Obituary is a well-known old-school death metal band from Tampa, Florida. They started in the early ‘80’s and along with some of names such as Death, Morbid Angel, Autopsy and Cannibal Corpse the set the tunes of what should become Death metal as we know it today. They are at the moment writing a new album and are soon to go on a tour around Europe. I was thrilled with excitement when I was offered to make a phone interview the lead singer, John Tardy, as I have been a huge fan for years. Sadly, the interview started with some trouble with the connection, which made the beginning of the interview a bit stressful.

Metal Revolution: Hi again.. So, I’m just gonna start right away…
John Tardy: OK, no problem.

Metal Revolution: You started playing back in 1984 under the name Executioner. Were you just some guys getting together to play metal and drink beer, or did aim to be as successful as you are today?
John Tardy: (Laughing) Well we weren’t even old enough to drink beer. We were actually still teenagers back then, you know, here you can’t even drink… Not saying that we wouldn’t, but yeah we were pretty young when we started back then, we were still in high school, back then Terry didn’t even have a guitar, Donald didn’t have drums, so we had to go find somebody’s guitar to borrow and some place that had a drum set, just to kinda you know, make noise as best as we could, so you know, it was definitely for the love of it at the time for sure.

Metal Revolution: So you didn’t aim to be as successful as you are today?
John tardy: I don’t know, I mean… I didn’t expect to be doing this for so long, so that was definitely a surprise.

Metal Revolution: Who were your idols and musical influences back then?
John Tardy: I think the biggest reason why we even got started was right in our neighborhood. You know, when Donald and I just moved up to Tampa from Miami we moved in, Trevor lived a few houses down, so he was one of the first people we met. And then we’d be like riding bikes or walking down the street, and the guys from Nasty Savage lived in the neighborhood. And we would see them jamming in their garage. And same with the guys from Sabotage, we kinda started meeting those guys who were all getting their demo tapes and stuff going like that, so definitely sabotage and nasty savage were the two main reasons what started us playing as a band, that’s what got us going. Early on when we started hearing early Frost and Venom, that’s really what opened our eyes into the direction we wanted to go, we just kinda instantly wanted to be as heavy as we could be, so those early bands and of course Slayer kinda things, started to get in to that and so.

Metal Revolution: So how were your first gigs? And what about the first fans?
John Tardy: The first gigs were terrible obviously. We weren’t one of those bands that went out trying to look for gigs or trying to play gigs, mostly jamming in our garage. We did get a show with Nasty savage at one time at some dirt-bar, we showed up, we’re sitting out there, our parents had to drive us to the place, and we’re pulling our stuff out of the trunk, and the owner comes out, takes one look at us, and goes “you guys can’t come in here and play” so we had to load the stuff back up and leave. (Laughing) The early gigs were silly, we were young and just excited to get there and just make noise, but they were cool, ‘cause at the same time it was happening and we were playing shows with Massacre and we kinda put a lot of effort into finding a place to play and do these gigs. Early on it was kind of fun to look at back then, Terry and Billy and them and Massacre were friends of ours when we were playing shows, and we played with Morbid Angel at one point in some Airplane Hangar, so we kind of found places to play here and there, and we really enjoyed it, which is was kinda what made us moving along.

Metal Revolution: In the late nineties you guys split up, but then you got back together in 2003. Why, and did it have any greater importance to the band, that you had had this break from one another?
John Tardy: There’s been a few times in our career where we’ve taken some time of, I don’t know, they were certainly not planned to be that long. A couple of times we did a lot of tours and had a new album coming out, it was time to take a step back, you really can’t come out with an album once a year and tour 12 months a year, it’ll wear you out. You’re a band but you gotta build some kind of demand from yourself. So there was times like, Back From The Dead had several years in between, but Frozen in Time was really the one, I think it was like seven years in between albums when Frozen in Time came out, that was definitely one of the times, where I was thinking to myself when we started writing and jamming, I hadn’t sung one word of anything in seven years, all of the other guys had kept busy with music, and I didn’t do anything musically, so I got a good long rest there for that amount of time, so I was careful coming back to them. But I was even kind of concerned, I mean what am I gonna sound like after seven years? Am I gonna sound different, is it gonna be weird? It was cool by the time we got back to the studio and started recording, it was good to feel that the Obituary sound came back to us and that was certainly a fun record to do.

Metal Revolution: You've been playing old school death metal for over 20 years and you still produce music and play tons of live shows. Where does all this inspiration and passion come from?
John Tardy: (Laughing) Wow. You know, I guess, as cheesy as it might sound, we still have fun with what we’re doing. Our new albums, new music kind of keeps us going and makes us excited to play it. Darkest Day, our last album, and we were playing like 6-7 songs off that album, which a lot of bands don’t do. A lot of bands come out with a new album, and even their fans may not have heard their new stuff when they’re on tour, and a lot of people are always screaming they wanna hear your old stuff. But when that album came out we were playing so many songs off it, it seemed to go really well, the fans were digging it and it sounded really good and heavy live so that was a lot of fun for us. The new music re-kick starts it and it’s really fun to play some of the new instead of the old songs you’ve been playing for years and years. I also do read a lot of fan email, and you do get a lot of encouraging emails, and people come out and say that they saw you, and you sounded better than ever kinda stuff and it really does make a difference. Not to sound a little, whatever, but those fan emails are good to get, when you get those good ones from people sitting around. And you play shows, especially in Tampa, and you see guys come out that have come out to see you from the early ’80s and early ‘90s. it’s good to see that also, and all those little things add up and keep us going.

Metal Revolution: In 2007 you changed from Roadrunner Records to Candlelight Records. How was your work with Candlelight and has it had any importance to you as a band?
John Tardy: Well, gee…… If it was up to us, we’d probably just be with the same record label all the time. Just like our music, me, Donald and Trevor, we don’t change much on how we do things, we’re kinda stuck in the way we do things, but with Roadrunner we kinda felt like they kinda run the game and it got so big and started paying attention to other bands, and it didn’t have the time or resources for us. And that’s fine, whatever, we’ll go some place else. Candlelight was one of the labels we looked at at the time, and they were willing to sign the agreement that we wanted signed, we kinda hung on to what we wanted and they just said yes to it. In that terms they were good for us, but fact is that they are not a very big record label, and there were lots of things they were supposed to be doing that they wound up not doing. In the long term there were a few of those albums, where they didn’t press that many copies, it was like, the album would come out, and all those copies would be gone, and when that happens it takes another month to get them out on the shelves, you know, you’re just spinning your wheels at what you’re doing. You know, at the end of the day, I don’t have any hard feelings towards Candlelight, whatever happened, happened, but at the end of the day, we just don’t feel like they did enough for us, so we’ve been kicking things around here, we have a couple of albums where we’re really dying to do the albums ourselves, but just don’t know if we have the time and resources to make that happen and the guys from Century Media actually came to Florida and visited us, and when we were on that last European tour they invited us over to their office on one of our off days and we hung out with them there.. They are really a bunch of great guys, they really are into what they do, they really do like and care for their bands and do everything they can for them so Century Media is gonna be a really good possibility for the next album of ours, you know, for them to maybe do that.. So.

Metal Revolution: You are currently writing a follow-up to the Darkest Day album. will there be any changes in your style or sound or will you stick to the old-school ways?
John Tardy: (Laughing) We haven’t changed in 25 years, so I wouldn’t expect country music to start coming out of us. (Laughing)

Metal Revolution: No, but some would say that you changed your style... (Laughing)
John Tardy: Yeah, you know, we took a few months off for the writing purposes and we just wound up doing more fishing and boating and stuff, than the writing we were supposed to do so the album we originally planned on, we really haven’t done by now. It isn’t anywhere near done. (Laughing) so we still have a lot of work to do on it. We did manage to get a whole bunch done and I know we’ve got like tree songs, you know, the first tree songs we finished are just absolutely awesome, I mean, they are just heavy and so cool, I’m really thrilled with the songs we’ve got. We’ve got most of the songs general ideas in place, but we do still have a lot of work to do. So now we’re gonna be gone in September, we might be in central America in October, or actually you know, in September and maybe in the beginning of November and at the end of November and the 3. December we’re gonna be around Europe again, so trying to get the album done before the end of the year is just basically not gonna happen, which we’re ok with, we’re really not in any hurry to do it, it’s not like we’re sitting around saying “oh my god, we didn’t get the album done”, it doesn’t really matter to us, it gets done when it gets done. After we get back from Europe and take a small break from all the touring, I’m sure we’re gonna get back out here and start writing again and hopefully sometime, maybe around festival season, we can have that album finished up and think about some proper release date.

Metal Revolution: You are known to be pioneers of death metal along with bands such as Possessed, Death and Autopsy. Can you tell me what was it like being a part of the development of the death metal scene?
John Tardy: It’s really cool to look back nowadays, at the time it wasn’t certainly anything we thought about. You know, nowadays you look back at everything you’ve kinda gone through, and especially the Florida bands around here, you know, Deicide, Morbid Angel, Death are all from the same area here and we all kinda started at the same time. It was good timing for a band like us to come out there, because it was kinda new, it was almost like this new kinda breed of metal that was coming out and it’s really neat at this time to look back and to see bands like Morbid Angel still kinda doing what they do. It’s good to see. Kinda proud in a way to see that everybody’s still going at it and having pretty good success. Some of those bands are huge, you know, not like Slipknot, but we’re doing pretty good, our tours are better than ever, album sales aren’t quite what they used to but neither are anybody’s with the way that goes, but we can gage in how our crowds are when we’re doing live shows and stuff and that has been great. So I can say that it was a cool time to be a part of and it’s cool to see its still kinda going.

Metal Revolution: A sort of arrogance about metal and what's "true" to listen to has developed over the years.  What do you think of the newer subgenres in the scene? Such as deathcore, metalcore, e.g. which is shunned by the self-proclaimed death metal elitists?
John Tardy: Wow. That’s a little bit much for me and my caveman-ways. You know, over the years it just seems that every band that kinda comes out tries to throw a different label on themselves and the type of music that they make. I’ve really just gotten away from thinking about all of it and if it’s heavy and it’s metal then it’s metal, some people are heavier, but it gets to be a little bit much for me, I’m usually not the person who’s out there trying to find the newest release by everybody and listening to it, I’m usually always a few years behind by the time I get things, that’s just the way I go, my Slayer albums and my Venom albums still get a lot more plays than the newer stuff even though the new Lamb of God album is something that… You know… Mostly ‘cause my brother he comes over here every day in the studio and we’re out there and he’s actually worn that Lamb of God cd out, so I’ve got my fill of that album, but when it comes to metal I get a little particular with what I like, there’s lots of stuff that can turn me off, a lot. And it’s just my personal opinion, it doesn’t mean anything, ‘cause if I don’t necessarily like it, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad or not good, and they are by all means probably better musicians than any of us, but I just get a little panicky, I like my old school metal and there’s a lot of bands that I’ve listened to for a long time, so most of these new bands usually take me a few years to come around and listening to it.

Metal Revolution: Supposing you listen to other music than metal, then what genres and bands do you like?
John Tardy: I do listen to a lot of music. I listen to country music, I listen to blues, I listen to rockabilly, so I pretty much like almost a little bit of everything that’s out there and I listen to a lot of Reverend Horton Heat, Lamb of God I’ve been listening to a lot even though it’s metal, and I listen to all the country music especially the classic, older country music, Willie Nelson and stuff like that. And obviously I just get a full dose of my southern rock all the time, Lynard Skynard and The Outlaws, who are some of the Florida boys. I listen to a lot of stuff.

Metal Revolution: What is your greatest tour experience, and why?    
John Tardy: Wow, I mean, you look back, and you go through the website and go through the photos from tours from long ago and it seems like everyone has a little bit of something you can remember doing at the time and it was special, but when you really kinda cut down to it, I think that first time… We never toured for Slowly We Rot album so when Cause of Death came out it was our first time that we went to Europe and it was with Morgoth and Demolition Hammer. And you know, just being in Europe and we did like 50 something shows, we were over there for like tree or four months so we played a lot of shows and you know, that first trip, being on a tour, on a tour bus and just going through Europe that very first time was an incredible experience. It really was a lifetime of memories and it’s probably the main reason why we’re still doing this, ‘cause it was just that much of an impact on all of us.

Metal Revolution: I can imagine that touring around the world gets harder whilst aging. How do you manage to stay sharp and still give great live performances?
John Tardy: Wow………

Metal Revolution: You say that a lot….
John Tardy: You’re asking tough questions here (Laughing), we’ve already been talking for about 20 minutes (Laughing). You know, we like to look at it like it’s almost like we work 23 hours a day and we get an hour off every day and that’s on stage. It’s all that work around that’s what’s really stinks and the travel and the whole nine yards but you kinda get used to it in a pattern, you know, you know how to prepare, you know what to pack, you know what to expect and it does make it easier on you. The more planning that you do is what does make it easier on you. There’s obviously plenty of time where there’s nothing you can do, you’re getting off stage at one or two in the morning, you’ve got flights at six am and you’ve got sound check the next day in a different country at two and then you get back on stage and there’s nothing you can do so you find yourself sleeping on the plane, sleeping on the van, one hour in your bed and that’s kinda what you do so the more you do it, the more you plan, you know what to expect and that does make your life a little bit easier.

Metal Revolution: Do you still have fun performing your live shows? and how important is the still increasing number of fans?
John Tardy: It’s obviously vital. If people didn’t come and our tours were getting smaller and there were less and less people. You can’t just rely on album sales, I mean, pretty much nobody can, it’s a very few bands that sell so many records that they can function just like that. Touring is just a necessity for us, it’s the only way we can kinda survive if we wanna continue to do this so the support from our fans is kinda well documented and I answer a lot of fan emails and stuff like that, and to this day people are still surprised to get an email back from me, but it’s vital. If they were not showing up, we would all be doing something else.

Metal Revolution: On your coming tour, you plan to make a set list out of your first tree albums and you have been in contact with your fans via facebook and twitter about this. Did you miss playing the old songs or is it to please the fans as well?
John Tardy: Because Darkest Day has been out for a couple of years and we’ve done a few tours with it, I’m ok with it. You know, we kinda got asked by the guy putting the tour on in Europe, he asked us if we’d be interested in something like that and we thought about it and talked about it a little bit and we we’re like “you know what, we can do that”. And our first thought was like, “let’s just play the whole Slowly-album”, but that quickly kinda turned in to us maybe just wanting to get some fan-input in, so we did and we sent some, you know, little twits…….. Twitters out and facebook and stuff and got a lot of input from people and the good thing is, that they were screaming out songs from all the albums and there was lots of stuff coming our way so we were like “ok, it’s gonna be kind of tough to do all the Slowly, so let’s try to narrow it down a little bit.” And then we kinda, in the process of listening to these old albums realized that The Incomplete is gonna be 20 years old this year, so we really kinda have to play some songs off of that and make something out of that so we kinda settled on playing songs from the first tree albums which makes us playing about six songs from each album which does a pretty good job of covering all tree albums and it’s been crazy, there’s songs that we haven’t played for years and years and there’s some of them we’ve never even played live before so we really had to go back and listen to these things and relearn them, starting over from scratch with them but now that we have the songs kinda picked out and relearned and we’re getting comfortable with the set, it’s been a lot of fun actually.

Metal Revolution: Sadly, you are not coming to Denmark on your future tour around Europe, but you played here at Royal Metal Fest in 2011. Do you like playing in Denmark and do you plan on coming back anytime in the nearest future?
John Tardy: Sure we’ll come back to Denmark, the beer is way too good there to not come that way and when we’ve been in Denmark we’ve had some really good shows there. A little surprising that one of the shows in Denmark didn’t make the tour, but that sometimes happens. It’s a great country and a beautiful country with really good beer, so we will definitely be back there.

Metal Revolution: What are you hopes and ambitions for the future? Both musically and personally.
John Tardy: At this point of time in our career we can’t just say that we wanna be as big as Slipknot, so as long as we’re having fun. The European summer festivals are really kind of a highlight for us because we get to play with some of these big bands we would never get to play with otherwise, you know, we’re playing with Slayer, Lamb of God, you know, Donald went up and played a song with Lamb of God at the one festival we did and that’s really cool for us to get to meet these people and hang out with them, you know, we wind up keeping in touch with all these people and those are a lot of fun so if we can kinda continue to put out good albums and I know the new one we’re working on is gonna be heavy ‘cause the songs we have started are just.. I’m really, really thrilled about them. So as long as we’re still happy with what we’re writing and we continue to get the crowds that we’ve been getting and it kind of feels right, that the energy is kinda still coming our way, we’ll continue to do it a little while longer and at the end of the day we’ll be satisfied with whatever happens.

Metal Revolution: Thank you for taking the time to let us interview you, it was an honor. Do you have anything to add, to your fans on Metal Revolution?
John Tardy: (Laughing) We’ll you made me feel bad, I wish we could come to Denmark so….. but you know, it’s sometimes easy by train or something to travel around Europe so maybe if we come close enough there to a surrounding country you can make a short trip if possible but hopefully we’ll just get your way as soon as possible and I promise that we will quit slacking on the album that we’ve been working on and we’ll get that thing wrapped up and out so...

Interview done by Freja