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Rock, Flag and Blood Eagle: Conan Are Here to Overwhelm You

Exploring The Worlds Of Wirral Peninsula's Heaviest Band

Tucked away in Northern England on the Wirral Peninsula just over the river from Liverpool, you can find the lair of Jon Davis, lungs and guitar-wielder behind the mighty “caveman battle doom” metal trio Conan. (When they’re not gracing stages at metal clubs and festivals across Europe, shrouded by their pulled-up hoodies and casting shadows like executioners on a wall of amplifiers, that is.)

These days, Jon’s got a lot going for him. The band is celebrating the release of their third album together but first on Napalm Records, Blood Eagle (named for the Viking ritual act of killing an important enemy by splitting them up the spine, breaking open their ribs, pulling their lungs through and sprinkling salt on the wound). He’s also been so prosperous with his new record label, Black Bow Records, and his on-site recording studio, Skyhammer Studio, that he’s quit his day job, and no longer has to “wear a suit and all of that bollocks.” And he’s worked hard to deserve it: In the subterranean, grossly unlucrative world of doom metal, there are lifers and there are those who just play music. Jon Davis has certainly made it clear which type he is.

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We spoke over Skype fairly late at the end of a long day for Jon, but his passion for chatting about all of his projects hid any weariness he may have been feeling as his delightful Scouse chatter countered my clunky American yapping for over an hour about the inspiration behind all three records, his love of retro sword-and-sorcery movies, and what drove Conan into existence in the first place.

Noisey: A few months ago, you posted on Facebook that when you die, you want your ashes to be pressed into a 12” record of Conan’s first album, Horseback Battle Hammer. Is that really going to happen?
Jon Davis: Yep, that’s done now. We had a guy come out to the house and sit down and work out our assets and whatnot. One of the questions they ask is, “When you die, do you want to be cremated or buried?” Just in case these decisions have to be made by the executor of the will and not by [my wife] Holly, if she’s not around. And I said, “Well, can I insist upon, when I die, instead of being cremated, can my ashes be made into a twelve-inch pressing of this album?” And it’s there. It’s all written in stone in my will. Some people get their ashes spread or tossed overboard in a lake or river, so it’s just a variation on that. I might see if Napalm wants to release a limited edition or something. 300 copies.

So just a little bit of your ashes in each one? That’s a great idea.
Yep, that’s right. And then I’ll suffer the ignominy of having myself sold on eBay in three years’ time for twice the price! I just hope it gets listened to, and not just put in a frame on a wall somewhere. That would be the worst thing ever.

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Maybe you could include stern instructions in the liner notes.
Yeah! “It’s gotta be listened to at least once a year, on my birthday. Full volume.”

Yeah, Jon Davis Day.
Yeah, like, a bank holiday off, and make everyone across the country listen to Horseback Battle Hammer at full volume. That’d be ace.

So you’ve got some really young kids, right? How do you explain the sound of Conan to them? How do they feel about it?
Well, sometimes when I’m listening to the new album in the car, they will sing along. But instead of talking about what I’m talking about in the songs, they will, in a child’s gruff voice, just shout the words, “Spaghetti bolognaise!” In their minds, that’s what I’m singing. I just say, “Ah yeah, that’s right. That’s what I’m saying.” My youngest girl, Alice—she’s just turned 4—says, “Is this rock and roll, Daddy?” And I say, “Yeah, this is rock and roll.” And she loves it. I’ve got a stepdaughter, Freya, is nearly 8. She’s not a fan of this sort of music. I don’t think many kids at that age are, really. She likes, I dunno, regular pop music. But she loves the fact that, you know, “Daddy’s in a band,” and she can tell her friends. I remember, maybe 18 months ago, we were in a kids’ play area, and there was a boy who was bothering Alice, who was trying to have a go at this roundabout thing. And Alice was crying, so I had come over to see if everything was okay, and Freya came over to him and said something like, “That’s my daddy. He’s in a rock band.” To these kids we don’t even know! I was like, “Alright, Freya. Stop it, now.”

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Hah! Freya knows what’s up.
Yeah, it’s funny. The kids think it’s a real novelty and they love it. But it’s tough for them when I’m away for a week or two. More so Alice, but she’s a bit younger and doesn’t expect Daddy to be away and it’s harder to explain that to her. But we speak on Skype or Facetime when I’m away, so that kind of lessens the impact of that. But yeah, it’s cool. The kids like it. When I’m home, I’m just Dad. So it doesn’t really impact upon their relationship with me apart from when away. But when I show them magazines, like, “Oh look, there’s Daddy in a magazine,” Freya’s like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe it! Is that really you?” So when they grow up, they’ll be able to say, “Oh, here’s Dad when he was young and he wasn’t sitting there in a wheelchair shaking because he’s not well now, when he was in his prime,” and, “Here’s him playing Roadburn.” I think that will be cool for them when they’re a lot older, but as it stands right now it’s just sort of a novelty. They just think Daddy’s in a rock band. So that’s good enough for me.

When you started the band, what initially gave you the idea to start a band with such primitive, war-like ideals and sounds?
Well, I’ve been in a few bands growing up. When I was in those bands, my main objectives were to sound like—and this sounds really shit, but it was the truth back then—somewhere between Radiohead and Nirvana and Foo Fighters and Green Day and all that. As a kid, that’s what I was into. But a few years later, a few bands had come and gone and we’d gotten progressively more heavy, a little more, like, riff-orientated. I started to listen to bands like Gonga and Slomatics. I was actually going through a divorce, funnily enough. I moved out—bit of a low ebb. And I thought, You know what I can do now? I can do with starting a band up and really focusing on something positive.

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And it just went from there. I thought, well, I’ll move away totally from the sort of stuff we were doing prior, and really focus hard on trying to do something more like, well, Slomatics. I mention them in every interview but it’s the truth. I was really influenced at that time by their album Flooding The Weir. And I thought, How can something so simple sound so cool? It was really a new thing for me, like, listening to that album and getting into fuzz pedals and valve amps. It was almost like a new beginning for me, musically.

What about the lyrics?
In terms of the actual subject matter, the bands I’d been into up until that point had all been writing about personal stuff. Real-life stuff. And it ceased to interest me. Because of this desire to do something positive, I wanted something I could use as a vehicle to sort of escape, mentally, from all the shit that was going on. And it really helped for me to be able to make these things up in my mind, using bits and bobs from movies I’d watched as a kid. It all just sort of happened without really trying. I found it really easy to almost, like, create scenes that never happened in the films I’ve seen and then sing about them. I don’t know. Have you seen Clash of the Titans? The original one?

No, I haven’t.
Ah, okay. That’s the one I grew up with. They’ve done a re-make now, but the initial version of that is when the Kraken comes up to take the princess. When I wrote “Satsumo,” And I thought, I wonder how that scene would have played out if she actually did get killed, and she got dragged to the bottom of the bay? So that song was basically my re-working of that particular scene. And I started think, That sounds cool. And I wondered if I could apply that to the scene in Krull where the enemies come out of the swamp. And the music that plays in the actual film score is called, “Battle In The Swamp.” And we’ve got a song called, “Battle In The Swamp,” which is a re-working of that particular scene. But instead of being these warriors from the future with laser-guns, it’s actually a battle between a minotaur and a unicorn.

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That’s really rad.
It’s funny, we never had this grand plan of releasing it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, maybe in a few years we’ll play Hellfest and Roadburn.” I didn’t even know what Roadburn was at that point! At that point, I didn’t even have any connections to this scene. I didn’t even have a Facebook account. It was just me messing about and I figured, I’ll get these recorded, and that’d be a good laugh because then I could listen to them properly in the car! And that was all it was. And we were sitting there mastering it at 4 a.m. on a Sunday. And I was like, “Wow, that sounds amazing! You know what I’ll do? I’ll actually send this off to a few different record labels.” And we had a few different offers and it just snowballed from there. It was never, ever intended to take off. I just thought I’d do my day job, be a dad, grow old, go to the football match, and all that stuff. But things have turned out differently, fortunately.

I think that makes Conan come across in a really genuine way. You’re making music because you’re really, intensely inspired.
Yeah, exactly. The same vibe still applies to what it was back then. This music is a lot of fun. It’s lots of fun to escape into these songs when we’re playing them. Writing them is ace. Growing up, I used to love writing stories in my English class at school. And I still enjoy writing stories in these songs as much as I did when I was 12 or 13. It must be this sort of escapism thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve got a very nice life. But that hasn’t taken away that desire to write stories and be creative. I just really enjoy and love it. Fortunately I’ve got this band now, which is a really great vehicle for that, because these stories aren’t just for my pleasure, you know? Other people, should they get into the lyrics, can sort of get into it as well. It’s something I never expected to happen, but I don’t know. It’s really good.

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I don’t think “escapism” has to mean escaping from something bad, it just means you’re a daydreamer and you’re always going to be.
Yeah, I am a daydreamer. And even if I’m chatting to someone, half the time, I’m sat there thinking about something or wondering if we could do this with that riff. When I was writing [Blood Eagle], I was terrible in work, and I’m be sitting there having a chat with someone about making someone redundant, and in the back of my mind I’d be thinking, “Oh, I’ve gotta email so and so because we might be able to do that show in June,” or whatever. My mind was on the band all the time. But in terms of the songwriting, one of the nicest things to me is just to sit with my guitar and think of words that go along with it. I wonder what story that could fit into? And the whole story can pan out that way. It almost seems like a childish thing to do, but it’s like, why not just go with it and see where it goes?

Obviously nothing is quite like seeing you guys live, but what’s the best way to listen to a Conan record at home? What’s the ultimate scenario in which a person could hear it and “get” it?
I would say in a large room with some acoustic treatment, for example, someone’s living room with a couple of couches in it would probably do a similar job, and through a stereo of considerable fortitude, and with either very patient neighbors or a detached house where they can’t hear you. It’s important that if you’re going to listen to it, listen to it on decent quality speakers. Or at least speakers that are capable of playing it loud, because we don’t sound very good through a laptop or computer speakers. The way our music is mixed is we don’t master it so it’s really loud in normal settings, but we do master it in such a way that you can turn your volume up quite a way without it becoming scratchy or tinny or unbearable like a lot of music might be. Like, in my car, if you adjust the settings just right you can turn up the stereo full blast and it’s incredibly loud but still not too overpowering for the speakers.

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In the U.S., we don’t have things like huge, centuries-old structures like cathedrals and relics like Stonehenge as a constant reminder of ancient history like there are in England and elsewhere. Anything we deem a “historical monument” is quite young in comparison to most things you find in your part of the world. Do you think that feeling of your country’s ancient history leaks into your music at all?
Yeah, Around here, there’s a lot of Viking history, and a lot of the towns have still kept the original names from when they were named by the Viking settlers back in the, I don’t know, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth century, and we’re influenced by it in such a way that we’ve got a lot of material to draw upon. I’m not an expert on it or anything, but one of the veins that run through our writing is Norse mythology and Viking history, even if it’s just snippets within a song, influenced by medieval warfare or the idea of ancient battles, massive swords, all of those things that would have happened in the past. The track “Sea Lord” was written about an Icelandic king that actually overcame a Danish king, and that was a victory song for him. But yeah, I mean, England and the UK are awash with quite a lot of interesting history. We’ve probably not even touched on 1% of it, but yeah, that sort of thing is what we like. But we wouldn’t want to start writing about factual British history, we’d rather use stuff that actually didn’t happen and write our own stories and use real-world events as a source of factual information. But we’ll never start writing about an actual battle that happened, aside from “Sea Lord.”

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So, instead of historical fiction, you write historical fantasy.
Yeah, exactly. Mythology, sword-and-sorcery movies, science fiction movies. Those are the main things that influence us, but obviously there are real-world equivalents of those that I think, in time, we’ll start to look at a bit more. We had some photographs taken back when Phil joined. We went to a place on the Wirral called Thor’s Rock, which is a really large sandstone rock which has been weathered by time. That’s a really cool place. But in the past, that was an area of religious significance for the Vikings settlers. That was a pretty cool place. There’s loads for us to find out about the Vikings, but we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg, I think.

My favorite thing about listening to Conan is when the intro of a song ends, and it moves into this galloping, angry beat. It makes you feel like you’re marching to ancient battle. How do you manage to capture that feeling?
Well, we imagine that we are within a song. A lot of the time, when I’m writing a song, I’ll take the basic riff, and—take “Gravity Chasm” for example: The galloping part is actually just me trying to play “Children Of The Grave” by Black Sabbath. If you were to deconstruct that riff, it’s a bit like “Gravity Chasm.” That one-note chug for awhile. It’s not as good as that riff because Black Sabbath are the kings, but that’s basically what happened. We were in a practice session and I just started playing that song, messing about. And that’s how “Gravity Chasm” came around. But because of the nature of that riff, it just made me think about the cover of Surrounded By Thieves by High On Fire where you’ve got the guy on horseback and you can’t really see much and everything seems to be in flames. And I just imagined this world and started putting lyrics together for that particular song. You can imagine the cover of Surrounded By Thieves shouting off into the distance. For that particular song, the galloping bit came around because I was trying to sound a bit like Black Sabbath, but then, in the end, it turned into this really cool song describing this mystical, crazy world.

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In “Total Conquest,” the main influence was the movie Conquest. It’s by a guy called Lucio Fulci who has written other horror/zombie-type films. But this particular film, Conquest, is a sword-and-sorcery film with a sci-fi edge to it. That song is written about one of the weapons he’s got in it. He’s got this bow and arrow, and when he runs out of his normal, man-made arrows, he draws down power from the sun and it shoots out these arrows that go in 10 different directions at once. In the song I write, “One arrow, eight deaths.” In other parts I write about the wizened giants’ leader bringing forth the hammers. That song is really just talking about different weapons I can imagine being in that sort of world. It’s almost like I’ve got some sort of mental illness and I just shout about nonsense! But all the nonsense has to do with sword-and-sorcery films and science fiction films.

Speaking of High On Fire, their song “Nemesis” influenced the track on Monnos called “Invincible Throne,” right?
Yeah, exactly. “Invincible throne, tormenting hate.” That album for me is just amazing. That main riff just drives that song. It’s unreal. I just love that era of High On Fire when they really had this sludgy metal sort of vibe going on. When we’re writing songs, we always try to drive songs as hard as that.

Well I think you and [Sleep and High on Fire guitarist] Matt Pike are similar in the sense that you like to invent really fantastical stories. They’re different in that yours are more ancient and his are more like Hunter S. Thompson-in-a-sci-fi-land, but the parallels are there.
You know, when we played with Sleep in 2012, we were going to play in Oslo on the final day and the drive home would have been around 34 hours. The promoter said, “Would you be interested in coming back in May and playing with Sleep?” And I sent the email to Paul and Phil and I was like, “Holy shit. Do you fancy playing with Sleep? And get flown over? And we can stay in a hotel and all that?” We were like, “Fucking hell, of course!” Sorry for swearing. But man, getting to meet Matt Pike. We went into the dressing room and shook hands. I don’t want to hero-worship anyone, but I don’t mind admitting that from the whole High On Fire/Sleep thing, Matt Pike is someone that I completely idolize. It’s just that whole vibe of, I don’t know, singing songs about skeleton kings that are still alive, fights between things that shouldn’t be. That was an amazing time. Getting to share a dressing room and have a beer afterwards. At that point, I used a pedal called a Sonic Titan, which is a distortion pedal made by a friend of mine called David Main from Yorkshire.

Named after the Sleep song?
Yeah. He still makes them. They’re very, very hard to get a hold of but they’re excellent pedals. I had one on my pedal board. We got to chatting after the show and Matt Pike turned to me and said, “What do you tune to?” So I explained that we tune to drop-F. And he said, “Oh, my god. We watched you from the side of the stage and I had to go and have a shit, it was so heavy!” And I was like, “Okay, that is probably the coolest compliment ever!”

Amazing.
There’s this part on [the documentary] Such Hawks, Such Hounds where he describes what “heavy” means to him, and he talks about the guy swinging the axe on the battlefield or something like that. It was like the heavens had opened up and I’m just sitting there and time had stopped and he opened his mouth and said, “You know, when I was listening to you, it was like you sound like a herd of war elephants, ridden by warriors, swinging twenty-foot battle-hammers.” Those were his words! I was just sitting there like, Oh my god, I’ve just had an orgasm. It was probably the coolest moment in my musical life so far. Having someone describe you in that way. It was amazing. And now we’ve had a t-shirt made of exactly that.

And that’s an incredibly apt description, Matt Pike style.
That was just amazing. They played ten days later in Leeds and they put us on the guest list and I brought over David Main, who makes those pedals, and he made Al and Matt both a Sonic Titan each. And Jason Roeder gave Paul his crash symbol, because I guess it had a tiny crack in it or something. You kind of avoid temptation to hero-worship because we’re all just human beings, but it’s still really pleasing to have those sort of experiences.

I think hero-worship is just a natural part of rock and roll. I don’t really like it when people try to downplay it because I think it’s pure magic when someone walks out onstage and your heart beats really fast and you’re like, “Oh my god, there he is—or there she is—in real life!” I don’t really want that idea to go away.
You know, in this world where we’re all taught to do the same thing and there are too many boundaries and barriers, a real human emotion like that is nice to experience from time to time.

And when it’s someone who’s influenced you so much in your own work, I think it’s a natural response. There are probably people who feel that way about you, too.
Well, maybe! I just hope they’re not too unimpressed when I turn up with my glasses on and my potbelly!

Watch the video for Conan's "Fohammer", or just go ahead and stream the entirety of Blood Eagle.

Cat Jones has never ridden a herd of war elephants, but she's willing to try. She's on Twitter. - @catjonessoda