Lawnmower Deth are scheduled to make an appearance at this year’s Uprising Festival at De Montfort Hall on the 27th May. A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to have a quick chat with frontman Qualcast Mutilator about their appearance at the festival and also their recently announced appearance at SophieFest.
You’re playing Uprising in just a few days now. Are you looking forward to it?
Is that all it is?! Yeah, we are really looking forward to it. We saw it happen last year and it looked good fun. Some mates of ours had done it, and we sort of knew what the score was down there. When it came around this time, and they asked us to do it… Half of us had seen Motorhead at De Montfort Hall god knows how many years ago and we were up for doing it just for that reason alone, really. We always work on the basis that we don’t do many shows a year and we want them to be tick-box shows, and De Montfort pretty much does that. Why would you not do it?! However, long story short we are really looking forward to it.
I think Paddy was there last year for Uprising, and the others might have been there more recently than me, but I’m presuming it’s still the same as it was all those years ago.
As well as this, you’re doing SophieFest in Manchester this year as well.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it came out last week that we were going to do that. I mean it’s fairly well documented, we’ve got quite a bit of history with the Foundation these days, so we’d done quite a lot together over the years. We did a big thing with them about 3 or 4 years ago that culminated in the Christmas show. Even in that interim period, we’ve still been involved with it. When Earache did the reissues, we decided to have the royalties from that sent over to the Foundation as it made more sense to do that than have us trying to divvy it up between five of us.
So yeah we’ve had a long history with them, and the approach only came about a few weeks ago actually, asking if we’d do the show in Manchester. [Evil] Scarecrow were already on board and given it was around that time of year we figured it worth doing the Christmas show there as well. It all fell into place after that actually. It’ll be our first time in Manchester for a long time actually! I think it was ’93 since we were last there, so it’s long overdue.
On a personal note, it’s very easy to get there for me as I’m just round the corner! And even better it’s for SOPHIE as well, so I think it’s going to be a really good do. There’s a strong lineup, and it’s a nice club, so what’s not to like!
For anyone who’s never seen you before, what would you say makes a ‘Lawnmower Deth’ show?
I think they should count themselves blessed, shouldn’t they?! Why come and see us? Come and watch some overweight old bald men still living half a dream!
We’ve got this habit, and we really like this habit, of being the sore thumb band. We’ve always been good at that. If you go back to the late 80’s, we were amongst the forerunners of the thrash scene. That’s where we grew up with bands like Sabbat, Xentrix and Acid Reign for example. What happened then, and what happens even more so now, is that we get put on bills that other bands wouldn’t get.
You know your typical thrash band will get like a Bloodstock or an Uprising or something similar to that. We can play those shows, and we really enjoy those shows. But at the same time, we can be on a punk bill or a much more mainstream bill, and we seem to be able to step around these little islands per se. It’s a great place to be, and it means we get offered some really interesting stuff.
So yeah, come and see us if you want to see the big fat sore thumb. We play what we play; we have a lot of fun, people in the room are going to have a lot of fun, and it ends up being one big party for however long we are playing. We normally don’t know what we are doing, and stuff gets made up 30 seconds before we go on! Other than it, it’s the audience reacting to us and us reacting to the audience. Sometimes it’s a car crash, other times it’s not.
And finally, describe yourself and then the band in 3 words
Oh dear god…
Erm, for me ‘Should know better’. And you could probably use the same for the band, to be honest!
Yeah, ‘should know better’.
Uprising will be held at De Montfort Hall, Leicester on 27th May 2017. Keep up to date with the latest info on Uprising’s official website at: http://www.uprisingleicester.com
