Interview with Zabrinski from Issue 8 of Welsh Bands Weekly, spring 2000
The scene: A dingy portacabin being used as a makeshift dressing room, behind the stage at the 1999 Eisteddfod in Anglesey.
The cast: Debs and Emma, interviewers extraordinaire, and their prey, Zabrinski, a young band of immense talent from Carmarthen who play the sort of heavy psychedelia that 19-year-olds just shouldn’t know about. Tystion rapper Gruff Meredith sleeps on a pile of jackets in one corner of the room, oblivious to our presence, his bare feet caked in mud. Big Leaves guitarist Meilir interrupts briefly to scrounge a cigarette.
The atmosphere: All except Gruff are in high spirits, yelling the questions and answers above the din of the band playing on Maes B…
If this were a film and the above were the narrative, the soundtrack would screech to a halt at this point. The din is where our problems lie…
Truth be told, the interview tape is indecipherable apart from a few odd comments: “Burger, you look like Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees.” “Yes, I am the fuzzy-haired member of Zabrinski who tried to eat Debs’ face at last year’s Eisteddfod.” And so on. The only remedy is to ‘phone singer Matthew on our return to London and redo the entire interview.
So, apologies to Burger, Pwyll and the other band members whose input into the interview cannot appear in the finished article; next time you’ll have to shout louder.
I start by asking Matthew about how the band started.
Matthew: “It started off as a kiddie-era type of thing, with me and Burger just fucking around. I used to play drums for a band with Burger, we used to fuck around, we never actually played any gigs, and we were quite shite really. Well, very shite, it was like a Britpop thing. Our singer left and I bought a guitar and decided to write some songs, and Burger said ‘why don’t you play guitar and sing?’ and I decided to do that. From then we just picked friends who were quite good instrumentally and we all just started playing some songs.”
About never practising…
Matthew: “No, we don’t. I’ve got no idea how many times we practised this year. It must be about twice or something like that! We played 20 gigs and practised twice, but that’s part of the fun of it. Although we should practise, because some things go really badly. But when it comes together in gigs it’s really good then, because we’re actually hearing it for the first time as well!”
Remind me who does what…
“Me singing and playing guitar, and I write nearly all of the songs, and Robin as well, who’s my partner in songwriting, and he plays keyboards as well and sings backing vocals. There’s Burger, who fucks around with his guitar, Emyr who plays bass, Jonathon plays drums, and Iwan Morgan is our… actually, I don’t know what he does! He does sampling and production things. He sorts it all out, backing-track wise. Then there’s Pwyll who does all our recording, he doesn’t like playing live so he records everything for us on his computer. So he’s a kind of production/recording bloke and he’s really good.”
About how the band got its name…
“The truth is that Burger was going on about some film called Zabriski Point, which should have been a huge blockbuster in America in the 70s. They spent millions on it and it failed miserably. I liked the name and pronounced it wrong, so it turned out as Zabrinski.”
About the Rugby Club incident, where you only played three songs even though you were headlining…
Matthew laughs. “We were headlining the rugby club in Carmarthen. This all comes back down to the not practising. Unless we get a soundcheck that lasts approximately 50 times longer than the gig itself, we’re absolutely shite. So we decided to get absolutely slaughtered instead. Which bands like Anweledig and Tystion can do very well, but we can’t do it at all so we got totally slaughtered and we played… I don’t even know if it was three songs, it might have been during the second… and everybody just went mad. Matthew from Texas Radio Band brought on his acoustic guitar, which was meant to be an interlude in the middle where we’d do some acoustic songs, and he just decided to stamp on it and that just let loose and we nearly got beat up by some townies! We got away safely but it was pretty scary. It was a good laugh though, the best gig I’ve ever played!”
About the band’s influences…
“To tell you the truth we can’t really put one thing on it. I know that would be quite a clichéd thing to say, but… it all basically stems from me picking off what everyone else in the band get their influences from. Robin’s got a totally different taste from the rest of us, and everybody picks up their own influences and puts it together. All songs are done by one tiny little idea or a few tiny ideas. There’s no sort of ‘these are the chords, let’s play it’. It’s all bollocks, we just fuck around and see what happens. Some of it’s done just by turning up and getting fucked! We really don’t know what happens sometimes – sometimes we just end up with a song. Some people don’t like them but… a lot of people want the rock, catchy four chord songs, and it’s quite a popular thing that you either hate us or love us!”
About never knowing your own lyrics…
Matthew guffaws. “I never actually get round to writing any lyrics because… I don’t know! Whenever we do practise or turn up for a gig, I get a positive melody in my head within about three seconds of a song being written, so that melody’s stuck and I can’t get rid of that and it’s always there. So I just start making anything up, and it changes from gig to gig, and the lyrics are so shit sometimes, they can be the most ridiculously indecipherable rubbish ever!”
What were you singing about at the Eisteddfod?
“We had to translate our lyrics from English to Welsh, which can be a bad one because we’re not very good at writing lyrics in Welsh; they always end up like the same words, such as ‘hapus’, ‘haf’ and stuff like that! So I decided just to sing gobbledegook and say it was Welsh, and if they accused us of singing in English just say ‘no no no, we sang in Welsh! Give us the money!’ I had one bloke come up to me in a gig the other day – after we played – and he said “I really liked your set, but 2Unlimited have got more fucking lyrics than you have!” I quite liked that, it means we’re quite unique! But no, I’m not very good with lyrics!”
Not very good for people wanting to sing along…
“No, but as long as there’s a melody there… We’ve got one song, Melody Made, which was on Garej a week or two ago, and it’s got no lyrics in it, it’s just oohs, lalalas, stuff like that. Everybody knows the tune where we come from, and they could all sing along but without needing any words.”
About starting your own record label…
“Yeah, that’s being done at the moment. We all record the stuff anyway, and we haven’t released it as in thousands. We did a few hundred tapes during the Eisteddfod, we got rid of all of them. We didn’t actually sell them all, we just gave a lot of them away. Iwan’s got his own record label, and we’re going to do a mini album or hopefully an album if we’ve got enough money, in February. We’ve got quite a lot of new songs being done at the moment and we want to get them down. And Owain at Ankst is going to put some stuff out for us as well.”
About telling people to get off the bypass with an amplifier…
“We’ve moved from that house now. It overlooked the bypass. So we started a sort of relationship with the bypass watchmen who had to stand and watch the bypass 24 hours a day. So we used to put an amplifier in the top window which was about 300 yards from the bypass, and start talking and singing Christmas carols and stuff to the night watchmen. And they were all dancing and singing along with us. And now and again, if they couldn’t get trespassers off the bypass, they’d do signals to us at the window so we’d scream through the microphone, ‘Go on, fuck off! Get off the bypass!’ and they’d all scuttle off on their bikes as soon as they could. We’d tell them that they’d be shot within 30 seconds if they didn’t get off! It was the best fun I’ve had in ages!”
About the white Rastafarian…
Matthew giggles. “He’s a speed addict. He’s completely insane, he’s lost it completely. He wears a rasta hat and he’s 80 years old! We found him outside our flat just wearing a pair of green Y-fronts, and he had this big Moses stick with him! His name is Jules, and we just started shouting at him: “Jules, this is the voice of God! You’re being persecuted for your crimes against society!” And he really did think it was God! And the whole street was watching. And he was going to commit suicide off the wall outside our flat! Because he thought it was the end of his life! He was going to do it, he was going to jump! We woke up one night and found his stick at the top of our stairs, and we haven’t seen him since! A very scary story!”
About Gorky’s calling Burger ‘Toby Mangle’…
“Burger started going to Gorkys’ gigs when he was much younger. He was about 11 or 12 getting pissed, and everyone else was 18. We went to school with Gorky’s and Euros used to call Burger ‘Toby Mangle’. All of them used to call him it. And it ended up that at every Gorky’s gig, they’d dedicate every song to Toby Mangle! And that’s the only way they know him now, they don’t know his name, only as Toby Mangle!”
And finally…
“I’d like to say ‘sorry’ on behalf of Burger. We went to a Maharishi and Anweledig gig in Carmarthen about two weeks ago, and Burger started a fight with Maharishi’s singer. We don’t particularly like Maharishi; in fact, we don’t particularly like many Welsh bands. Burger caused quite a big fight, between Ceri Anweledig, a few friends, Burger and the Maharishi people… so I want to apologise for that! We’re weak people. We don’t want fighting! We can’t beat anyone up! And they all look much harder than us anyway! But sorry! If you don’t like us, please don’t beat us up! Beat Burger up, not us!”