Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes: More Than Modern Ruin
Wednesday, 18 January 2017
Written by Alec Chillingworth
“Before, I was just an obnoxious, arrogant little cunt. I didn’t have any respect for what I had. I didn’t appreciate what I had.”
That’s Frank Carter. The man who, as frontman of hardcore punk troupe Gallows, landed a million pound record deal and responded with the punishing ‘Grey Britain’. The man who got a tattoo on stage at Reading Festival a decade ago. The man who punched, kicked and swore his way through live shows, displaying scant regard for his own body.
The man who changed.
Carter quit Gallows in 2011 and formed Pure Love, a band that traded in indie-tinged, unashamedly anthemic rock songs and subsequently rubbed a large portion of Gallows’ following the wrong way. “That’s being very kind,” he says. “They fucking hated it.” Pure Love shows weren’t violent, they were celebratory. It was always Carter, though.
“Pure Love gave me an enormous amount of humility and humbled me like nothing else in my life,” he continues, clad in a suave suit, clean-shaven and far from the scraggly, bearded creature he was in the band’s final throes. “I’d gone from selling out 3,000 capacity venues all over the country with Gallows to struggling to sell out a 150 cap room, in London, with Pure Love. It was quite a fucking blow.”
Pure Love’s farewell show at London’s 500 capacity Underworld might have sold out, but Carter’s statement rings true. People just didn’t want what they were selling. The band folded following the release of a debut record, ‘Anthems’, and the digitally released ‘Bunny EP’. As Carter suggests: “[If you’re] doing fucking 100mph in a car, then you’re gonna have a lot of trouble doing a 90-degree turn.”
After Pure Love guttered out, Carter was done with music. He bought a house with his pregnant wife and worked on his other passions: painting and tattooing. But he was still a man synonymous with the best British rock music of the 21st century. ‘Grey Britain’ is one of the greatest hardcore albums the nation has ever produced, and its ringleader couldn’t just wait out the rest of his life in relative suburban comfort.
So, shortly after his daughter was born, Carter called Dean Richardson, the former guitarist of Hertfordshire hardcore band Heights, and started his third outfit: Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes. In 2015, they released a bullish, bluesed-up punk record, ‘Blossom’, which sprinted into the UK charts at #18. They spent a year or so touring the thing, with the shows initially harking back to the adrenaline-fuelled spectacle of Carter’s Gallows days. During the band’s first show, at Sang Bleu tattoo studio in London, he hit his head until it bled.
As things progressed, though, the frontman redefined himself. When he pulled up at Reading again in 2015, he brought his daughter on stage. That’s a far cry from decking people in the front row of a club. “I never thought my daughter would see me play live,” he says. And the tour rolled on. As the momentum swelled, it seemed that there was always a Rattlesnakes show going on. The touring cycle for ‘Blossom’ wound down last summer as Carter hit the floor in his now mandatory floral suit for a debut on the main stage at Reading.
“It was one of the greatest moments of my career and put an end to my, sort of, antics,” Carter says of the show. “More often than not, my shows were always about the circus that I created and less about the music. With Reading, we were able to strike quite a good balance where it wasn’t a complete circus but it was an introduction, to show we can handle bigger stages. Because that’s the future – we want to take our little band and make it the biggest rock band in the world.”
The way Carter talks today is still wrapped in that cocoon of confidence he exhibited when in Gallows, but it’s no longer a charade. He wants to put himself right back where he believes he belongs: “The upper echelons of British rock.” And with the new Rattlesnakes album, ‘Modern Ruin’, set to land, he has already mapped out the next stage of a plan that began with a kick to the listener’s sternum on ‘Blossom’.
“I needed, in the very first instance, an explosion to capture everyone’s attention,” Carter explains. “Then I needed to make a change people could digest. So this new record is the change, but it also has possibly the best hardcore song I’ve ever written. The title track is, without a doubt, my favourite heavy song I’ve ever written. Lyrically and musically, it’s just fucking savage. Life is all about balance and ‘Modern Ruin’ has the best balance. It’s the most authentic version of me. If I could give anyone a record that sums me up, I’d give them ‘Modern Ruin’.”
And, to be fair, he’s pretty much on the money. The Rattlesnakes’ second LP does have a sliding scale that will appeal to those with ears new to hardcore, but its fangs will sink in if you let them. Because it’s a dark record. It’s packing poppier hooks and a clean production job, but its choruses are sinister when you really explore them.
“It’s an accessible record if you’re just looking on the surface,” Carter agrees. “If you’re not willing to open the door, you can still exist with ‘Modern Ruin’ quite happily. If you open the door, you’re fucked. Once you start going in there, there’s a lot more to it. What I wanted to do with ‘Modern Ruin’ was to take the violence and the hidden, insidious nature of the suburbs; all the terror that goes on behind closed doors. You walk down every street and there’s probably a lot of pain and suffering in every house, you just never know. I wanted to take that and put it into the lyrics, but performed in a way that people can understand.”
One of the album’s many highlights, the one-two attack of Jackals and Thunder, serves almost as a follow-up to Paradise from ‘Blossom’ and looks beyond the picket fence at the multitude of political ills affecting the world at large. “A lot of miserable shit had happened in the world and it was just being fucking force-fed to us and the facts were wrong,” Carter says of the tracks’ lyrical spite. “It was just fucking horrible. Thunder’s about the weight of numbers the world is displacing purely for fucking greed and power. It’s so depressing.”
Elsewhere, ‘Modern Ruin’ is a little more light-hearted. Sort of. The wild west chants on Vampires were half-inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and, according to Carter, soundtrack “a stand-off, a duel in the middle of the night, between me and my wife, where she called me an egomaniac".
So ‘Modern Ruin’ is Carter changing before our eyes again. It represents another rebirth of sorts, but it also carries with it an element of surprise. Carter has managed to make his long-term machinations feel to us like a gunshot from the bottom of a swimming pool. And he’s not done yet.
“We wrote ‘Blossom’ in February 2015 and the album was released in August, then we started writing ‘Modern Ruin’ in September,” he explains. “‘Blossom’ was the spearhead for the movement, then ‘Modern Ruin’ is the weight, the driving force to make the kill. What’s important about these records is when bands release their debut, they spend a lot of time and effort trying to define their band, as a sound, in 10 songs. That’s impossible. It’s much more complicated than that. I wanted 24 songs to do that, and that was why we wrote them back-to-back.
“‘Modern Ruin’ and ‘Blossom’ become a cohesive platform for album three, which has always been the intention,” he continues. “When we started this band, I said to Dean: ‘Look, whatever happens, we have to stay friends to get to album three!’ I’ve never released three albums with one band, and I think it’s the most important album you can release as a band. That’s the album that makes or breaks you.”
Carter’s long-termism extends beyond the bounds of the band’s recorded work and into the live arena. A Rattlesnakes show is a sweaty, brutal experience that leaves your knees shaking, your head pounding and your boss sending voicemails asking why you’re not in work the next day. But, as prominent as their rise on the live circuit was in 2015, last year was even kinder. Sold out notices became a regular occurrence and in March they’ll pitch up at KOKO in London for their biggest headline show on these shores to date. Surely this thing’s just going to snowball, out of control, out of Carter’s hands, to the point where the idea of seeing the Rattlesnakes in a sweatbox is but a distant memory, right?
“I come from hardcore punk rock,” says Carter. “It’s not about turning my back on it, but I want my band to play the biggest stages we can purely from a living sense, because playing bigger stages helps me get more money to keep making music for a living. As crass as that sounds, it’s true, and we want to grow – it’s difficult to make a living from 200 cap rooms.
“That being said, there is literally no other feeling like playing a sold-out 200 cap venue to fans who are just devoted to your music. There’s music that’s nice to listen to and then there’s music that means stuff, but then there’s music that means something to you. When you get a fan who feels a true connection to your songs, you can spot them a mile away. They’re the people I single out. I’ll stand on their shoulders and give them the microphone while I climb up something and jump off, because they deserve it more than anyone in the room. We’ll never shy away from small shows. It’s what we live for.”
Right now, Carter seems truly vibrant, possibly even more so than he appeared when coming up with Gallows. This is a man very much aware of the fact that he holds weight in the hardcore community, but he’s a realist. He can craft catchy melodies and he knows that, in order to survive, he’s got to get them out to more people.
And his resurgence comes at a wonderful time for UK rock music. Milk Teeth, Venom Prison, Marmozets, Employed To Serve, Creeper and more are emerging from the underground and making a serious racket. The latter have opened for the Rattlesnakes in the past and will land at the Electric Ballroom in London on the same night that Carter takes the stage at KOKO.
“This is an opportunity for both our bands,” Carter says. “For people to back great British music that we’re gonna send around the world and fucking stick that flag in: ‘Here’s British rock ‘n’ roll…again.’ It never died, it never went anywhere, it’s here, it’s got grit, it’s got darkness, it’s got light, but it’s played with the fucking fury of a soul on fire. The way it should be.”
Even amid this sea of excitement, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes stand out, floral suit or not. There’s an actual, tangible chance for something massive to happen and Carter isn’t going to let it slip through his fingers again.
“I had my thing and I lost it twice,” he says. “Now I understand, more than ever, what music means to me. When you’ve had something you love and you understand the good it can bring to your life, once it’s gone you spend the rest of your life trying to work out how to get it back. For me, I didn’t think I’d have that opportunity, because I didn’t want it. I was like: ‘Fuck music, I’m going to just look after my family.’ That changed when I realised music’s something I need to do, so I’d better just get on with it.”
Yeah, Frank. Get on with it.
'Modern Ruin' is out on January 20.
Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes' Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu March 16 2017 - NORWICH Waterfront Norwich
Fri March 17 2017 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy 2
Sat March 18 2017 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE Riverside
Sun March 19 2017 - GLASGOW Saint Luke's
Tue March 21 2017 - BELFAST Oh Yeah music Centre
Wed March 22 2017 - DUBLIN Academy 2
Fri March 24 2017 - LEEDS Leeds University Stylus
Sat March 25 2017 - BIRMINGHAM Asylum
Sun March 26 2017 - CARDIFF Globe, Cardiff
Mon March 27 2017 - EXETER Phoenix Theatre
Wed March 29 2017 - PORTSMOUTH Wedgewood Rooms
Thu March 30 2017 - LONDON KOKO
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