As Brit stoner-metal legends Orange Goblin roar back into action with their first new music in six years, singer Ben Ward reflects on longevity, being called the new Motörhead, and how the clarity of quitting the booze fuelled the excellent Science, Not Fiction…
Back in 2001, Ben Ward and the rest of Orange Goblin had all taken jobs they could drop quickly and easily to go on tour. "Delivering furniture, delivering salmon, all sorts."
Following the previous year’s third album The Big Black, the band’s name had blossomed from a deadly one among the British stoner and doom underground to one that could take them much further. Ben recalls it as the only time two musicians – he and Goblin guitarist Joe Hoare – have found turning up at Wembley Arena to be a drag.
“Joe and I worked in the kitchens, making the pre-packed sandwiches to sell in the bars,” the burly singer remembers today. “We actually walked out of that job. Told the guy to shove it. I told him, ‘We'll be back here playing one day.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, everybody says that.’”
Ben laughs as the punchline arrives.
“Two week later, we got offered to go on tour with Alice Cooper and Dio, and we were back at Wembley.”
Twenty-three years on, it’s a story that highlights a few things about Orange Goblin: resilient, at times underestimated, sometimes even under-appreciated, almost always victorious, and well-regarded by heroes and peers. Even Ben himself has been known to be surprised by his band’s way-markers. Celebrating in their dressing room at their 10th birthday bash at the Camden Underworld in 2005, he bellowed to Kerrang! that, “I didn’t think we’d last 10 minutes!”
And yet here we are, a whisker under 30 years in, with a 10th album in the bag. Not only that, but Science, Not Fiction – their first with new bassist Harry Armstrong – is easily the best thing they’ve done in over a decade. Recorded by legendary Sabbath and Judas Priest producer Mike Exeter, in sound it sits very comfortably next to those bands. But, really, the greatness comes from how dominant, how ecstatically recharged they sound on it, even as Ben ponders the possible end of Orange Goblin on the album’s closer, End Of Transmission.
“The lyrics talk you through that almost 30-year career we've had, travelling time and cosmic frequencies and all that. It's kind of an autobiographical song,” says Ben. “So, to end the album with it and leave that question mark – is this the last song we're gonna record? – was kind of the intention. I sincerely hope it's not. But who knows?”
Their first transmission didn’t come with much hope for all this sort of thing. When they initially formed in 1995 as Our Haunted Kingdom, they were “bored teenagers sitting around listening to Black Sabbath and drinking all day”. What scene for this kind of music there was was small but tight-knit, and success for them and other Sabbath-heads like Iron Monkey, Solstice, Electric Wizard, Sally and Acrimony was inversely proportional to how much great music was being made. Anyway, there was a fridge full of beer at the gigs.
“We were really naive,” recalls Ben. “Martyn [Millard, former bassist] had never played bass before, so he picked one up and learned from scratch. I’d never sung before, and didn’t have the confidence to really sing back then. We just thought it was a good excuse for a piss-up.”
This is part of the appeal of the Goblin, completed by drummer Chris Turner. It's what they're about, what they celebrate, what their snorting, cranked mix of classic metal, big grooves, touches of punk fury and double-barrelled shot of wild energy provides the perfect soundtrack for.
Modest as their start (and ambitions) were, they’ve become a keystone band in British metal. Their Time Travelling Blues album from 1998, and 2000’s monstrous follow-up The Big Black, both helped set the tone for the stoner rock underground in which they were put, at the same time as they proved to be so much more than that. Adding punk, psych, touches of country and a sliver of prog over the years, as their palette has grown so has their name.
Of their peers, they were the first to break properly out of the tight-knit UK scene and hit America, where Ben recalls how, on their first trip, nine people spent six weeks sleeping in a 12-seater van, driving 16-hour days through the desert with no air-con, occasionally to find no knowledge they were due to play venues with scorpions running across the floor. They’ve got fans from the expected stoner heroes (Wino, Dave Wyndorf) to legends like Dave Grohl and Guns N’ Roses man Duff McKagan. Recently, they went back to Australia and Japan.
And on it goes. In the absence of Lemmy, they’ve become regarded by some as the natural band to fill the Motörhead void for loud, hard, no-bullshit, high-energy rock.
“You can’t replace them, but it’s flattering that people would say that,” says Ben. “I can see where they’re coming from.”
As much as Science, Not Fiction is a celebration of all things Goblin, there’s one big difference. It’s the first album Ben’s made without a bottle, can or pint glass in his hand.
For years, the giant frontman has appeared as the lumbering hairy, drunken berserker leading the charge, a loveable, bear-sized Labrador full of beer. Early flyers listed the band as ‘Boozer groove’, while later on, a shirt proudly declared, ‘Straight-edge ’til the bar opens’. On The Big Black, the song Alcofuel revelled in squiffy excess, and infamously sozzled actor Oliver Reed got a salute in the thanks. Meanwhile, the hidden track comprised a series of increasingly pissed answering machine messages from the singer. Having spent all day at the darts in Epsom, he called to slur into Martyn’s machine that, “I’m drunk as a fucking lord…”
In March, Ben marked two years sober. Noticing he was getting ill, he’d gone and asked for a medical opinion on what was up. To give the damage some sort of scale, "the doctor told me I had a similar kidney to George Best".
“I was surprised I hadn't had any sort of failure or anything like that," he says. "I was starting to get jaundice around my eyes. My skin was all yellowing and everything. It was not a good look.”
So, Ben quit. Looking back today, he says he’s not going to pretend he didn’t have an enormous amount of fun, but that part of his life is over.
“I got to the stage where it just wasn't beneficial for me, it wasn't beneficial for the people around me. It wasn't beneficial for my business. I was kind of going through bouts of depression, and I'd get aggressive with band members, with people close to me, and just it just wasn't right,” he reflects. “I've done that chapter, and now it's time for a new one. I think anybody that knows me and respects me can understand that decision.”
Ben notes that he’s lucky, and that he’s seen far too many friends in other bands go before their time because of booze and drugs. But he also says he’s not going to become preachy – “everybody's an adult, everybody's entitled to their own opinions, and can make their own decisions, and that's why the rest of the band still enjoy a drink”. The benefits of his new lifestyle are, however, plentiful. As well as getting absolutely shredded, it’s made touring as he approaches his 50th birthday a lot easier when not doing it through a hangover.
“After I got sober, the first tour we did was a week in Germany, and it was amazing. Everyone else was staying up drinking and going to bed at four or five in the morning, I could hear them creeping up to their bunks just as I was getting myself up and going for a nice walk around Berlin and taking in all the sights. I thought, ‘I've been doing this for 25 years, and I've never actually taken the opportunity to go and visit these beautiful countries that I've been fortunate enough to go to.’ It's great to get to do that.”
This refreshed enthusiasm has made its way into Science, Not Fiction. Talking to Ben, he actually looks and sounds like a man attacking life with renewed gusto and even more energy than before. Happily, he's also still the same loveable metal maniac goofball as he ever was.
Put this to him, and he’ll reply that he’s realised how lucky he and his band are to have what they do. As other people get older, he says, they take up golf or get more into football as their thing – “we just get together every weekend and make a racket”. Again, not so different to how things started, and why Orange Goblin remain the band they are.
“I've been in this band over half of my life,” he says, proudly. “It means the world to me, it really does. As you get older, you get more protective of it, you get more sort of attached to it. It's been a long, winding road, our career, but ultimately, it's led us to where we are now, and we find ourselves 30 years in, 10 albums deep, and I wouldn't change anything.”
Some jobs are worth quitting. Clearly, the Goblin is not.
“If you're doing a job for 30 years, you should get better at it,” he laughs. “Otherwise you're in the long wrong line of work!”
Science, Not Fiction is out now via Peaceville
