DIAMOND HEAD - Still Evil? Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"He's probably still in bed, at the moment," says Brian, asked what Harris is up to these days. "No, we've kind of lost contact. I mean, Sean likes writing songs; that's his big thing. He's not too bothered about playing live. As you can tell by the length of time between albums, we haven't really done a lot, since Death And Progress, really. I would imagine he's just writing more songs. As it is, an album was finished, the one that was shelved, the one we did in 2002. He pretty much went into his demo studio and started writing the next one, which seemed crazy to me, but there you go."

Asked to name standout tracks on this crunchy, combative, raw, not all that well recorded but eminently sturdy of song album, Tatler goes with 'Give It To Me', a cool, arch-Diamond Head pop-tinged rocker. "It was one of the last songs we wrote. Everything was demoed here at my home studio, but some of the songs, Nick hadn't quite finished the vocals. So we were tweaking a couple of them as we went along, and that was one that got tweaked. And 'Come Alive'. I also like 'Mine All Mine' and also 'Alimony', which is growing on me."

"'Come Alive' is the only slightly unusual one, because of the time signature. Duncan Scott, the original drummer, he co-wrote that one. In 2000, I was jamming with him, and he got that beat, which was a really original beat, I thought. So I came up with the guitar part to go on top of it, and I lived with that riff for a couple of years. Eventually it ended up on this album. It was just a case of getting into an arrangement, something we could put a vocal on. The time signature... there's a bar of nine and then a bar of five and then a bar of nine, and things like that. And it's really difficult for a singer to work out a tune over the top of that, which is why it never came to light before. Whenever we rehearsed it, nobody could remember where we were in the song, and we had to keep stopping, 'Well, how many bars is that; how many have we gone? (laughs). Is that an 11 bar bit or a nine bar bit?'"

DIAMOND HEAD - Still Evil? Page 3