“I would say it’s different”, declared T, vocalist for British extreme metallers Dragged Into Sunlight, explaining the bands live concert ahead of their first trip to Australia. “You can expect everything heavier than everything else generally but it’s a different experience. It isn’t like when you go to a festival and you see those ten bands that are all long bearded dudes with metal horns and so on interacting with the crowd. You’re not gonna get that. I would say it’s like those art house films but it’s a lot deeper and a lot more meaningful and a lot more thought gone into it. It’s more unique. Either you like it or you don’t like it but either way you will think it’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever seen because when those amps go on and the lights go on and the power comes up you can feel every bone in your body rattling and if you can feel it out front imagine how loud it is on stage”!
Dragged Into Sunlight have never been your usual metal band. They refuse to conform to musical expectations by concealing their identity with balaclava’s and playing live shows in relative darkness with their backs to the crowd. Their identities have remained unknown with T making no apologies for their approach.
“We formed this band ten years ago with those key individuals from a lot of other bands in the U.K”, he explained. “For a start, our first band practice was nine or ten people and we thought then well this isn’t a normal band, what’s everyone gonna do (laughs) and it was more… we didn’t think of instruments. We talked about the concept. We talked about what we wanted to do and slowly that evolved into this mission statement which evolved into basically a berating of the music industry and experiences we’d had over the previous ten years at the expense of record labels. People saying ‘you guys could be huge’ in various bands and leading us on for five or ten years; making music scenes happy; making music to keep management or labels happy, so the ten of us sat in this room in a circle and we said this is our last band let’s do whatever we want. I remember being of the mindset of no-one is gonna like this. No-one is gonna get it, but who cares”.
In the full interview T discusses more on the early days of Dragged Into Sunlight, what they are expecting from Australian crowds, the demands of bringing the full production here, why the band plays with their backs to the crowd and some funny stories that have come from that, new material the band has been working on and he has a special message for Aussie fans.
