MY DYING BRIDE - „My mother was Roman Catholic and my father was just Yorkshire man ”

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Much has been written over time about MY DYING BRIDE, one of the most innovative metal bands of the '90s, pioneering true and school initiatives. Behind this name is, as you know, Aaron Stainthorpe, a singular character who has taken on himself and in our name - the curse of being human, drinking every day, until the bottom, the bitter cup of despair, again and again, as a homeopathic potion without which he couldn’t live. While for the second time in Romania, in Sibiu at the ARTmania Festival, Aaron was kind enough to talk to us (but for you), about music, literature, religion and MY DYING BRIDE, with sincerity and passion (as otherwise?), mending our souls as he’s the only one that knows how to do it.

As a lover of Poe, Celine or Marquez, when I heard it the first time the MY DYING BRIDE phrase I thought, brilliant, literary speaking, the same level, say poetic, with titles like Journey to the End of the Night or One Hundred Years of Solitude. What literary reference of choice for MY DYING BRIDE?
„I didn’t read Celine nor Marquez, but it's very strange that many people mentioned Poe as a reference to MY DYING BRIDE... To be honest, when I was in school I was very interested in the classic english poets of the time, Byron, Shelley... And I like what they did, but I could not say why ... I like their tragedies more than I liked their comedies or the natural theatre...  The darker subjects seem more passionate than the light-hearted subjects, so for me, I purposely avoided people like Poe, of whom I think he may changed my style if I had read several of his works, I'm convinced. I wanted to find my my own style. I borrowed a lot from Shelley, Keats and Byron. I took some of their ideas and inspirations and kind of mixed them in my own head and channel them in my own direction. I was aware of other poets doing other things and people would say "oh, you must read this" and I was thinking "no, because that means that I must be similar to them already so, there’s no point reading them if it’s already similar with what I do… Two reasons: if I read them, I will think that their work is great and I’ll be very gealous or I would read their work and I think “maybe I can borrow more from them” and I prefer not to do that. I quite like to read people who aren’t associated with a somber style, the melancholy. Because sometimes… you can turn a poem about a summer’s day really on its head and almost write every line as a negative… And you’ll turn the sun upside down into darkness… And you can take the simple summer’s day poem, written by a poet nobody heard of, and it can evolve into some real heart-rending tragedy of very simple proportions… And people suddenly think: “where’s that from?”, “who wrote that?” Well, I’m not gonna tell you who wrote that! That author is not associated with this dark material… But it’s nice to do that juxtaposition: to take something white and turn it black by adding your own dark spirit to it… It helps me avoid going down the… not cheesy and not traditional, but the Edgar Allan Poe’s route which people might expect me to go down… I try to avoid these things because I don’t want to… well, I do quite like to be a little bit like Poe, but I don’t want to be too much like him. I want to do my own thing and if people say “Oh, you must read EA Poe…” I tell them that I’m trying to avoid him... ”

Then where lies Shakespeare's tragedies?
„He’s alright, ha, ha, ha ... Yeah ... Shakespeare, of course… Because he wrote so much about so many different subjects, he’s done tragedies, he’s done comedies, he’s done everything on so many levels, short poems too, orations by kings… because he’s done so much it's hard to call him too much of an inspiration. I only like a small amount of his work. Many of these great XVII-XVIII poets they’ve covered a lot of ground and I don’t really have a favorite, because sometimes is nice to just read a little bit and to convert it into your own style without ripping it off and then going away from it… If you read too much of one style it will influence you so much that your style is not yours anymore… I’m not writing lyrics by Aaron Stainthorpe, but Lord Byron’s lyrics, but I think they’re mine and everybody else who read it would say “yeah, it’s Byron…” So it’s actually good to avoid classics… Use them just to get the ball rolling, but once you start going your own road you should stay on your own road. Later on in life, if you’ll realize everything you’ve written really has been copied from someone else, I think you’ll be very disappointed. I mean, it’s important to be able to write things and to stand there and say: “It’s all mine! Every single word on that page is mine!” I think this is important…It’s nice to have a kick start from someone else; it’s nice to have someone to light the fire. You have to be inspired by something otherwise you’ll have nothing...”

Your artistic concerns are multiple, in different areas. I understand from other interviews that you are concerned first and foremost to express yourself and do it in any form that seems appropriate to you at a time. Think of an art or even all multidisciplinary, which combines in a single act more forms?
„No. For me, art must be widespread. I don’t have a particularly favorite... I use traditional oil canvas, as well as dirt and digital photography and of course music… My art… it has kind of niche area that I have access to and I can manipulate to my own style. I’m not about to start using cubism because a: I don’t find it particularly interesting, and b: I don’t think I can’t do it. I think artists - good artists, no matter how perfect their work may be, if they believe in what they’re doing then that’s the important aspect of it. You can draw me a picture now that’s been in your mind for weeks and it might look interesting, but if you believe that’s from your heart 100%, then that’s a piece of classic artwork, in my view…”


It transcends?
„Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course... You can hold it up to all these people now and say “what do you think of that?” Some might say “pfffft…”, others might say “yeah, it’s pretty good.” For me it’s more than good, because it’s coming right from you. That’s why I’m not a big fan of commercial art… Things created purely to sell. I don’t think that I’ve ever created anything with my mind on the market... I mean, some of my art work it’s been showing here today, and there’s a lot of people going “I want to buy this! How much is this?” and the curators said “we need to talk about how much you want for this stuff, and I said that I’m not interested. You printed all this out and you sell everything to cover your costs and anything extra you’ll split 50-50, and when I’ll take mine, I will split that 50-50, because I always gave money to charity and with the rest of it, I’ll probably get drunk! If you have a picture and the price tag… that price tag will change that image immediately. If you don’t have a price tag, people will look at the image for its own merit, and then they will decide for themselves: yes, I like it or not. Soon as you put a price tag on it, if it’s a small price, say 5 pounds, people will say “if it’s 5 pounds, it’s shit!” If it’s 5.000 pounds, people might think “it’s 5.000 pounds, it must be rare, it must be special, it must be unique – so I’ll buy it!” That’s wrong! You should never have a price tag, because the art stand for itself – shouldn’t influence people by putting a price tag on it… So when they spoke about the money early on, I said “do what you like, I’m not that interested”… but yeah, art for me it’s music and visuals within my realm… I can’t get out of my boundaries, because for me it would feel uncomfortable and I wouldn’t be able to make sense properly and… All artists have to make sense of what they’re doing. If you’re trying something weird or whacky and you’re not sure… then why you’re doing it? I’m happy in my environment and that’s what I’m gonna stick to… But then, I love sculpture but I can not do it! I try once and it was shit… it looked like a shit… And I just think: well, some people might like it! When I created it, it was made of clay and the rest of the band thought: “Yeah, Aaron made a shit on the table!” Then I thought that maybe it’s something there, but because I wasn’t 100% convinced myself – shhhh! In the bin! So this is not something I’m interested following up, but I like it. Again, architecture! I’m a big fan of architecture. Not necessary classical architecture, but just architecture that I feel is saying something to me… I would love to try and design a building, but I’ll never will because I know I can’t do it… And it would look like… well; I don’t know what it would look like… But again, free architecture it’s an art form: to be able to create a beautiful building it’s such a skill, a technological skill, a skill that translate to the people on the street, they’ll gonna “look at your building, I got to photograph it, because it looks brilliant…” To me, a really good building is a massive piece of art work… When you see some buildings, you go “wow!” and your hair sticks up and you go just: “fuck! That is a fantastic piece of work” It transcends, it becomes something else… Not many people see that, I do, but other people go: “aw, fuck it; it’s a building – so what!” But for me it’s more than a building…”

You are among the musicians whose life, ways of thinking and the music that you create are one and the same. Do you think music is a way to harmonize the self with the outside? If so, this way of looking at things is appropriate to the century in which we are living?
„It could be, yeah… I try to stay away from the contemporary references in my lyrics, because for me music and artwork is a form of escapism. I would never write lyrics similar to the things you just see on the news, because for me, with the things that I create I want to take the view of the listener out of their daily life in to something different… It may be something darker, but it has to be something different, and that’s why when you read MDB’s lyrics, you’ll very, very rarely find any kind of modern references. You won’t see trains or politicians or anything like that, because that’s a reference to kind of our lives and struggle we have every day… For me it’s almost fantasy, I guess. I want people to put their headphones and press the play button and listen to the MDB’s music and to be transcended into a completed different place in time where they can leave their life behind and go somewhere else, even if it’s a darker place, it’s still escapism. You have to get away from it sometime; you can’t live like this all the time… I can’t! I need to get away… When I write… it’s just thoughts running through my head and references to things I’ve been through in the past… And those are the hardest songs to sing live, cause obviously, when you sing the lyrics, you’re reliving the moments you wrote the lyrics, and when you wrote the lyrics it was a very dark moment… that’s why I hate playing live, because I have to remember in a vocal manner dark painful thoughts, and it’s hard and I don’t like playing live, I ended plying live cause the rest of the guys want to play live. If I had my choice we would never play EVER! But we have to do it, and it’s a sacrifice I have to make because sometimes the lyrics are very personal and directly from my own personal life straight into MDB and then translated to other people… It’s hard to do, it’s hard to stand up in front of thousands of people and say “this is what I’ve experienced”… Because some of them will laugh, and you don’t want them to laugh, you want them to be there and feel it with you… That’s a hard thing to do…”


Someone said somewhere that you’ve expressed the whole MY DYING BRIDE’s essence in the album As Flower Withers and that you’re next creations detailed that essence in various forms, each idea from there. In other words, the MY DYING BRIDE would deal with each album the same structures / concepts with each album but watching them from different angles. Do you think that is true?
„That is a true thing there, of course, because when we did the first album, despite being an obvious young band, we had good ideas, good strong ideas and we know what we wanted to do, but still one album is not enough to express all, unless your first album it’s a triple album if you really wanted to say everything you wanted to say. And of course, you have a budget and when you’re a young band your budget is nothing so you have a small space of time to express the things you want to express, so you’ll try to make them as intense as possible. You can never get it right on the first album, that’s almost like building foundations, and that’s the stone on everything will rest upon and expand upon as well, because I felt much more comfortable when we did Turn Loose The Swans...”

A beautiful album...
„Thank you. I fell that we touched on certain areas on the first album now we can expand on the second album and then with each album… It’s like a tree: it starts expanding all over the place into directions you never imagine when you did the first album, and that’s essentially because you’re growing older… You think you rule the world when you’re a young kid and when you write an album you thing it’s the greatest album ever. And then you get older and you experience so many more things in your life and you begin to write about them I knew I touched certain areas of the first album and that we can expand more on the second ... For example, on the new album I writing on subjects now that I would never even considered on the first album, because I never lived them… I think I was 21 or whatever when we did the first album, now 40 and a lot more experience and so my writing style and content is altered over the years… And it must do for everybody because you can’t do the same thing all the time, because you evolve… And when you evolve the things that you touch change, because you’ve changed… I’m sure that critics of MDB will say “yeah, they’ve been doing this doom and gloom for 20 years, maybe they should try something new”, and I can understand that point of view, but they’re looking just on the surface level… When you’re look at the many layers underneath, that’s when you’ll see the different content, things we haven’t try before and I guess it’s only the die hard fans that spot the changes, the things that are new and original and exciting again, because of the things we now experienced that we didn’t experienced when we were younger… So yeah, that was a good starting point: less of a foundation, more of a seed that once planted everything blew up from that, and it’s still growing which is good… I mean, we’re still into it, as I mentioned earlier I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe in it… You’ve got to be passionate about it because is almost no money in this business, most of the bands have day jobs too, and it’s expensive to travel all over the place and it’s hard work a lot of the time as well… If you’re doing it only for the money, then you’re wasting you time!”

Some of the titles, even some of the texts can be interpreted in a religious key. Even if the relationship with divinity, whatever the reason, it is a matter of each heart, do you have any religious faith and if you do what is it?
„Well, I don’t. My mother was Roman Catholic and my father was just Yorkshire man. Fortunately, my mother did say: "you can go on your own way”, I was never forced to follow the Roman Catholic way ..."”

Something quite rare...
„Yes, I know ... Well, my father influenced her to a degree obviously because my father was not interested in the church at all… I had a look at religion, I had a look at Roman Catholicism and for me… it just didn’t make sense, I couldn’t understand even why anybody would want to follow that faith. I just thought “well, it’s not for me, I will move on…” Some people like apples, some people like pears. So I moved on to something else… Well, I looked around at other religious things, because when we were growing up we had all these confrontations with the Northern Ireland, they were bombing England all the time, all that trouble in the seventies in particularly. And I used to think “people are killing each other in the name of religion and I think this religion thing is a bad thing – it’s not good news, it’s bad news”. And it seems that today, with all the bombing that happened and all that terrorism stuff… you can say that it’s about oil or territories or whatever, but finally, the deep seeded feeling is religion. And so I’ve only growing up thinking that religion is a particularly bad thing and it’s causing more trouble than it should. If there was one god and we all believe in the same thing, I can imagine being a peaceful place to live in this planet. It’s like a game “hey, my god is better than your god, you motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!” But I don’t even know you! You might be really nice, but because you’re a different religion, you can fuck off! And I think that’s very wrong! You shouldn’t be doing that… So, my lyrics from time to time touch on religion, not… I’m not trying to be aggressive towards religion; I’m just trying to say “I don’t want it! Because I’ve seen it and it’s nasty and it’s bad, I prefer to stay away from that, thank you very much!” And I don’t want anyone to force me to believe in it! I use references to Christianity, simply because I’m from the west, as people describe the world, and for us the crucifix, Jesus and the particularly design of churches and cross are common to Christian countries, so there’s no point in using references to Buddhism because I don’t know enough about it to start using it… I can’t use references to Islam in my lyrics, because I know hardly anything about the subject, so I wouldn’t know if I’m right or wrong in my comments. I know I’m right or wrong, depending on your point of view when I use references to Christianity, with what I’m familiar with… but I don’t believe in it – it’s just a point of reference so the people understand what I’m talking about. If I’m about to reference some obscure Celtic god that no one has ever heard of, fans and my friends will never understand: “who’s this and and why are you saying this?” That’s why I’m not using a Celtic god because it’s the same whole thing, like gang warfare, so… I prefer to stay away from it…”


Many put MY DYING BRIDE’s music in the same category as ANATHEMA and PARADISE LOST. The truth is that the beginnings of the three bands were different, there is only one time; let’s call it grace, when these bands met somehow. What do you think is the production mechanism of such events, coincidence not being a relevant explanation?
„Hmmmmm ... Now it’s hard when you take that out of the equation, ha ha ha ... I do not know ... Maybe there is something in the water from the north ... I know ... England is darker the further north you go and I just don’t mean the sky… it’s the industrial north… I was talking with Nick Holmes about this thing in an interview we did together before. We’re both from the similar areas in northern England, same town in fact. But Nick referenced the dark satanic mills of Yorkshire, the massive cotton industry that was there one hundred years ago, and everybody was almost like slaves working for almost nothing… A lot of the old towns are dark, with dark buildings, it’s very oppressive… He finds inspiration for PARADISE LOST through that urban decay and urban darkness… I went for the hills and the forests of Yorkshire, the lakes and the rivers and the waterfalls of Yorkshire… I found inspiration there because it was always raining and snowing and it’s dark and foggy all the time and I found that very inspirational… It’s a bit grit were we’re from but you can see beauty if you’re looking for it, and Nick found inspiration from the buildings, I found mine in nature… I’m not sure where Vinnie and the guys got theirs from… The north of England is a dark but interesting place. It’s not a tourist place; there is not a lot to see… There’s just something about the grip of the north of England… The grip and the grit… It’s harder from the people that live in London… But the whole of the south of England seems like a nicer place to be and the further north you get you’re starting to see more decay… I don’t know, three bands coming from the same area at the same sort of time… it has to be coincidence, ha ha ha…”

Of all continents, at least "touch" of "monomania" heavy metal is Africa. Any idea why things are so?
„Um ... is a good question ... Maybe because it is a bloody big place... I wonder maybe it’s down to something more simple, like electricity ... You won’t hear heavy metal in Africa unless you have electricity, power. That’s money and there’s not a lot of money in Africa. So they are generating their own music with the things they are given... Then generates some sort of following… Without electricity, as silly as it sounds, we’re not a heavy metal band any more, but an acoustic band and we would sound worse probably… If your country doesn’t have power, you’ll hear more folk oriented music which doesn’t rely on power… Things that you created yourself or your forefathers and they’ve passing on to you… In an industrialized country, it is industrialized music... You play with wooden tools, but when you have electricity, someone is that clever enough to turn this into music. In Africa, people would probably think that this think is broken... “The machine that man is holding is broken because it’s sound like shit!” Because they never heard anything mad-like before… So… traditional tools…”

Listen, Aaron, how you feel about silence?
„Silence? Hmm ... I enjoy it! I enjoy it when it needs to be enjoyed… Silence, when you do a press conference is particularly not so interesting... It’s funny cause where I live the basement of my house is mine, that’s my territory: no one goes there… It has anything I need: my computer is there, some of my musical things are there ... my Aston Martins are there, ha, ha, ha ... It is my space ... I don’t sit there in complete silence, but sometimes, when I’m listening to music, the gap between the music is there… it’s just a small gap of silence, but it’s there… It’s almost louder than the music! The music is going on again and you’re doing whatever… But as one song’s end, I stop typing and just… The music starts again but the silence that is there is even more impressive than the music itself… But I put music on the first place because I want to hear music, but those moments of silence really stick out… Fortunately the country side is very near by the place I live so you can sit there without television only just read a book ... Although is not silence in your mind as you’re follow the words and the plots on the page, it’s to read in silence, because it sharpens your focus on what you’re reading… So the silence will amplify what the word in the book is doing… I can’t read when there’s music playing, I’m not a woman; I can’t do more than one thing at once… So, by turning everything off, the silence will amplify the things that I’m reading… So it’s important in that aspect…”