there, the internet is our right hand man these days. People remember the band, talking well about the band, so why not? In Search of Sanity has always been the monkey on my back in terms of how I wanted it to be and how it never was, this gave me the chance to make another record to put everything right that was wrong. That’s what we did. It took a long time as we had been away for 14 years. Jeff and I were in a band post-Onslaught, and that’s why he came back with us. When that ended in 1994-95, the guitars went away for 10 years. The first rehearsal was like, ‘woah’, really bad.
Dead Rhetoric: Do you think when these bands first come back for reformation, there is that growing pains period for the first record because there is so much time away?
Rockett: We came back for the reason of doing something positive and creative, not just for nostalgia purposes. It took us a long time to see where we were going with Killing Peace. It had to be 100% right, anything that was weak or lame, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it. It did take 2 years to get that record right, it was a good strong comeback record for us.
Dead Rhetoric: How do you view the latest albums in Onslaught’s catalog? Obviously I believe VI is one of your strongest to date, and possibly the thrash album of 2013. There seems to be the right balance of aggression, harmonic leads, speed, and tightness that incorporates all sides of thrash.
Rockett: Everybody says their latest album is always their best – but we believe that. The journalists and fans have said the same, the reviews were out of this world. We knew we created something good, we are really pleased. The next task is to better that one, there’s no sense in releasing inferior product. We are going to try.
Dead Rhetoric: Are you the kind of band that when it comes to writing you have inspiration and record ideas as they come along or do you have to lock yourselves away and set aside time to record?
Rockett: Obviously with the way the situation is in the music industry things have changed- we have all the day jobs down, and luckily we are in the kinds of positions where we can take as much time off as we like. We have to say when we are writing. The way the last two albums got written, they were done on a weekly basis- a day set aside a week. It’s the only way you really can kind of do it. You have to have a way to fit it in for the life schedule. At this point we can’t be doing a band full time to pay all the bills.
Williams: Plus the great thing with modern technology around nowadays, it’s a lot easier to do it that way. We can communicate through the internet, you have the various systems that can set up files and trade back and forth at home. We can send rough ideas back and forth, so it does make it a lot easier to create a record.
Dead Rhetoric: Does an older band like yourselves have an advantage growing up in the analog days in a full studio set up to now using this home studio technology to your fullest extent?
Rockett: Yes for sure. We did it the hard way in the early days, having gone through that process and make records that way. We incorporate both ways. Like Jeff said- all the recordings for the guitars on the last three records have been done at home. There’s no need for 1,000 pound, 2,000 pound a day recording studios- it’s insane to think of what we spent on the In Search of Sanity album and what we spent on the VI album – and you listen to the two, and VI wipes the floor (with it) and it cost maybe 1/30 of what that cost.
Williams: We like to record old school but with as modern a technology as possible.
Rockett: The technology has obviously saved a lot of bands, the limited costs that are available as a result of the way the music industry is set up.
Dead Rhetoric: As a result, does the mixing and mastering matter more and where you put the bulk of your resources towards?
Rockett: That’s where we invest all of our money now. We record the bass, guitars, solos, vocals at home. We spend our small pot of money on a good guy for the mixing and mastering. We are making records in 15-18 days. In Search of Sanity took like 5 months – what the hell were we doing? We were so self-indulgent, there was so much money behind the music industry back then, we just took a piss. Why couldn’t have been like this back then.
Williams: I was thinking ‘why couldn’t it have been more like that now’! (laughs).
Dead Rhetoric: My favorite songs on the album include “Chaos Is King”, the exotic sounding “Children of the Sand”, and “Dead Man Walking”. Do you have any particular stories to tell regarding the creation of these songs and specific lyrical content for each track?
Rockett: There are a few stories running through the album, I don’t know if you’ve noticed on the Onslaught website there are some photos of troops in Afghanistan with some Onslaught shirts on. That came about, there was a program…
Williams: The actual program was called “Modern Day Assassins”, on the Discovery Channel, and it was about a British missile battalion that was settled in Afghanistan, and they were actually called Onslaught 1 and Onslaught 2. They have the logos upside down and everything.
Rockett: You end up walking into their operations tent and the logo is there, and we managed to get in touch with a Colonel in the battalion, and he was an Onslaught fan. That’s how the shirts went out there, and one day he sent this e-mail to us. He said he had some time on his hands, he wanted to get stuff of his chest, and gave us permission to use this as inspiration for lyrics. It was a massive ream of a story, and really heavy, very interesting. Two of the particular songs on the album – “Slaughterize” was based on the story of a sniper, and then “Children of the Sand”, were influenced by these words. Hence the Middle Eastern sounding strings and the vocals on there, we wanted to give it that true feel and hit it home a bit stronger. A little experiment that people have taken to. The lyrics are very factual based and they have a lot of personal meanings, quite political you could say.
Part II of Matt Coe’s interview with Onslaught will post tomorrow, November 3rd.