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Interviews
The Coffinshakers - Rob Coffinshaker
02/09/09 || Daemonomania
If you haven’t done so yet, read former staffer Bobby Peru’s excellent review of the new Coffinshakers album here. Then watch their cool video here. Then stop being gay and accept the fact that they ain’t metal, but damn close. Once you’ve gotten in touch with your inner psychobilly, please do crack a skeletal grin as you get to know main man Mr. Rob Coffinshaker below.
Global Domination: Sum up The Coffinshakers in 8 words or less!
Rob: Hmm… Gothic horror, death, darkness, country…
How long have the band been around? Looking at your discography, it appears to have been a one-man show for a while.
The band was formed in 1996 after I did my first recordings by myself in 1995.
Give us all a brief bio, starting at age 10 and finishing two years ago.
Musical bio: At 10 I hadn’t really started to like music at all, but at 12 I found ZZ Top, still favorites of mine! Then I discovered punk and Venom. At 14 Death Metal came along and Black Metal soon followed. I formed my first bands at that time and got myself some drums. Soon switched to guitar for a metal-band and vocals in a doom-band. At 15-16 I recorded 4 or 5 demos with different bands, and at 16 I recorded the first album I play on. I formed the Coffinshakers in ’95 and now it’s my only band. I’ve never been much of a player, but I think I can write a decent tune when pushed…
I’ve been listening to the new one incessantly. Great, great stuff. Do you feel like this might be the album where you “hit it big”?
Well, it’s the first time I feel that we have started to capture the sound and atmosphere I’ve been looking for all along. I think we managed to write some good songs as well…
You do vocals and guitar these days, and most of the songwriting. Any other album where you covered more of the bases?
No, I did some guitar-solos for the first 7” and the first LP. On the new LP we use a lot of extra instruments that are not included in our usual live-set, so I layed down some autoharp and Moog stuff, and our producer played some great stuff on piano, clavinet and organ.
Sounds like you had a good amount of fun putting the music together too. Who thought of that awesome blues ending for “King of the Night-Time”?
Yeah, sure! We deal with a lot of dark subjects in our music, but we do a lot of songs that people can have a twisted good time with too. “King of the Night-Time” was just one of those things that pop up when you rehearse, don’t remember who thought it up, but maybe Andy.
Speaking of writing, the lyrics put a big old grin on my face every time I hear them. Would you say you think of vampires and hell a little more often than most people?
Hehe… I like those kind of subjects I guess, and I do try to put in a bit of dark humour there as well…
Have you every heard of this guy Billy Currency… no… that’s not it… uh, Jimmy Dollars… nope… oh yeah, Johnny Cash??
It’s a name that often gets mentioned when the Coffinshakers are talked about.
On that note, who would you say your influences are besides, of course, the original Man in Black?
He was the one reason I started playing this kind of music. Other influences where early on Waylon Jennings and Lee Hazlewood, and the new album is very much influenced by Joe Meek. Lyrically I get my influences from 60’s-70’s eurosleaze and old gothic novels.
Alright, one last Johnny Cash question. Maybe. Your top five songs by the coolest guy to ever be disemboweled by an ostrich and then sneak a bag of painkillers into a hospital by packing the drugs in his wound. Mine would be “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”, “I Got Stripes”, “Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog,” and his covers of “Thirteen” and “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”.
Hard… these are the first that come to mind:
“Any Old Wind that Blows”
“Give My Love to Rose”
“I Still Miss Someone”
“Folsom Prison Blues”
“Kate”
Being that this is a metal site, give us a few of your favorite metal bands too.
Also impossible… but Mayhem, Darkthrone, Pentagram, Venom, Bathory, Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Angel, Bulldozer, Death SS, Nifelheim, Vulcano…
If you haven’t told us already, where are you from? Scandinavia is my guess.
You’re right, we are from Sweden.
The video on YouTube is cool as hell. How come the rest of the band didn’t get to be in it? I’ll tell ya, if someone hadn’t pointed me to that video I would have forgotten about you guys despite the great review on our site. Because of things like YouTube, could the dignity of the music video be reclaimed?
Well, Fang lives in another town, so he’s hard to get over here.. But the next video will feature the whole band, we’ve started the pre-production now. I guess YouTube’s a good thing, but the good stuff gets completely drowned in all the shit…
There’s a lot of psychobilly/evil retro bands out there. Ever heard of Tiger Army, for example? You dudes should tour the States with them and Mike Ness. You’d be famous as shit in no time. And I get free tickets.
We’ll go if anyone asks us to… I’m afraid I don’t have very good knowledge of other bands.
What was I saying about other bands? Oh yeah, that there are a lot of them who mix classic country and 50’s stuff with punk and dark lyrics. How are The Coffinshakers superior to all those chumps?
Hmm, lyric-wise, vocal-wise and general style-wise.
And recommend us all a few bands we may not have heard of that are chump-free.
I saw Dungen live recently, great. Switch Opens is a good band that’s just releasing a new album. Hey, I listen mostly to 50 years old stuff, I don’t really know what’s going on in the modern world!
The monologue in the middle of “The Coffinshakers” theme is spiffy indeed. Were you going for the spoken word part in Judas Priest’s “Nightcrawler”, or Vincent Price’s awesome voiceover in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”?
Hehe, it was a last minute thing, so I didn’t have anything else in mind really, I wrote it in 5 minutes in the studio… but, I can certainly see the similarities now!
How would you rate your treated over at Cobra Records? If the answer is not “highly satisfactory” then perhaps I can sell all of my meager possessions and sign you on my yet-to-be record label instead.
They’ve been very kind, we don’t really hear from them a lot. We don’t have a deal for another album yet, though I’m sure they’ll do it if we want to. Any serious offers will of course be taken under consideration!
We’re nearing the end of the interview, and the end of my ideas for questions (clearly). So it about that time to rate the following acts from a one to a ten, and name which type of fish each one would be. For example:
Yngwie Malmsteen: 10. Great white shark, eater of foolish guitarists.
Now you.
Hank Williams (the first): 10. Fish-names in English? That’s tough… I tell you, I can’t really imagine Hank as a fish. Octopus? Nestling his arms into all aspects of contemporary music… eh…
Volbeat: 1. Dead herrings?
Danzig: 8. Electric eel.
Bob Wills: 10. Any fish that plays the fiddle in a western swing act…
Chumbawumba: What?
Why not, Johnny Cash: 10. I really run out of fish..
Will you give me a free t-shirt for all of this great publicity? Same place you sent the CD, size large please.
Sure… Didn’t send the CD personally, though, so you’ll have to get back to me about the address.
Sweet. Okey doke, we’re coming to the close. So, what’s next for The Coffinshakers? What are you guys working on? Tours? Excitement?
Getting by. I guess we’ll start working on new material soon… Maybe tours, if we can manage to get something together. We just decided to go to Stuttgart, Germany for Halloween.
Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks as well for some Grade-A music. Any last words for the metalheads at Global Domination?
Stay dark!
http://www.coffinshakers.com
http://www.myspace.com/coffinshakers
http://www.myspace.com/robcoffinshaker
