The most obvious starting point would be the new album, Folkémon.  Are you pleased with how it turned out?
Very pleased - as pleased as we can be I think.  I think it is part of the philosophy of Skyclad that we are always aiming to do the best we can and once we've done one album, we are always looking forward to doing the next.  We're getting ideas together for songs for the next album.  The response has been wonderful from everyone we have talked to, which is always nice because there is nothing worse than doing interviews when people don't like your record.  The help we've gotten from Nuclear Blast has been great and it is great to talk to guys like you over in the States, which is something we've not really done for years.

The last time I talked to you was around the time of Prince of the Poverty Line.
That's a very long time ago, around 5 years or longer.  We were still on Noise back then and I can remember that actually.  Yeah, because we didn't do very much press at the time, so I remember doing The Plague before.

With Folkémon getting a more widespread release, was there any added pressure on you when writing it or was it just business as usual?
Business as usual.  We always do the best we can with the budget that we've been given.  There's always a lot of pressure in the studio because we are working on a limited budget with limited time and I think that is how Skyclad work at their best and most creative.  We normally find, when we are under a bit of pressure, we come out with the best ideas.  I can't imagine Skyclad ever doing a Metallica trick and being in the studio for four years or something - we'd all kill ourselves after that long, or each other at any rate. [laughs]  So we were conscious that we wanted to do the best album, but with the kind of enthusiasm of signing a new record deal.  It's kind of like that excitement on a first date, so it generally helps things along quite a lot.

When you first started Skyclad, did you think you'd still be going just as strong ten years down the road?
I didn't think I'd still be alive in ten years, to be honest. [laughs]  No, we didn't really think about that.  I had been friends with Steve [Ramsey, guitar] and Graeme [English, bass] for quite a long time before we formed the band, I knew them from my old days in my old band Sabbat and I knew they were people I enjoyed working together with.  I'm happy it has turned out like this, but we don't really think that far ahead in Skyclad.  We normally don't think past the next month or the next week, so I don't think we really considered that.  It's great that we have and hopefully we'll have another ten years together.

How would you say the music has evolved over that time?
I think it has evolved quite a lot.  We've always tried to make every album different from the last one.  I think that is very important for a band like Skyclad.  I know a lot of bands like to find a formula and stick with it and that's great for the bands that do, but Skyclad's a constantly mutating kind of band.  We started off very thrashy, not really knowing we wanted to do something in a folky and a traditional direction, but I think it has taken us the last ten years to develop a style, to experiment with that style, to return to the heavy roots a bit.  We've always done every album the way we really wanted to do it.  Fortunately, we've never had a record company or a manager try to tell us what to do and tell us what kind of style we should play - we've done exactly what we felt like doing at the time.  You hear about a lot of bands signed to big major labels and they get all the push and the backing from that, but at the same time they are having to conform all the time to what the record company wants them to do.  That wouldn't work with Skyclad, not at all.

How about the lyrics - how do you view that evolving?
Ummm…  I'd not really thought about that.  I'm sure it must have evolved, because I've evolved as a person.  I like to think that I've matured in some ways and I'm probably the same stupid idiot I always was and even more of an idiot in other ways than I was when I was younger.  My lyrics always reflect the mood of the time, the way I am feeling.  I try and put comments in there that are relevant to what is happening in the world around me at the time when the lyrics are written and also what is happening in my life when they are written.  I've not made a conscious effort to try and do anything special.  One thing I have done, actually - when we started off, I used to write absolutely reams and reams of lyrics, which worked very well with the earlier style of music.  As we progressed, we kind of tried to keep the essence of that heavy style, but actually write songs with choruses that people can sing along with because that tends to work very well live.  So I try to think more now about melody and harmony and actually making the words help the music, so the words and the music work together rather than being a constant battle to find space for one another.

Is there a particular place or atmosphere you like to be in to write or does it just come to you at various times?
What I normally do is I've got a little office in my apartment, very small and compact.  I sit there with some candles lit and normally write late at night, have to get in the mood, have to get relaxed, smoke a bit fat spliff, and just see what comes out.

Can I ask you a bit about what inspired some of the lyrics?
Of course you can, no problem.

“The Great Brain Robbery”
It is about the crime of forever that is going on all around us, every minute of every day, where the normal everyday people like ourselves are being duped and conned by our politicians and the big corporate organizations.  It seems that these organizations are only interested in making money and they are not really thinking about the future of the world or the damage we are doing to the environment and issues such as that.  Most of the people that are around in Great Britain and I'm sure it is the same in the States, as long as they can watch Jerry Springer on TV everyday and eat hamburgers, they think the world is great.  They've been sold this big corporate lie that buying consumer products and owning more possessions will make you happier, so the people work very, very hard to get to buy these things they don't really need.  At the end of the day, our world is dying and in 50 years time, it won't matter if you've got the best car in the world if you've got no gas to put in the tank.

How about “Think Back and Lie of England” - that one seems very pointed.
We've done a lot of rather naughty things over the years.  Not only the English people, who have persecuted the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, but Great Britain has done quite a lot of bad things in places like Africa and India and China.  I'm also sure the British committed a lot of atrocities in America when it was a British colony, because that is the kind of thing that empires tend to do.  I'm very proud to be British, but I'm proud of the good side of Britain:  the nice people, the tolerant, the creative - the positive side of British culture, of which there is a lot.  But I think it is important that every nation admits and remembers the bad things that we've done throughout history so that we can make sure these mistakes don't happen again.  I think it is something only a British person could have written those lyrics; it's a bit of an attack on ourselves.  It's kind of pointing out the faults with British people.  We are living on a very small island and in many ways we carry on the attitude of when it was the Age of Empires and Great Britain ruled half of the world, which we certainly don't anymore.  As I say, the thing I would definitely point out at the end of that is that I'm proud to be British and I think Great Britain is a wonderful place to live and there are a lot of good things happening here and there's a lot of fantastic people.

Do you find that a lot of people try to ignore that side of reality?  Because I know growing up here, they always tended to downplay all the bad things that America has done in its past.
Every nation does it and that song is against any kind of empire-building and intolerance and racism, which is something that we in Skyclad don't agree with at all.  Everybody should learn to get on with one another.  Our planet is tiny, it is miniscule and we're in some obscure part of the galaxy in a universe that is vast, and we argue about, "Hey, I'm from Nottingham and you're from London, I'm gonna beat you up guy,' or 'I believe in this and you believe in that, I hate you,' or 'We've got different colored skin so we won't get on.'  What kind of attitude is that?  I find it very, very crazy, in an age where you can travel around the entire world in a matter of hours, that people still think of themselves as coming from one town or another town or one country or another.  We're all human beings, we all come from the same place and, unfortunately, unless we change the attitudes we're all going to the same place, which will be Hell probably.

Seems like almost everyone has listed “The Disenchanted Forest” as a fave and it is certainly one of mine, too.
I think the music to that track is very different to anything else on the album.  We wanted to have a Skyclad epic - our 70s-style, metal Skyclad epic.  The lyrics tell the story of a young British guy who works on a farm who is cutting down the yearly harvest in the fall.  When he and his brothers finish he work, they crack open a big barrel of ale and they get totally drunk.  The young guy falls asleep and his brothers do and when he wakes up, his brothers are gone and he sees what he imagines to be a dream, which is two armies facing off against one another.  One army is the army of the forest and all dressed in cloaks of leaf, with big green pennants hanging off the shields and spears, and the other army is the army of technology all mounted on bulldozers, carrying chainsaws, with the workman's hardhats on.  Even though it is a fantasy story about an imaginary battle between the forces of the forest and the forces of progress, it's about the real battle that is actually taking place today.  The fight for nature, the fight to preserve the trees, the forest, the lungs of our world basically. 

Last time I talked to you, you seemed to have a very guarded optimism about the future.  How do you feel now in the year 2000?
I think that unless the human race radically changes its direction and outlook in the next few years, it might even be too late already, I don't think there is actually much future for the human race and a lot of other life on this planet.  I'm sure if I could build a time machine in my garage and travel a hundred years into the future, the world I would see there would not be the kind of place where we would want to live, or for our children or their children to live.  I don't see mankind replacing itself with Terminator-like machines or blowing itself up in a nuclear holocaust, but I can see us slowly and miserably drowning in a swamp of our own shit and chemical waste, which is quite a sad way to leave the world really.  Unfortunately, I think our generation will be remembered as the generation that betrayed the human race and the world by shouting, "Jerry!  Jerry!  Jerry!" as we go all the way down to Hell.  So that's not a very positive outlook really, is it? [laughs]  It just seems to me, you don't have to be a genius to realize that you can't go on taking and taking from the planet in the way we are doing.  We've become some kind of ravenous beast that can never be satisfied.  We can't go on doing that without paying a price at the end of the day.  Our presidents and prime ministers, they have the best advisors and best scientists, they know exactly what the score is.  You have all these environmental summits and talks - there was one over on mainland Europe about a month ago.  The British Prime Minister Tony Blair went over there and achieved absolutely nothing and I'm sure all the politicians are the same.  Unfortunately, these people who actually have the power to change anything, are so dependant on the backing and the money they get from the big business corporations, I don't think they actually dare do anything to make matters better.  Because then they will lose the backing, the sponsorship of all the corporations and they won't be able to fight their election campaigns and they'll lose.  At the end of the day, we're all going to lose.

“Helium”
Ooh, let me think back a bit on that one…  It's about a guy in a big city, like New York and he's stood on top of a tower block, threatening to jump off this building.  Of course, all the police gather around and all the people are rubbernecking, trying to get a look at what is happening.  The police negotiator speaks with the guy and he says, 'I'm a songwriter and I could never get my song played on the radio and unless you play my song, I'm going to jump off this building.'  It's about someone who has given up hope and thinks the only way to get noticed is to make a splash.  Quite a strange little song.

“Jumping My Shadow”
That's a song for anyone who has ever been in a relationship with someone who has tried to change them. We all are who we are and I don't think it ever works when one person tries to change the other person in a relationship.  Just as jumping my shadow is something you will never be able to do, so you are never going to be able to really change who and what you are in your heart.  One of those songs about heartbreak and trauma, which there is a lot of in Skyclad lyrics.  I draw a lot of my influences from sadness and the dark side of human nature and in a way it is a therapy for me.  Whenever I feel low about something, I can write it down and share it with other people.  I consider it an honor that people are actually interested in what I've got to say.

Is there a particular song that is perhaps the most personal thing to you?
Practically everything on Vintage Whine.  None of those were written to be used as Skyclad lyrics, because they were my personal therapy from the worst two years, emotionally-speaking anyway, of my life.  I had written all these things down and they just happen to fit very well with the music that the guys were writing at that time.  That was very weird because a lot of that album is very, very personal indeed and actually singing it on the record and doing it live can be quite a weird feeling at times.

"A Well Beside the River"
It is about, if you have a dream, you should really go for it, you should use your talents to their full.   A well beside a river is something that is completely useless - there is no point because you get your water from the river.  Don't waste your life, don't be a well beside a river.  Join the fast-flowing water and live, exist, move fast, that kind of feeling.

“A Stranger in the Garden” 
That is about the first time that Skyclad went to Athens in Greece, played the first time there and we had a very big surprise by how popular we were over there.  The warmth and friendliness of the people and the warmth of the weather, the way the city looked - we had never really been anywhere like that before.  On the night we arrived, I was standing on the balcony of the hotel room, looking out, and I saw the biggest moon I've ever seen in my life - it filled the sky.  We just met so many great people out there, I wrote this strange lyric about it.  It's sort of like being a stranger in the Garden of Eden, like you were just dropped in some magical fairy-tale world.

Can you tell me anything about the Bloodstock festival next May?
We now have a web-site for it, http://www.bloodstock.uk.com  It is going to be on the 28th of May, 2001, in a city in the middle of England called Derby in the Derby Assembly Room and the idea is to do a day of the best British metal and rock music.  The scene over here has died so much in recent years that myself and my friends thought we should do something about it.

So you are directly involved with organizing it?
Myself and my friends have formed a little cooperative called A Must 4 Music and the idea is that we are trying to do our very best to put metal music back where it was here in the UK.  Someone has got to do it because it is really terrible over here, Dan, really bad.  For bands like Skyclad and a lot of other bands that do well in mainland Europe, we just get totally ignored here.  We decided to not sit around on our asses and do something about it.  If no one comes along for the festival, then when everyone turns around in a year's time and says, 'Oh, nothing ever happens in Britain anymore…' then it's their bad luck really.  It's the duty of every British rock and metal fan to actually make the effort to come along to this.  It's the only festival that is going to actually be taking place in the UK, as far as I know, of its type.  We're going to have 18 bands on two stages, at an indoor festival that holds about 3000 I think.  We're planning a record faire as well for collectors, people who like vinyl, merchandise, jewelry, T-shirts, all kinds of things, trying to make it a day out for everyone.  It's on a bank holiday Monday and I think Skyclad will be doing an unplugged show the night before the festival and a lot of groovy things happening on the day of the show.  I'm planning on doing a bit of a reformation of my old band Sabbat, myself and Frazer Craske are thinking about doing that.

Is that going to be kind of a one-time reunion thing?
We're not sure yet.  We're still looking for a guitarist.  We talked with Andy Sneap and he's very busy doing his big producer thing at the moment and I don't think he actually want to play live ever again, to be honest.  I just feel that we owe it to all the younger guys who got into the music of Sabbat in the last ten or twelve years and the band doesn't actually exist, so they've not had a chance to see the band.  We intend to do - if we can find a guitarist, that is, as we've been too busy doing Folkémon interviews [laughs] - we intend to do the Bloodstock festival and then hopefully the Bang Your Head festival in Germany and maybe a few other things.  I don't know whether we'd record an album or anything like that, but it's very early days yet, just me and Frazer the bassplayer got together and thought that would be something we should do.  Not for money, just to get out and play the old stuff again.  He's been working as a printer for the last ten years and he kind of wants to get out there and do it again.  We want to do it the way it should have been in the beginning really, with a bit of fun involved and a nice kind of atmosphere.  Because, as you know if you were a fan of the band, it all went a bit sour towards the end.

That would be great.  I was a huge fan of Sabbat and I still think Dreamweaver is one of the most amazing albums, lyrically, that I've ever heard.
Cool, thank you very much!  We plan to do it the way it should have been done, with a bit more stage show.  Kind of the reason that Frazer and me left was because it wasn't going to go far enough down the pagan, British way that we wanted to do it.  The two other guys in the band wanted to pursue a more Bay Area thrash kind of sound, they wanted to turn into Testament.  Which I mean, Testament are very good at being Testament, and Sabbat didn't really need to be Testament Pt. 2.

Sabbat were so far ahead of their time, esp. if you look at how black metal developed in the 90s - the pagan ideals, the extreme vocals, even the keyboards on songs like "Blood For the Bloodgod."  Would you agree?
I've always tried to do things all through my career - not wanting to sound the slightest bit arrogant, because it's not meant that way - but I look and have a little chuckle to myself when I see the things we did with Sabbat, the things that the two guys from Skyclad, Graeme and Steve, did with heir old bands Satan and Pariah, they were very much ahead of the time.  And then what we've done with Skyclad.  When we started, people laughed - a girl playing fiddle in a metal band.  And now there are German versions of Skyclad, Spanish versions, there are millions of groups now that have got girl band members.  You're not trendy if you haven't got a girl in the band these days.  So maybe, in some way, we've managed to not become really that famous, but to really influence the scene in an underground kind of way, I suppose that is the best compliment you can have.