Metal Making Monsters 11/3/13

Image compliments of Paul Brown

Local metal band Making Monsters are going to be appearing at Hammerfest, a metal festival produced by Metal Hammer magazine and Hard Rock Hell fest. This will be the groups’ debut UK Festival performance and will see them play on Saturday the 16^th March. Making Monsters are due to play on the Jägermeister Stage, as they as currently sponsoring the band and have featured in their music video. Paul Monk describes how the band first got together.

“I had loads of riffs and song ideas. I just wanted a band then so I just put it out there to friends and stuff to see who wanted to gig but not mess about because too many bands waste time. Then I came across Brian, so it was guitar and drums and originally I had my cousin Michael Monk on vocals and Dee Mullan on Bass. But Dee decided he didn’t like bass anymore so we got Robert, we changed singers before that, Emma, just came across her in the Battle of the Bands, she’s a brilliant singer and I just asked her if she wanted to do something and jammed. That’s the line-up now.”

From forming to writing, Paul explains that song writing for the band can often come from a solitary riff and builds from there to become a new part of their set list. “Normally it starts with just a riff or some chords and drums, bass line and then the vocals. I have a song written and then we put our own bit to it but now we’re kind of more comfortable and we’ve got a big enough set list. Robert’s starting to write riffs, just everybody’s ideas, normally the song generally comes first then lyrics and vocals after, it’s just improvising. Every song is different, we try and make the next song completely different from the last one.” However, as Robert Arbuckle goes on to say, the group sometimes use the lighter side of things when coming up with new ideas. “Me and Emma, we’ve done a bit of writing together as well, like an acoustic thing on the side, we even put up a track on our Facebook called ‘Fire’. The way we wrote that, I had a riff from before and then Emma put her brilliant lyrics and vocals over it, it was as simple as that. I write a lot on the acoustic first because I don’t have an amp and electrical guitar, so I just platy away on acoustic and come up with ideas and sort of have the picture of what it would sound like as a band in my head. I’d always be thinking of the other instruments and maybe what the vocals could do as well.”

When first forming the band Paul was adamant he wanted dedicated members as he wanted to take his music seriously in order to make a career out of it. With some bumps along the way he thinks he’s found the final line-up for the job. “There’s a while laziness but a lot of bands in Derry but it’s probably the same everywhere, where people think that success comes to you or work comes to you but you have to bring the product to the right people. I think it’s from my previous band No Mean City that I gained that experience. Too many bands are laid back and wait for things to happen, you just need to do it yourself. I’m really determined, I don’t know where I want to be. I want to be a household name, not for popularity, I would like it to be my full time job. It’s a dream career and it’s what I enjoy, obviously I want us to be as big as we can, we’d be more likely to get a career out of it. I think before we kind of knew the weak links because Dee was a guitarist that played a bit of bass but his main instrument was guitar and he just missed playing guitar when he was on Bass. The previous singer just lacked experience but the current singer Emma has come a long way since she started with the band. I think we’re all really determined, I don’t think there’s a weak link now, or that we’ll be changing anything anytime soon. We’re all into the same kind of thing, it’s fun.”

Having not long recorded and released their first single the group simultaneously put out their first music video and are hoping to be following with more. “We just recorded a single ‘Instinct’ and released it with a video so it was kind of two products as once rather than a music video for an old song. We had recorded a brand new song and no-one heard it until the video came out so you were getting a visual and the audio. It’s expensive being in the band but any money we get we put it straight back into the band. We make zero. I don’t really know what’s happening next but I want to do more recording this year if we can afford it. We realize our first EP in the Summer last year, a four track, hopefully towards the end of this year we’ll have another EP, and some day an album.”

“The single is available online at www.makingmonsters.bandcamp.com you’ll come across the single there, or if you search YouTube the video will come up and there’s a link on the video to where you can buy the song or we can be found on facebook at Facebook.com/makingmonstersband.” The group will also be appearing locally in May as part of the much loved and celebrated Jazz Festival. Make sure to catch them there as the plan for the group seems to be to catch the attention of other festival organizers in both Ireland and England.