Stephen Murray

This interview first appeared on The Sleeping Shaman on 9 June 2014. It is a warm afternoon. Bright sunlight piles into the Lexington on Pentonville Road through large windows set in two adjacent walls. The pub is quiet, almost dead, save for the jukebox which crunches out some indie rock, presumably for the benefit of the largely untroubled barman. Last night Japanese rock nobility, Boris, headlined the Electric Ballroom and helped to bring Desertfest 2014 to a climactic close. They are now comfortably installed in a corner booth, and though coffee is laid before them, they appear fresh and alert, well-groomed and seemingly unburdened by the pitfalls traditionally associated with rock musicians on the road. Yet some other shadow is disquieting them. “I hate cassette.” The verdict is delivered slowly, unequivocally and in English. Up until now, Atsuo, Takeshi and, theoretically, Wata have had their words recast from their native Japanese to English by an interpreter p...

This interview first appeared on The Sleeping Shaman on 6 March 2014. In summer 2011, two bands from the UK’s south coast, Jovian and Funeral Hag, broke up. Being at a temporary loss, four refugees from these bands decided to jam together. An hour into the session they had written their first song and Sea Bastard, as they were to become known, had formed. Ever since their first gig on Hallowe’en that year lending support to Pagan Altar they have been washing up in many a town to ply their doom. I caught up with them on one of their recent inland excursions. The headline is going to be ‘Sea Bastard Hate Guinea Pigs’. “Yeah, that’s fine,” agrees guitarist and riff-writer Oli ‘Irongiant’ Heart. But he wants to be clear on the point: “I hate the people who like guinea pigs more than the guinea pigs themselves.” A biting wind cuts across the handful of wooden tables which constitute The Unicorn’s beer garden, overlooking the rumbling traffic on London’s Camden Road. We...