1. CAN YOU GIVE SOME INFORMATIONABOUT THE BAND’S HISTORY?

• TEFRA formed back in 1996 with myself (Darren Parkinson) on Guitar, second Guitarist Gareth Wilson, Drummer Simon Gratton and Bass Player Jonny Park. Later, in 1997 we recruited Christos Tsotsos a Greek student to come and sing for us. This line up (minus Gareth Wilson, who left during 1997) recorded both the ‘Tefra’ Demo tape, and the ‘Carved In Mind’ Demo CD. After Carved in Mind had been recorded both Simon (Drums) and Jonny (Bass) left the band. They were replaced by my Brother Gavin on Bass, and by temporary drummer Chris ‘The Destroyer’ Mills of True Metallers Conquest of Steel. Permanent Drummer Col Butler later replaced the Destroyer, and thus the current incarnation of TEFRA was born. This line-up recorded the ‘7/10ths to Madness’ EP in 2002 and continues to this day.

• Yeah, the term ‘Epic Power Doom’ has proved problematic ever since we decided to use at as a description of our music. We certainly feel that in parts our music has certain Epic qualities, particularly in the vocals and lyrics, that it is also powerful and that it is certainly Doom. However we appreciate that this term maybe be more appropriate for bands such as Memento Mori and Memory Garden, but at the time it felt right to describe our music as such, and whilst not regretting describing our music in this way, we don’t think it is now as appropriate, particularly for the new material that we are writing.

• Black Sabbath have certainly influenced the way I write music. When I started to learn to play guitar it was Sabbath songs that I started to learn, and certainly in the early days of the band I think the Sabbathisms were pretty obvious. Nowadays I think it’s fair to say that we are still influenced by them, but to a less obvious degree, although having said that you will have to make up your own mind when you hear the new songs! Solstice have also been a big influence, I loved their demos and ‘Lamentations’ is one of my favourite albums. Manilla Road are a band I never really got into, so I think It's fair to say they haven’t influenced us. Other influences are all the obvious Doom bands really, Trouble, Candlemass, Pentagram, The Obsessed, Solitude Aeturnus etc etc, although we are all into other types of music that may influence us more subconsciously. Col (Drums) is into the more atmospheric, experimental side of metal and lots of non-metal stuff, whilst Chris listens to Old Thrash, NWOBHM and other old Rock stuff. Me and Gav have always listened to Death Metal as well, but I don’t think you’ll find too many parts with Death Metal influences!

• Yeah. I think that is definitely a fair statement. The groove parts have always been important in TEFRA, but I think that is becoming less important as time goes on, although there will always be a groove to parts of our music, just don’t expect us to sound like Orange Goblin! Bands like Solstice and Warning have certainly influenced us to some degree, as have older bands like Witchfinder General etc, so the British Doom influence is certainly there, but bands like Pentagram have certainly made a big impact on the way we sound. We like to think that we combine Traditional Doom elements with our own style of song writing that hopefully brings together all of our diverse influences to create what is known as TEFRA!

• Chris was studying in Hull (UK) when we formed the band, and we put up some posters advertising for a singer and he was the first person to answer the ad. Chris came along to practice, had a go at some of our tracks and then blew us away by singing an awesome version of ‘War Pigs’, after that he was definitely in the band! Yeah, it’s good to use Greek words in some of our songs, it gives it a different feel and gives us a bit of an edge. So far we are only using English song titles for the new tracks, but this may change if we find some appropriate Greek words……any suggestions from you or your Greek readers?!

• At the beginning I used to write all the music, take it to practice and let the rest of the band put their touch to it, but nowadays it is much more of a band effort as both me and Gav (Bass) write the basic riffs and they are then developed on in practice, with lots of help from Chris and Col. Col is particularly good at helping with arrangements and organizing the songs in the correct way, and Chris just comes up with the most amazing vocal lines almost as soon as the riff is played to him, how he does it I’ll never know, but I’m glad he does!

• He He He….. hopefully not, but I think we have all had times when we have wondered about our own sanity, which I think is a totally natural thing. To not question ones own existence, or way of perceiving the world is to not be in touch with the essence of humanity. But by questioning and thinking we can sometimes be led down a path that we didn’t realize we were taking at the beginning of the journey, and this may lead to degrees of madness, or at the very least to worrying questions about our ability to continue the journey. But don’t let all this make you think that we are all introverted, depressives who can’t enjoy ourselves, far from it in fact, however if you really want to know about being 7/10ths to Madness, talk to Christos!

• We love the way he sings, and yes it is definitely a part of the trademark TEFRA sound. When recording the 7/10ths…CD, Greg Chandler (Engineer) asked us if we wanted Chris to pronounce his words a bit better, to make his accent less obvious, but we like it the way it is and it wouldn’t sound like Chris if he didn’t have his Greek accent! 

• We used plenty of delay on parts of Chris’ vocals in the studio, and this has given it that echo effect. It just sounded right to add that amount of effect to Chris’ vocals, and yeah I think it does make his vocals more epic, not to mention more distinctive! We were careful not to add too many effects in the studio, as it can then be hard to replicate them in the live setting and also bands often drown their music in effects and it just ends up sounding wimpy and over produced. We wanted a Heavy Metal production with just enough effects to bring out certain parts of the music and I think we achieved this.

• Yeah I think it is important that a singer sings his own lyrics, it makes it much more personal for him/her to then sing them. I think this is certainly true for Chris, as some of his lyrics are quite personal to him, and it wouldn’t sound right if he was to sing somebody else’s words. Apart from that Chris writes excellent lyrics anyway, and I can’t write lyrics for toffee…..I stick to just writing the music!

• I think the bass just sits just right in the mix, not too loud and not too quiet, but I know what you mean about being able to hear the bass. There is nothing worse than hearing an album where you can’t hear what the bass player is playing, and Gav is a good bass player so why not let him be heard! As to having only one guitarist….If it was good enough for Back Sabbath then it’s good enough for us!

• Probably a combination of the both, but with a definite emphasis on the 70’s rock sound. This is mainly because the scale I play the most is just basic blues stuff…..the same scale that Tony Iommi will have used and many other players of that generation. However, my solo sound is definitely developing and is starting to incorporate other styles too, people like Dave Chandler and Wino have definitely influenced my soloing style….nothing fancy, just solid blues-style soloing, with a distinct Metal edge.

• You aren’t the first person to have mentioned this. At the time we wrote the songs, it felt natural to finish them when we did, they felt like complete songs just as they were, we didn’t see the need to make them longer just for the sake of it. Our new tracks however vary much more in length, with some being 3-4 minutes, while others are reaching 6 minutes. It just depends on the song as to how it turns out; some songs need to be longer than others, whilst some sound better left as 3-minute tracks. Check out some of the Pentagram songs….…..they manage to write excellent Doom rock songs that last less than 3 minutes, but also write much longer tracks when the song calls for it.

• We will always endeavor to create songs that have slightly different themes, as it keeps things interesting for both us as players and also for the people listening to the songs. Nobody wants to listen to an album that sounds the same from beginning to end do they? Having said that our new tracks while all having a distinct style of their own, are beginning to sound slower than our old songs, more avant-garde in places and with a bigger emphasis on the DOOM element of our sound. For sure our songs will continue to rock out in places, but I think the days of songs like Anything Less are going to be over pretty soon!

• Yeah I’ve always been into bands such as Paradise Lost, Anathema, My Dying Bride etc, I hadn’t really thought that it had particularly inspired us before, but maybe it has seeped in subconsciously!

• Well we sent them a CD and they offered us a deal, simple as that really! We did spend quite a long time negotiating over terms in the contract and eventually managed to get things changed so that things were in our favour a bit more, but it was all relatively straightforward thankfully. I don’t think the distance matters at all, we are frequently in touch with Mauro the label boss via e-mail, and can get things sorted out no problem. Thunderstorm are an excellent band and they are the reason I sent a copy of 7/10ths…to Northwind in the first place. I believe that they have now left Northwind records and have signed with another label.

• I think in a way maybe the Doom scene as a whole does evolve cut off from Metal in general, but we are certainly involved with the Metal scene as a whole, particularly the Metal scene in West Yorkshire, which is relatively healthy, compared to some areas in the country. There are some great Doom bands in the UK, particularly with rumours of Warning and Solstice getting back together, Unsilence have always been good and we played live with them in Bradford a while back. Newer bands such as Cambian Dawn and The River are also starting to make a name for themselves, so hopefully things will only get better

• It does indeed stand for Birmingham but unfortunately we didn’t record there because it is the birthplace of Heavy Metal, but I think that we definitely had good luck because of it! We recorded in Birmingham because we already knew the studio as I had recorded there previously, and we knew that it was a good studio with a good engineer (Greg Chandler) who would get a good recording for us. Nowadays the Birmingham Metal scene is pretty poor, and there aren’t many bands that I know of that are coming out of the area for such a large city anyway, which is a real shame considering it’s Metal Heritage.

19. I KNOW YOUR DRUMMERCOL ALSO PLAYS WITH A BLACK METAL BAND, AND ALL OF YOU GUYS LISTEN TO STUFFNOT LIMITED TO DOOM METAL. HOW OPEN MINDED ARE TEFRA AND DO YOU INTENDUSING NEW SOUNDS IN THE FUTURE BUT ALWAYS STAYING DOOM?

• I think you pretty much summed up how we see the future for TEFRA’s songs. We will indeed stay DOOM, but will incorporate other ideas from other genres of music as long as it doesn’t water down the original concept of the band. We are all open minded and have plenty of ideas of how to keep TEFRA interesting and musically diverse whilst still retaining the essential Doom Metal heart of the band. We are essentially a Metal band at heart and I would rather die a painful death than see my band turn into a parody of its former self, by becoming an ‘alternative’, ‘rock’ or ‘stoner’ band, simple as that.

• Mp3’s are fine by me. It gives people a bit of a taster of the band for free so they can then come and get the full album off us if they like it enough, it’s just another way of spreading the word of the band, and if more people get into us by listening to MP3’s then that’s fantastic

• Unfortunately we don’t play live that often, particularly at the moment, as we are busy concentrating on writing our album. We usually do a handful of shows a year and the feedback we get is usually positive. Unfortunately Doom Metal isn’t the most popular form of music and it can be difficult to get people to come along to the gigs, after all this isn’t music for the masses and not all metallers want to come and see a band playing slowly for an hour, but turnouts to our gigs are usually pretty good and we are usually pleased with how our gigs go. After releasing the album we will make a concerted effort to play more gigs and spread the word of TEFRA further.

• Oh, you know, rock stardom, naked chicks, drugs that kind of thing! But if we don’t manage to get those things then to play songs that we love to people who love our music will be success in itself, and to hopefully get more people to listen to our music and come to our shows will be even better. Simple dreams for simple people…….!

• Fuck man, that’s a difficult question! If we knew the answer to that then we wouldn’t have so much trouble with thinking of ideas to use as cover artwork! Ok then, maybe something with a hidden meaning and depth, something that isn’t immediately obvious to the person looking at the art. Although I think our music is relatively instant, I think that our new material has a lot more depth to it, and the lyrics in particular have always had lots of deep meanings that only Chris is aware of. So yeah maybe something with extra layers to it, with subconscious meanings and depth of feeling, but yet with an instant kind of attraction that draws people in only for them to later discover that there is more to this piece of art than they originally thought. 

• Cheers for the interview George…I think it’s the longest I’ve done yet, but also one of the more interesting ones too. So thanks for that and good luck with the website. Darren (TEFRA)