GAMA BOMB

JOE MCGUIGAN

Gama Bomb has been around for little over a decade now and they have fastly established themselves as one of the best bands in this new era of thrash metal. They have released four full length-albums during their first ten years as a band, their latest called "The Terror Tapes" which was released last year. I have spoken with Joe McGuigan, bass player in Gama Bomb.

First of all I must say that I remember recieving your The Fatal Mission-demo back in 2004 and I loved it, it was the best demo I received.

Thanks for the kind words Jim!

We can begin with a small presentation of your band...

Hi My name is Joe, I'm from Ireland and also gama bomb. We play fast and talk fast and have been shaking heads around the world since 2002.

Why did Luke leave the band after so many years? and how has his departure affected band?

Luke left the band for the same reason many people leave bands; Life. Playing this sort of music is always going to be a hobby, no matter how much touring you do it will never amount to what is a normal wage. Luke had a good job and wanted to get married so decided to step off the ferris wheel for a while. Any hobby like this is always going to affect your job and family and after a while it becomes hard to justify taking time off a well paid job to earn no money and drink for 2 weeks.

Where did you guys find your new guitarist John Roche?

Domo (lead guitar) injured his hand pretty badly in 2010 and we asked our original guitar player Kevy to fill in for a tour in USA. After we returned we hoped Domo would be well enough to undertake the next leg of the tour in south America, unfortunately he still hadn't recovered and since we weren't getting along with kevy anymore we put an add out looking for a touring guitarist. So it just so happened john was filling in for Domo when luke left,so john took Lukes place. I'll send you a graph.

Gama Bomb - The Terror Tapes

Your album "The Terror Tapes" was released a few months ago, are you satisfied with how it was received by the fans and media?

Yea its very gratifying having the album received so well after we'd been out of the spot light for a couple of years . Overall I think its had a slightly better response than the last album.

Why did you give away your album "Tales from the grave in space" for free download and how did you get Earache to agree with that decision?

Philly had talked to me about the idea for quite a while, our idea being that if the album was released for free it would open up the horizons for gama bomb and we could start touring outside europe. Earache had actually had the same idea and were looking for a band to be the lab-rat and see how it worked.

Why did you leave Earache Records for AFM records?

Our business relationship wasn't a positive one anymore, so we decided to make a fresh start and see what happened. Its quite frustrating that the process took over a year, but that's show business.

From left to right: Joe McGuigan, Paul Caffrey, Philly Byrne, Domo Dixon and John Roche

How was it to tour with such thrash metal legends such as Onslaught, Exodus, Forbidden, Sepultura and Artillery?

Yea its always a dream come true to tour with your heroes. All tours are different tho, so for instance on the Onslaught uk tour it was us playing to the same sort of fans we always see at our shows whereas Sepultura we really got exposed to a different sort of crowd.

You got along well with those bands?

Yea for the most part really well. Touring with people like Overkill and Exodus, theres so much to learn form those bands, both in terms of stagecraft and from them personally, how to tour professionally.Weve had some negative experiences of course, guys who've been in these legacy bands for 3-4 years trying to act like big shots around us, treating us like green kids despite the fact weve been doing this for 12 years.

What's the highlight of your career?

Maybe playing the Whiskey a Go Go in L.A, or our last show in Europe last year; that was the first time we sold out a show.

You had your tenth anniversary as a band not that long ago but what will you guys do in another ten years? still touring and recording?

I hope so. We base our approach on the band Tankard; they sat us down and explained how we could do this while still having a job and a family. So since no money is involved really we dont have anything to argue about, so it mite actually be hard to find a good excuse to break up.

What's your plan for the near future?

Finish writing album #5, some festivals this summer and then a tour in South America in September.

Do you think that the thrash metal scene has changed during those ten years?

Yea it has quite a lot really, the thrash revival has come and went really so we've seen some great bands come and go while we've been doing the same thing for ten years haha. But its been massively to our advantage being associated with the revival and its left us in a great position to keep building our fan-base.

Have you got any funny story to tell, If anything weird has happened?

In 10 years? Yea lots of weird stuff has happened. One that sticks in my mind is a weird encounter we had with the guitarist in a famous Irish band The Corrs. He started talking to us about lots of weird conspiracies and then tried to sign us up to some nazi mailing list.

Any last words for our readers?

Keep supporting underground heavy metal music and headbanging at concerts.

Gamabomb.net

By/Ruthless

(24-03-2014)