Coal Chamber are back, and in a big way with a new album Rivals, and with a huge European/US tour just completed, and an energy and fire that suggests this might not be a one off. Room Thirteen had the privilege to interview powerhouse drummer Mikey Cox in Glasgow earlier in the year, on the UK leg of the tour, in what turned out to be an in depth and exceptionally honest and revealing interview.
R13: We are from Room Thirteen and we are really grateful for your time, we really appreciate it, and thank you for coming to Glasgow to play, we are really excited about the gig.
MC: Yeah so far it has been good out here, yesterday was fucking crazy, and Nottingham was really good, it was packed. After taking so much time off, you don't expect anyone to come, and it's been stronger than it was when we broke up, so we are very grateful. I wouldn't wait twelve years for a band; I wouldn't wait twelve minutes...
R13: Well it is Coal Chamber…(all laugh)...so...
MC: Yeah so... it's good. We kinda look at it as, we are new, we have other records, but we are a totally different band now. We don't hate each other, none of us are strung out on drugs, all that shit we went through, and we need to prove ourselves again.
R13: It's a good attitude to have.....
MC: Yeah....we don't like days off...we have a day off tomorrow...I hate days off, I want to play everyday, you know. So after the day off, we have ten shows in a row, which is good, I want to play all the time; we need to make up for last time.
R13: At Download 2013 you had blood all over your hands. The ferocity with which you played was staggering.
MC: Yeah I wear gloves now...It's like we tour and I just had a kid, so when I’m home, I don't play, I hang out with my kid, so every time I go back on tour I get blisters. So now I wear gloves... But yeah that show was great!
R13: The Coal Chamber sound feels to us, a really great mix of different influences, metal, new wave, goth, and with that characteristic underlying heavy Coal Chamber groove. How would you describe the music Coal Chamber make?
MC: Nasty....My favourite term for it is nasty, just aggressive, has groove to it, and we like to keep the raw nasty feel. If you notice on the records, we don't like to polish them up. A lot of bands like to make the record sound perfect, which is great for them, but you know we have always been a raw band. Not comparing us at all to Rage Against the Machine, but their records are really nasty and emotional, I'm not comparing at all, but you know, I love Rage, I like the sound of their records, it just doesn't sound perfected. That’s how we are live, we try to capture what we do live on the record, so it doesn't sound like two totally different bands. Everything which is on the record is completely us, and you know nothing is edited, you know, it is all of us; we just like to keep the groove. When Meegs and me come up with an idea, we don't sit and go lets write a song like this or like this, we just write and it just happens. Once me and Meegs come up with an idea, we send it to Dez, and Dez on the last record on Rivals, was sending us his vocal ideas on iPhone and texting them to us, because we don't live near each other. So we would get his ideas and we would do our work and then send them back to him, like through the iPhone. So that’s how a lot of ideas start, and then you know Nadja, comes in and does her parts and it kinda just writes itself. We didn't just sit and say, we need to be on the radio when it's not at 100 %. If you get on the radio cool, but we've never been a radio band, everything we've gotten was off touring, so that’s why we tour a lot. We plan on touring a lot, it's not a one record thing that we are doing, which a lot of people have thought we were doing, to cash in. We are not cashing in here, the record cost a lot of fucking money to make and you know if we were only gonna make one record, I wouldn't have done it. I don't think anyone would have. It's too emotional for us and to take all that time off, to just come in for one record, would be stupid. So we are just happy to be back man, and we all get along, we are all in a different space now and it's good.
R13: We sense a really close and passionate connection with your audience when you are playing live. How closely is what you are feeling on stage linked to what you feel coming back from the audience?
MC: Like almost 100%. On stage it is therapy, we play with a lot of energy and you know it's insane up there for me, and a lot of it is from the crowd, minus my personal stuff that I go through in my head, when I play. But we feed off the crowd 100%. If our crowd just isn't there, we'd still do what you'd do on stage, but it's different in your head than if they are going crazy. It's a huge part of why we continued to do this and you know, I get nervous as hell every day to this day. I’ve played probably 10,000 shows and I still get nervous before I go on stage. When the intro's rolling, I freak out and I always say that if I lose that feeling, I'm gonna quit, because that means you don't care anymore. If you get nervous about something that means you care. I get the butterflies and all that stuff whether it's 10 people or 10,000 people. It's just a weird feeling and it's just great, and I think all the fans that come out to see us, is part of my therapy, it keeps me sane. I appreciate it a lot. When I’m not touring, I go crazy, I just build stuff at my house and play with my kid, the crowd is good.
R13: Your third studio album release 'Dark Days' was by far your most heaviest and most aggressive album to date when it came out. The unprecedented edgy and destructive sound coming from what appears to have been a very hard and dark period for the band, creating the greatness that is Dark Days. How does it feel to recreate that sound on stage when the band is in a very different place now?
MC: Well like I said, on stage it is different. On stage everyone goes from happy to angry, it's therapy, so I personally still go through all those emotions, during certain parts of certain songs. You know with Dark Days, we were all in a very crazy place and the entire of the album is fitting for where we were and as far as music goes, they are still songs that we like to play. I love that record, I don't look at it as, 'oh this song from Dark Days, I was going crazy at that point of my life'. I look at it as we wrote some killer music you know. But on stage, we go through all the same emotions, that we did then, it's just we leave it on stage now...back then we didn't leave it on stage, we would come off stage and fight and all that stuff to put it lightly. So now I think the difference is that we all leave it on stage, it's like when you have a job, this is your job, you can’t go to your job with your personal problems and expect to keep your job. So I figure it's the same way on stage, if we took what we do on stage, off stage, we would kill each other, and that’s what we used to do. So to keep the band going we now leave it on stage and it works out good. We come off stage, happy as fuck! We are far to old now to come off stage and fight someone anyway...I’d probably faint.
R13: On some of the videos fans have put up of recent gigs, the visual look of the band on stage looks stunning, with some very atmospheric lighting and back screen films. Was it a conscious choice to create that visual backdrop for the band?
MC: Yeah I mean, we only do the films and stuff in the States, because to ship it out here is so expensive, but we've always been a band that don't need production. It just helps; all the horror movie stuff just goes with the theme of what we do. We wanted to come out after this long and put on...you know there are people that have seen us like fifteen, twenty times, and they've seen the same show over and over, with the same songs, so we wanted to add more, and as the band gets bigger, we can add more stuff to the set. But honestly we will play shows with….. for example, we played Sway the other day, and Dez got them to switch off all the lights, so we played the beginning of Sway with no lights on. The whole club was black, so you know we don't try to rely on production. We are running all over the place on stage, we are very visual, but all that production helps, it makes you look like Iron Maiden or some shit. But yeah tonight’s a good one, we've got some stuff going on with the lights, and they've got that big fucking disco ball out there. But yeah it's just a added thing, that makes it fun for us, makes us feel new, like we are putting on something new and then with the video walls, we can put what ever we fucking want on there, so yeah it's good.
R13: For the new album Rivals, you recorded it at Audio Hammer Studios in Florida with Mark Lewis in the producers chair. He has a formidable track record! What did Mark bring to the record?
MC: Long hair! He eats a lot of chicken, he is a gorgeous man. We told him we wanted to make a nasty record and he made a nasty record. Once he sent us the rough mix, once the music was done, I was so blown away by it. Like to me it was ten times better than I thought it would be, you always have an expectation of how it's going to work out and he just captured the raw, nasty thing, I cant even describe it. But once the mixes came and I heard them, it was almost like I wasn't listening to my own band, you know, I was completely shocked. He's just good, he's great to work with, he's funny as hell, so he obviously has a great track record. I think he is only gonna get bigger, really easy to work with you know. The downside is that you record at Audio Hammer Studios in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is probably better because you’re trying to get work done, but yeah it is really boring. People think making records is so fun, but it's really fucking boring. I mean I was there for a couple of weeks, Meegs was there for like six weeks, he was there for a while by himself, so you know, I’m surprised he's still sitting here and didn't kill himself. The first day there I was catching Frogs and shit.....yeah it's in the middle of nowhere in Florida. There's Frogs, Bears and shit.... yeah it's Jurassic Park. But yeah Mark's awesome, he has I would say a strict way of doing things, but he has a process and once you get into the process, then you know how it goes. But you know I spent on one of the drum fills I was doing forty-five minuets, and he's like do it again, do it again, do it again, like forty-five minuets on a thing, which is only five seconds long. But you know, that’s how you make records and if I were better at my craft, I wouldn't have taken so long. Mark's awesome, he captured the album, and he didn't really come in and change all the songs, which is great. As a lot of producers want to come in and change songs just to change songs, to say they produced it. He came in and left a lot of shit pretty normal, you know he added some really cool stuff, but it was all little stuff. He didn't go, oh this whole song, you know has to be scratched. He is just a great dude to work with and he is gorgeous, looks like Thor!
R13: Some of the tracks that have been previewed from the new album, here in the UK, Rivals, I.O.U Nothing, and Suffer in Silence, sound amazing and really strong. We really like the title track Rivals, full of some great melody and very atmospheric, and lots of heaviness. How did that song come together?
MC: Once again, it is just Meegs and me. Sometimes we start songs by just tapping on the table or beat boxing to each other. A lot of our stuff is up-tempo, faster and we wanted to break it up, and the original guitar line that Meegs did was totally different, than what came out on the record. We just wanted something really dark, and we had the idea and then when we sent it to Dez. He sent back the lyrics because Dez writes very quickly, he has journals of lyrics. When he sent back what he was going to put on it, it totally changed how we were writing the song. It ended up coming out darker, heavier. His lyrics really wrote that song, they moulded it. We really wanted something creepy and spooky, and in the metal world what ever that is, we've always been kind of the darker band. There was no such thing as Nu-Metal when we came out.....so they just said "hey you guys are Nu-Metal”. Well I don't really give a fuck. You can call us polka metal if you want, I really don't care. Dez's lyrics really moulded that song, and this is the first record where Dez's lyrics aren’t about me and Meegs, so that’s good. We were very happy about that, because most of the other records it's pretty much about me and Meegs. But anyway it's kind of a universal song, everyone has rivals and you know the song The Bridges You Burn as well. Everybody in this world has went through those experiences, so it's not about a specific person, it's about the rivals thing. What we get out of it is, we all had to overcome the rivals in our heads to get this band back together, because for years, people were like "would you ever get back in that band". I’d be like "fuck no, never, I wouldn't even take a phone call". Dez will say the same thing and Meegs would say the same thing. So we had to overcome ourselves and our stupidity to think wow we should probably be friends with these guys, since they are a big part of your life. But you know every male is very stubborn in bands and there was then no chance in hell that this band was going to get back together, not one chance. We all overcame it. The biggest opponent in your life is yourself, if you tell yourself you can't do something, then your not going to do it. So that’s kinda where rivals came from.
R13: Dez said in a recent interview that 'When we started off, we were mixing the sounds of... Bauhaus with Motörhead'’. The Bauhaus reference highlights that gothic strand running through Coal Chamber's music and lyrics, and is very evident in the brilliant 'Suffer in Silence' from the new album. What do you feel that gothic element in your music is connecting to in the band?
MC: It's funny when we say shit like that, people are like you guys don't sound like Bauhaus, you guys don't sound like Motörhead. What Dez isn't saying is we took a Bauhaus song and a Motörhead song and made this song; he means, what we listen to carries on in to what we write and we all love a lot of different music. For instance I’ve been listening to the Cure all day, it's just what I grew up with, but I don't want to play a Cure song. I like to play with energy and craziness; so I'm not gonna go play a Cure song. They are one of my favorite bands of all time but were not gonna do that. It's just where we take are influences from, we all like and listen to that kind of music, it's emotional and you know, I like emotional music. Dez dates back further with all the stuff he listens to, sometimes he names bands and I have no fucking idea who that is, and then he'll play a song and I'll be like, oh yeah that song. Dez has a huge Motörhead influence, he's always been that guy and you know we just combine what we do and you get what you get. We don't plan on what we write, it just comes out, so if people like it cool, and if they don't they are not gonna change what we do. It's super emotional for us to be back, and we are just getting started. We are gonna do it the right way this time, we all have other bands that we do, which is good because Coal Chamber is a very emotional band, it's like having a girlfriend, if your around each other too much your gonna stop communicating and it's gonna break down. So Dez doing Devil Driver is a good thing, me doing other projects is a good thing. We are just living by one day at a time, it's almost like rehab for us, just one day at a time. The fact that people are supporting us is amazing, you know everyday I see the ticket counts and I’m just like oh fuck...I didn't expect even ten people to come to these shows, it's just crazy, we are extremely grateful to the fans.
R13: On the next touring leg in the United States, you have a great line up with Fear Factory, Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed and his new project, and Devil You Know with Howard Jones, ex of Killswitch Engage. How did that line up come together, it's pretty awesome!
MC: Yeah! We hand picked all the bands for this tour, it's all friends of ours. Dino (Fear Factory) got us our record deal way back before I was even in Coal Chamber, I joined the band just before we produced the first record, and Dino was the one who got Coal Chamber the record deal. We see Dino all the time, he's such a sweetheart and you know Jamie obviously with Hatebreed and all that shit. So yeah we hand picked the bands, playing with Fear Factory is really cool, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be crazy, absolutely insane! You know the States is a hard market to break through in, especially if you take time off and we've been doing really good, so adding them to the bill just fits and it's cool. I don't have to go in and go "hi my name is Mikey", as I know everyone on the whole tour. So it should be a lot of fun and you know anytime we can help friends out, because you never know one day this band is bigger than you and one day your bigger than them...if your all friends in the business and help each other, it makes it so much easier, because there is competition but it's friendly competition, it's good for the soul.
R13: We would be intrigued to know what music is playing on the Coal Chamber tour bus?
MC: We just have Spotify battles that never end. We've played a lot of the Cure, DMX, Nick Cave. I’ve been playing Roots again by Sepultura, you know I won’t play it for five years, and now I’ve just got it on Spotify all the time. The mix is crazy! There's Dr. Dre, Hooverphonic, it's quite varied. If I just put on the Cure all the time I'd just come here and start crying, so we've got to add some Hip Hop and some of the heavy shit like Pantera comes to mind. We play a ton of heavy music but I can't listen to it 24 hours a day, I need to calm down at some point. I remember this kid in the States, we just got off the tour bus and he was like "what are you playing in there" and I told him DMX and he literally was so pissed off with me and he was like "you guys are listening to rap" . He was so mad, I'm sure he must of went home and burnt all of his Coal Chamber merch, he was so pissed at me, he literally looked disappointed in me. It's not like I listen to Slayer when eating my breakfast. You know people are so protective of Metal. I'm just like, dude I get a lot of my drum beats from Hip Hop and I got a lot of my drum beats from the Cure and stuff, it just sounds heavier in Coal Chamber, but yeah he was so mad at me. I was like "Yeah we love this band!", he didn't even go to the show, he just left, well he can just go listen to Black Veil Brides you know.
Interview by Gareth Allen and Lewis Allen