What The Dead Know

Glasgow-based five piece What The Dead Know are set to open the second Music-News.com Underground in Edinburgh gig in May, playing alongside LightGuides, Any Color Black and Suspire. What The Dead Know inject liveliness into a set, not purely through effervescent stage antics and production, but through the expected force of three guitars. Loud and fully-charged, What The Dead Know are fast-paced musicians and are an excitingly energetic act to add to the Music-News.com lineup.

As What The Dead Know prepare to take to the Music-News stage in Maggie's Chambers, Edinburgh on May 28th, I caught up with the band to discuss their music, energetic stage antics and their thoughts on the politics of today's music industry.


Who are WTDK and what’s your story?

Camebull: What the Dead Know are a collective of like-minded individuals who battle against mediocrity, mundane day-to-day routine in search for a better more fruitful existence. Be it music, art, film, any kind of creativity that comes from the most passionate part of ones being. We the band are Camebull on Guitar/Vox, Neil Jarvie - Guitars, Toma – Guitar/Vox, Haigie – Bass, Richey Knight - Drums. Some of us have been working on this project longer than the others and now we are starting to move forward since finding 5 of us who are completely on the same page.

Where does the name 'What The Dead Know’ come from?

Neil: The name was inspired by Stanley Kubricks 'Full Metal Jacket' where Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is standing over a trench of dead Vietcong Soldiers covered in lime and says 'The Dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive' which is ironic giving the situation of war the character found himself in- We kind of use that as a metaphor for day to day living.

Describe your music to those who have yet to hear it.

Camebull: Musically we can go from pretty high octane, energetic alternative rock to soundscapey, mellower songs, sometimes in the same song! Progressive to a degree, or acoustic, always with the melody on top, as we can be an aggressive band, we always found it most important to have the melody right at the front.

Neil: Our music tries to keep an open mind. Although it can probably be stuffed into genre or sub-genre’s by the people who listen to it, it’s not something we as a band do. We simply try and write music that fits in with our mood swings, our life outlooks, our interests, our happiness, and our sadness. I personally derive a lot of influence from both ends of the music scale, from classical and acoustic to punk and hardcore. I don’t really make time in my life for anything in mediocre middle.

Where does your sound come from?

Camebull: Our fingers and our faces.

Toma: Were pretty aggressive on stage, not in a metal screaming sense, more the way we dance nd how we react to the songs.

Camebull: Its brought on from either real life situations we encounter, from watching junkie parents bring up there demon children into the next batch of anti-social misfits or local poverty, to things we see or read about in the media or don't get to read about in the commercial media due to them only reporting things that is deemed 'news worthy'.

Neil: Again, being brought up on both classical and punk music for me really answers that question. What I seem to write comes visually as well. If we’re talking about influences I can get a lot of influences from everything around me, but not just in a lyrical sense but also more as in a musical sense.


Where do you draw influences, in both lyric and music style?

Camebull: Lyrically, we mainly grew up listening to punk bands and styles, political influenced rock. Everything else that was mainstream or popular when we were growing up was all about girls, sex, or going out getting shit faced and not really giving a fuck that the world we live in is a complete riot. It was basically a way to switch off a creative mind, we completely blame major record labels in UK for running creativity in this country into the ground, by only subscribing to stay safe, boring, middle of the road bands that say nothing relevant about the world we live in and churn out album after album of mundane dad rock or teeny bopper non-sense to cash in on generation of kids parented by kids.

Haigie: They ignore nurturing real talent.

Camebull: We all like to go out and not think about serious issues, but there is room for bands who actually want to make a difference and they are not being given their platform. We’re never going to see another Dylan, another Lennon, another Lydon, Cobain, or Edwards, or anything else that could start a revolution through music unless the majors take a chance on a band with something to say.

Richey: In the last 10 years I can’t think of a lyrically relevant new British band that has came out on a major commercial label.

Toma: Musically we don't try and write in any style just what comes out and sounds good to our collective ear, and if it sounds 'What the Dead Know' we'll play it.

Neil: What keeps me influenced and keeps me going is generally the fact that everything is generally getting worse as I get older and I need something to keep me away from that. I don’t feel 'society is at a downfall’ or anything like that, I feel for every generation, the older they get the more alien everything seems to them and the more diluted the younger become in intelligence to them. Although this is not the case I can’t help but feel a complete and utter detachment from everything and this is one way to take my detachment and turn it into something productive.

How do you go about penning lyrics and writing music?

Camebull: Depends really, sometimes I will have some lyrics and if Neil or Toma has a song I will try and put that lyric to their music, but if I find something my self or indeed if Neil or Toma have music and lyrics they will put that down, some times we mix it up to see what works best.

Neil: For me personally this is a difficult process. I generally focus on lyrics and try to develop a feeling rather than a song. I tend to dwell over lyrics a lot, mainly because I think they are far more important in a song than most people do. There’s nothing worse than hearing a good song in the background but when you actually properly listen to it, the words are so mundane and over-used.

Camebull: Lyrically if I have an idea I will try and come away with a line that really sums up my thoughts on the subject and work round it, for instance we have a song called Unfashionable Disaster, which is about when British holiday makers go abroad and they die or if a British solider is killed in combat abroad, its well reported, with pictures, interviews, background, giving an insight into the victims lives and family, but if many people who are of that countries origin are killed they are portrayed a merely a number.

Haigie: Unless of course they are American!

Camebull: Pretty much, there's definitely Anglo-American bias in the media.
The lyric 'Skin Contour in the back of your mind, berate the fascists until you’re right' - referring to how the BBC are meant to be a neutral unbiased network, yet they have this hierarchy of what they believe to be what is deemed credible or acceptable coverage. 'Berate the fascists until you’re right' was aimed at their portrayal of the BNP as the fascists they are, but yet they were happy to put them on television to score some ratings with Question time. We hate the BBC and the BNP equally.

Haigie: They’re fucking hypocrites.

Camebull: Even in Scotland, they had a completely biased documentary about how Buckfast makes people commit violent crimes, it was embarrassing how badly researched and how one sided it was. They didn’t speak to ONE member of the public who actually still drinks it, the only person they spoke to that does was a representative of their distribution company! Worse than that it gave convicted criminals the opportunity to use the drink as an excuse to their actions. Perhaps they should have spent their time and our money on a documentary about how, a poor public education system in Scotland, Anti-social neighbourhoods and parents are breeding a country of young criminals and that it doesn’t matter what they drink, if Buckfast didn’t exist we would still have the same fucking problems. - Camebull

Richey: They just wanted to demonise something to sell their programme.

Toma: I drink Buckfast, so many people I know do, not one of us has ever committed a violent crime, I’ve got naked on it, that’s about as offensive as its got.

Camebull: Anyway If I have a lyric, I will try and build a song around that I feel does it justice.

How much does place, i.e. where you come from and where you write your songs, affect your particular music style?

Camebull: We have moments, like I said which can be lyrically external, but sometimes there are more personal lyrics involved, even subtly. Where I came from and in my childhood, there's not a lot - I had a great childhood, not very rock n' roll to say so but I loved where I grew up. As I got older and started seeing more of the bigger town I was from, surrounding areas and then Glasgow, it’s easy to say you hate it and see the worst in it. I like Glasgow for what it is, maybe not the people that live here but generally as a place there is plenty to do and to see, your going to get idiots everywhere.

As for our style, I love playing in Glasgow because we don't sound like most other bands who just follow that years particular trend, which at the moment seems to be a strong Scottish accent type thing. As much as we are proud Scots, these bands just sound like they are really forcing this accent and it just makes us cringe. Then you have your stereotypical indie wannabe oasis bands who have just came up in different shapes and sizes for the last 10 years. It’s fun playing with all these bands as you can really can come off sounding pretty original in comparison ha-ha. There are bands out there though totally stand out to us above other local bands, like Ocean Fracture, Blue Nova, Daedalian, Hiroshima Blackout, Soundtrack to a blockbuster, really good hard working original bands.

What do you aim to achieve through your music?

Camebull: To end this trend of mediocrity in commercial music and start a movement to develop a more creative artistic forward thinking world, where all art can be expressed freely without worry of censorship, repression or political correctness gone mad!

Neil: I want to be able to create something that I can be truly happy with, and maybe have people who feel the same be able to relate with us. At the moment I find it hard to find meaning in anything but music, literature and art is one of the few things that bring it to me. Maybe I want to achieve meaning.

Are you excited about playing our second Music-News.com Underground night?

Neil: YES! I can’t wait to bleed all over the stage.

Camebull: We’re always excited to gig really, its a strange thing for us, we haven't gigged as regularly as we used to for various reasons, so its always nice. We don't really enjoy doing much else so it should be a good one from us we hope, Edinburgh has been mixed for us in the past so we can never tell how we will go down.

What can fans expect from a live performance from WTDK?

Richard: Bring protective clothing, helmets etc.

Toma: We often invade our audience with some crazy dancing and flying guitars, we are very energetic and excitable bunch on stage.

Camebull: We always see it as our opportunity to truly vent everything about the world that just really fucks us off and we would more than welcome people dancing with us, letting it all out!

What’s next for WTDK after the music-news.com gig?

Camebull: We have a couple more gigs this year booked including The Granary in Leith on the 13th June, Paisley Soho in July on the 18th and headlining Ugly Tree @ Cosmopol Glasgow 31st July with 7 other bands should be fun. Other than that we are just going to be working on some recordings to get them out.