Obituary are headed our way for a run of shows early next year, paying tribute to their 1990 classic album Cause of Death by playing it in full. That album was the catalyst for the future musical direction taken by Obituary and remains amongst the fan favourites today.
Founding member and rhythm guitarist Trevor Peres joins us just before going on stage for a chat about that album, the tour, and the band’s history.
“We were still children when we started in 1984,” he laughed. “I was 14 or 15 years old and barely able to play the guitar (laughs). Donald (Tardy) was just learning to play the drums at the same time and we didn’t really know the direction of what we were gonna be doing. We knew we were heavy metal but to start with our influences were all over the board. Musically at first, we were kind of more thrash metal I guess. Our first couple of albums had thrash written all over them and were just heavier because of the tones and the vocal style. It was darker than your traditional thrash metal but that was a big influence. It took us a while. The song ‘I’m in Pain’ was written in 1985 and I remember thinking man, this is heavy as shit so we took all of the songs before that and threw them in the garbage can (laughs)”.
In the full interview Trevor talks more about the Australian tour, the relevance of Cause of Death 30 years later, the difficulties in reproducing a whole album live, memories of making the album and why it was so crucial to the bands future sound, what makes music timeless, the hole the recent retirement of Slayer will leave in the music world and more.
