HAILS TO THE GODS! THE GODS OF DOOM!
Pentagram, Candlemass and Pagan Altar. They are the titans of doom and your lucky ass gets to see two out of three of them this year at Noctis. Out of the three, Pagan Altar is certainly the least recognized. The traditional (read: nasally vocals, blues guitar, sexy, old-world grooves and an outright ancient vibe infused with Pagan themes) act has been functioning inconsistently since 1978. Truly, they could have been a lost classic if not for the almost lost art of tape trading and the more recent widespread appreciation for doom and its myriad contributions to heavy metal. Vocalist and band co-originator Terry Jones knows this well.
“We’ve been really pleased, though I wish it happened 25 years ago, from a personal point of view,” he says when I call him at his home in the United Kingdom. In his backyard sits the band’s recording studio and, in it, they are putting the finishing touches on two new albums. In 2013, Pagan Altar are the most active they’ve ever been, as their early career was a series of misses due to the musical climate.
“We were on the cusp, if you wish, of the Sabbath era and [New Wave of British Heavy Metal],” says Jones. Their first release was the vastly circulated Pagan Altar demo in 1982, a live-off-the-floor recording and absolute classic that only became widely available in 1998 when it was reissued on CD as Volume 1. Simply put, it’s a definitive benchmark for the band and for doom. Unfortunately, the release also marked the band’s dissolution. Given its staggering quality, in the following years scam artists moved in and sold bootlegged versions of that debut tape at exorbitant prices.
“Someone told us people were selling our albums,” says Jones. “Once we found out they were charging for the album… if they had been charging a normal amount, not ripping people off, that would have been fine… but they were really ripping people off.”
No more. The band reunited and began re-recording old tracks for wider release, given that a damp basement damaged the masters. The result was 2004’s Lords of Hypocrisy and its 2006 follow-up, Mythical and Magical. Their stomping grounds in Nunhead Cemetery inspire much of it. Overgrown with vines that creep amongst the crumbling chapels and decaying Victorian monuments, Nunhead is the least known and ventured burial grounds of the “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries in London. Fans will recognize correlations to that alongside commentary on periods in English history, on the upcoming Never Quite Dead and The Ring of Roses.
“We are like the London bus, you wait for half an hour and nothing comes, then all of a sudden, three will come in a line,” says Jones, laughing. He goes on to explain the some of the lyrical inspirations within each record. The first is the inconsistencies behind the Jack the Ripper myth; the second is the rash that appears when one contracts the plague. As it is with the remainder of their discography, other hidden meanings and experiences will also be embedded within. As their band name implies, they have carte blanche to explore the mythical, magical and meaningful.
“Pagan Altar is Stonehenge. It’s a thing that encompasses so many different aspects. Anything can be a Pagan altar. If it’s not of a Christian religion, it’s obviously Pagan. It can be witchcraft, it can the occult, it can be anything,” says Jones. He goes on to criticize the church for being historically threatened by such nonsense as a woman dwelling in the forest treating people with “a cow shit poultice” who in turn would be condemned as a witch.
“I think hypocrisy is one of the things that really grates on me. And it seems to be rife really,” he says. “It’s really nice to be able to express it in music.”
Ancient themes, indeed. Hence the quality of Pagan Altar’s music: it oozes with discontent, a functional relationship to the natural and distaste for popular authority. And that’s something all metal fans can get behind.
Watch Pagan Altar on Friday, September 20 at MacEwan Hall as part of Noctis 666: Lucifer Rex.
Words and photo by Sarah Kitteringham
BeatRoute Magazine 