“I was a fan then, and I remember the feeling was like what I’d read in old rock biographies. “It totally had that vibe,” Buckingham agrees. It felt like we had a little bit of the rock’n’roll dream, up until touring America in the early 2000s, when loads of people were turning up at gigs, and there were groupies, there were drugs.” “It’s a pity, because we came in at the tail end of that era, at the end of the nineties. Though their ability to piss-take is often missed, Electric Wizard support rock’s world-changing intent. You’ve let yourselves down, you’ve let rock’n’roll down… ‘You’ve got a naked body, you’ve got blood on it. The title, even though it’s a Sabbath reference, was meant to be a withering English comment said by Alan Partridge, or in On The Buses. “I wanted to design one where you go into a record shop and think: ‘I’ve got to hear this.’ That’s how I approach music – with wonder. “I like the art of the record sleeve,” Oborn argues. Wizard Bloody Wizard’s cover, with its title daubed in blood on a breast-skimming nude female torso, makes a tongue-in-cheek stand against this. What’s wrong with breasts? Why have they become obscene, according to Facebook? It’s bizarre.” “It’s heading towards not being allowed to do anything any more, and not being allowed to think for yourself, when you should be able to.
We’re definitely resisting that!”īuckingham confesses herself “quite paranoid” about the times. “I always think of Amon Düül’s Apocalyptic Dawn, where they talk about the perfect world, where there’s no hate, there’s no love everything’s just grey and boring. “It seems like we’re moving towards a utopian nightmare at the moment,” Oborn says, laughing. ‘All my pleasures are now a crime,’ from Hear My Sirens Scream, is a key lyric in a year of constant moral panics – often with individual good cause, but collectively acting to put the sort of perversity on Wizard HQ’s walls under lock and key. I like the idea that you can use rock’n’roll to become something more than you were born into.” I came up with this fantasy that in 1971 they built a tunnel between Dorset and Detroit! I like the working-class element to that music – that’s similar to Sabbath as well. “You do get nostalgic for the past,” Oborn considers, “and the Detroit sound’s been a big influence on the album. With sludgy yet widescreen doom-rock landmarks such as Dopethrone (2000) in their past, they’re now steeped in classic rock, from Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes and the Alice Cooper Band to the slashing chords of the Stooges’ Raw Power. With Buckingham the only other constant since the original Wizard line-up split in 2003, Poole has been joined by another American, bassist Clayton Burgess in “essentially a new band”, Oborn says. Wizard Bloody Wizard is contrastingly playful, even poppy (circa 1971, if Tony Blackburn could play singles about heroin injection and virgin sacrifice). “The band was up shit creek, or it felt like it. “We were totally depressed,” Oborn recalls. That sort of despair informed Time To Die heavily. The band’ll be finished, and I’ll drive a forklift again…” “Your influence has led to me living like this now,” Oborn admits to her. “I’ve got him past the class system you have here.” I’ve shown him – let’s go do it,” Buckingham says. It’s quite an American attitude, to demand the right to be left alone to do their own thing. Like dune buggies with machine‑guns on,” he smiles, referencing Neil Young’s Charles Manson ode Ambulance Blues. I’ve always liked the romantic idea of living under the radar. “I have been disappointed by a lot of people, and you end up burning bridges along the way. This dead-end house “appeals to me perfectly”, Oborn says. Full-time drummer in Electric Wizard’s ever-evolving line-up since 2014, the grey-bearded Poole also lives up a narrow lane, in a Cornish home with, he says, “similar” decor. Satyr IX Recording Studio, where Wizard Bloody Wizard was recorded, is a regular room with barely enough space for its analogue tape reel and Simon Poole’s drum kit.
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