Bleeding Fist – Breaking Abroad Is Our Goal (2007)

Bleeding Fist, a hard-hitting trio made up of Etienne Chelleri (guitar/vocals), Simon Dermota (bass) and Alex Destradi (drums), who, as they like to put it themselves, stand for the colors of chaos thrash metal and who pull the ground out from under your feet with their in-your-face extremity and tons of massive brutality, stepped in at the very last moment to open the second day of the 7th MK Red Eye Biker’s festival in Baredi above Izola. The trio already has a studio debut under their belt, “Immortal Hate”, released in 2006. I was pleasantly surprised after the show in Baredi. After half an hour of rattling from these angry young men, the bleeding from my eardrums hadn’t quite stopped when Bleeding Fist frontman Etienne Chelleri walked up to me, and after a short chat we agreed on an interview right then and there. Etienne turned out to be a real commander who knows exactly what he wants to achieve, and he was fascinating with his sparkling mind as he presented the new rising thrash metal star over the Slovenian horizon. In the backstage tent, where just an hour earlier I’d been deeply immersed in an equally interesting, in-depth discussion with the members of Lady’s First (Rockline interview HERE), the in-great-spirits Children Of The Damned kept Etienne and me company at the next table. They’re an Italian Iron Maiden cover band that came to the festival as Paul Di’Anno’s backing band, while Lady’s First had their hands full with a sound check on stage…

RockLine: I have to admit right away that I only found out at the last minute from Bucot (Lady’s First) that we might get to see you live here at this year’s Biker’s festival in Baredi. I heard yesterday…
Etienne: Yeah, everything about this gig happened really fast…

RockLine: You’ve already got quite a bit of experience behind you… First give us some basic facts: when did the band form, what kind of music do you play, and what are your musical influences?
Etienne: We started in 2004, and the idea was to play aggressive, fast music. We’re what we were missing on the Slovenian coast. What didn’t exist on the coastal scene before us, as far as music goes, that’s exactly what we decided to do. In the original lineup we were a trio at first, just like now, and then another guitarist, Matej Latin, joined us and left after we finished recording the album “Immortal Hate” (2006). Before our first album we put out two demos. Right now we’re preparing material for a new album, we’ve actually got half of it written already. We’re slowly heading into the studio, and sometime in the first half of next year we’ll release the new album, and of course we’re looking for a label to go with that.

RockLine: Where does the name Bleeding Fist come from?
Etienne: When you’re looking for a name idea, it usually goes like this: you never find one. What happened was that I had to return a CD I’d borrowed from a buddy. It was the Anthrax record “A Fistfull Of Metal”. On the cover of that album there’s a fist, a face mangled by its blow, and blood. Fist and blood – Bleeding Fist, that’s how it came about.

RockLine: The name strikes me as spot-on, I’d even say ideal, especially after what I experienced at your show here at the festival today.. It brings across that anger, that rage, that pain you try to show people directly…
Etienne: Yeah, yeah, yeah… that’s it! Direct – straight in your face, that’s us.

RockLine: What I heard while you were playing was an extremely brutal version of thrash, and the vocals struck me as screamy, coreish. How close did I get with that description, and how far off was I?
Etienne: I really try not to sound coreish with my vocals. I try to sound as thrash as possible. The band combines influences from thrash, black and death metal, and there’s some garage stuff mixed in too, like Motorhead and early Venom, etc… All of that together, we’ve labeled it “chaos thrash”, and that’s what we play. It’s a genre that combines everything I just listed. Thrash dominates, and everything else is chaos.

RockLine: It’s incredible how these genre labels have run wild overnight, just think of all the variants spinning around the word “core”… time has run me over on that front, I got stuck somewhere deep in the eighties….

Etienne: That core scene really isn’t close to my heart.

RockLine: Slayer, right?
Etienne: Heh, that’s a different song.

RockLine: You played Metal Camp this year! It’s great that you made it there, bravo. Tell me, what was it like playing Metal Camp?
Etienne: The selection was really tough. If I’m not mistaken there were only 7 or 9 Slovenian bands in total, and all the others were mostly German and big names. We played the Talent Forum Stage. The first impression was awesome too, and the crowd… There were more people than I dared to expect at first, and the response was great too. I thought there’d be a handful of people in front of the stage, but it filled up…

RockLine: Did anyone throw pumpkins at you while you played?
Etienne: Oh yeah, yeah… That happened too, it did, ha, ha, ha…

RockLine: Did you catch Motorhead at Metal Camp 2007 as a fan afterwards? Is Lemmy still holding up?
Etienne: Yeah, absolutely. Lemmy will keep going as long as there are cigarettes and booze, no worries about him at all.

RockLine: Tell me, how do you see the thrash metal scene in Slovenia today? Personally I think there are a couple of bands in the genre, but they’re quite different from each other. You’ve got Negligence, reviving the Bay Area sound with polished, wonderfully noodly solos and complexly built harmonies under the thrash riffs, then there’s the trio Fosgen, which is a different story again, and now you guys are showing up…
Etienne: Oh yeah, Negligence are great. Fosgen, as far as I know, play more covers, and compared to both of those bands, we’re even more direct in delivering aggression and outbursts of brutality.

RockLine: A strict emphasis on semitone riffs?
Etienne: Yeah, yeah. And with a garage feel, with what bands like Motorhead, Slayer, Venom and Sodom brought to music… How would I sum it all up? War, war… “positive” war, something like that.

RockLine: Do you have any gigs confirmed for the near future?
Etienne: Yes. First we’re playing the Metal Mania 2007 festival (10.08.2007 – 11.08.2007, ed. note) in Komno, where we’ll open the festival on Friday, 10.08.2007 at 5 p.m., then we’re playing for the fishermen’s festival in Izola, at some club. After that in Koper, I think on 07.09.2007. Those three are definitely confirmed.

RockLine: In general, what kinds of music are the young bands here on the Slovenian coast and its hinterland leaning toward?
Etienne: It’s pretty poor, to be honest. There’s a lot of indie on the coast, say in Izola, and in Koper so-called metalcore is getting more and more popular.

 

RockLine: Very MTV-looking, right?
Etienne: Yeah, yeah. And bands like us aren’t supported here on the coast. So we were forced to organize our own gigs on the coast, where we could then play. Like here, now, at this biker’s festival in Baredi, we managed to pull it off…

RockLine:… I personally was completely surprised and blown away when I heard your onstage terror. I noticed that you also put a lot of attention into building your outward image and take care of it. That’s really important, and I think Slovenes lack it. They can play technically great, but on stage they don’t care if they’re in raggedy tractor clothes. I was also fascinated by your incredible self-confidence and determined performance.
Etienne: Yeah, in Slovenia there are a lot, a lot, a lot of bands that are great players, real polished machines, perfection down to zero, really. But at the same time, there are few bands here in Slovenia that have balls. And that’s very, very important in music. Technique comes with time, but you can’t get balls or buy them somewhere. You’ve got to have them. And that’s really what’s missing, not just in Slovenia, but in the world ranks today. I think Bleeding Fist have those balls.

RockLine: I definitely felt them earlier while you were burning it down…. And how do you get along as a trio, what’s the relationship like? Does everything click between you when you write songs in the studio?
Etienne: Yeah, yeah, everything’s running smoothly, and it’s easier now that there are three of us in the band again. The point is, you’ve got to give the audience something. The audience has to feel it. If the audience feels it, you feel it too, and the other way around. If you pull that off, you’re golden. And that’s what we want to give the audience. The essence is to pour all of our anger and all of this negativity into the music and show it to the people below the stage. They too, when they’re shoving and screaming down there, give that energy back to the band. There’s got to be an exchange of energy between the folks and the band. That has to happen.

RockLine: What do you convey in the lyrics of your songs?
Etienne: Politics doesn’t interest us much, the lyrics are more military, and of course there’s some mysticism and occultism. I’m drawn to the themes that black metal bands pick, or the themes that Slayer pick.

RokcLine: How do you work with people in Slovenia who make their living from the music business?
Etienne: The fact is that there’s no professionalism here. Most of them don’t even answer our emails and our initiatives, they mostly make empty promises, or make promises they then don’t keep, and that has disappointed me a lot so far as far as the Slovenian scene goes. In Slovenia you get the feeling that when you set out to start a band and present it with your music, to do something serious in that direction, everybody starts looking at you sideways. It’s normal that you do it for yourself first and foremost, but you have to present that music, you have to be given the chance to bring it closer to people. Because it’s nice to make something, since music isn’t exactly cheap.

RockLine: People in the music business in Slovenia really don’t know how to appreciate this, which is sad. What about abroad, what are your experiences with other countries and their response to your music?
Etienne: There are some dates in play for gigs abroad, namely we’re talking about shows in the Czech Republic, but that’s not final yet, and we’ve also been invited to Milan for some festival there, and beyond that we don’t know…. We’ll see. But abroad is our goal anyway, because there’s no future for us here in Slovenia. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll get through Slovenia one way or another, but that’s not our goal, we’re not aiming at Slovenia, it’s not enough.

RockLine: That’s nice to hear. It’s the first time I’ve heard someone honest from the heavyweight scene of Slovenian bands say on their own that their goal is breaking through abroad. The other Slovenian bands should really follow that example…
Etienne: That’s it. You’ve got to get out there. But when you say that here, you get the response that you’re a poser and you only want money. Why money, when all we want is to make our own music and that’s it. Though you need money anyway. At the beginning you can’t live off music, that’s for sure. So you’ve got to work at it, otherwise it’s nothing.

RockLine: It’s great that you’ve gone beyond the general Slovenian modesty that reigns in that scene of Slovenian bands.
Etienne: To me, thinking about going abroad seems totally logical. For example, one of those bands is Laibach, hats off to them, really. Then I see Noctiferia, where my buddy Matjaž plays drums… To me they’re the best Slovenian metal band. They’ve done something, in the professional sense too, and they’re aiming “big”, and I truly respect them. Bleeding Fist can take them as a role model, though we’d like even more.

RockLine: If I may hint and speculate a bit, you’ll probably get discovered abroad first, a similar story to Laibach…
Etienne: That’s very likely how it’ll go.

RockLine: Thanks for your time, Etienne, I truly wish Bleeding Fist all the best on your way up! Do you have any closing statement for the end of the interview, anything interesting, any important message?
Etienne: Thanks a lot for this interview, and otherwise see you at Metal Mania, and check out our website www.bleeding-fist.com and I hope we’ll get to work together like this again.