Stephen Murray

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...