Interview by Julia Cartwright
We’re here to talk about your album Self Degraded Suicide, so first things first, why the title?
It sums up all the themes explored on the album and the emotions experienced during its creation. A lot of shit went down and I kinda beat myself up about it, put myself down and always focused on the bad, but you have to look over that and keep pushing forward.
In a way there’s a feeling of hope as you follow the album through, there’s always that one line at the end which proves you keep dusting yourself down and move on after every fall. It’s there in each song. To be reborn you have to destroy everything you’ve become.
The main underlying theme of Self Degraded Suicide seems to be betrayal, how does that reflect to you personally?
All of my lyrics are based on things I’ve seen, noticed or experienced, so personally they mean everything to me as they reflect what I believe. At the start, the album didn’t have a theme but as it progressed it picked up the emotions of that period. There was a lot of backstabbing and deceit going on in my personal life so that kinda bled through onto the record.
Was it your way of dealing with it?
[laughs] A self-flagellation therapy. No, seriously, it helped. Each song has a personal meaning, capturing the anger, upset or venom of emotion. I agree that it is not a happy album, but it has a strong message. I mean, I wrote part of the lyrics for ‘Dead in my Eyes’ as I sat across from the person they were about and then they went and stabbed me in the back and the song was completed, kinda full circle.
This loss of relationships is a theme we continued on Judas Halo, a free web-ep which we released for our fans.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but is the track ‘How Do You Feel Now?’ refering to a guy?
Yeah, you’re the first person to let on that they noticed that.
It was the line ‘bastard son of pain’…
That’s the only bit in the song that mentions the sex of the person, and if he heard it he would get the deeper meaning of the wording. But yes, it is about a dude and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions to that.
The first half of the album is very political, does politics have a big say in what you do?
The whole album on a whole is a critique of society, of modern culture. Everyone scrabbling for their own interests. When you talk about society you can’t help but notice the increasing and distressing rise in people’s apathy. They’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, if it doesn’t effect them they don’t care. The government creates all these bogeymen and dislikables through the tv sets and people just accept without question. It’s very much a case of ‘Saddam was a bad man, he killed loads of people, but we’ll allow our government to go and kill a load of people because they haven’t told us it’s wrong.’
We haven’t jumped on the politcal bandwagon, we actually have something we want to say. Today’s society is shit, everyone has become disposable and we need to ask ourselves why we let it come to this.
So what is The Red Devil Incident upto at the moment?
Well, we’ve just been out there promoting Self Degraded Suicide, performing a collection of acoustic and full band gigs. We’ve also been back recording some new demo tracks and new material which will form the basis of a future release.
So this isn’t the last we’ve heard of The Red Devil Incident?
[laughs] I fucking hope not, there’s a lot more I wanna say and achieve.
The Red Devil Incident’s Self Degraded Suicide is due for release digitally in April, 2007.
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The Red Devil Incident – A Pain that I’m Used To appeared in the January edition of Off the Wall Fanzine, a fanzine based in the North West of England. The copyright in this interview belongs to the fanzine’s writers/publishers.