CARCASS Trivia — 10 Entries
10 sourced facts about CARCASS.
Trivia
The early albums were given Japanese titles of their own. The band page on the Loud Park 13 site gives them: the debut, Reek of Putrefaction, as 腐乱屍臭; the second album, Symphonies of Sickness, as 真・疫魔交響曲; and the third, Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious, as 屍体愛好癖. From the fourth album on they were simply transliterated instead — Heartwork as ハートワーク, Swansong as スワンソング and Surgical Steel, seventeen years later, as サージカル・スティール. This site uses the original titles throughout, so none of these appear on its pages.
Their first visit to Japan after the reunion was Loud Park 08. The festival's own timetable puts them on the first day, 18 October, at Saitama Super Arena from 17:25, with Sonata Arctica before them and Avenged Sevenfold after, and Slipknot closing the night. Down, registered here for the same day, went on at 19:35. The timetable for the following day, 19 October, does not carry the band at all.
The Loud Park 13 booking was announced on 4 September 2013, the day Surgical Steel — the first studio album in seventeen years — was released in Japan ahead of the rest of the world; the festival's own band page says so. They played on 19 October at Saitama Super Arena, on the BIG ROCK STAGE from 16:40, on a stage that also carried Lost Society, Bring Me the Horizon, Therion, Lynch Mob and Europe, while the other stage was closed by Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington. The timetable for the following day does not carry the band.
At Loud Park 15 they closed the EXTREME STAGE, the one that gathered the death and black metal bands. The official timetable puts them on the second day, 11 October 2015, from 18:40, after Obituary, Abbath, Dark Tranquillity, At the Gates and Napalm Death had passed through the same stage, while Helloween and Megadeth closed the other two. The timetable for the previous day, 10 October, does not carry the band.
Loud Park came back for one year only in 2023, and the band played its Tokyo day. The official site gives Tokyo as 26 March at Makuhari Messe, halls 9 to 11, doors at 10:00 and music from 11:00, at 19,000 yen. The Osaka day of the same edition, 25 March at Intex Osaka, carried only Pantera, Kreator, Nightwish, Stratovarius and Bleed from Within, and not this band. The Tokyo bill added Amaranthe, Outrage, H.E.R.O. and Jason Richardson & Luke Holland to those five, with Bridear and Phantom Excaliver as opening acts.
Carcass Japan Tour 2014, in May, was five nights behind Surgical Steel. The promoter Creativeman's own page gives them as Hiroshima Club Quattro on the 1st, Umeda Club Quattro on the 2nd, Nagoya Club Quattro on the 3rd and Shibuya Club Quattro on the 6th and 7th, at 6,800 yen in advance and 7,300 on the door, on sale from 22 March. Nagoya alone opened an hour earlier, doors at 17:00 and on stage at 18:00, where the other three halls opened at 18:00 and started at 19:00. Both Tokyo nights sold out.
Carcass began as a side project the guitarist Bill Steer ran while he was a member of Napalm Death; the band page on the Loud Park 13 site says so. The line-up at the start was Steer with Jeff Walker on bass and vocals and Ken Owen on drums, and when the second album, Symphonies of Sickness, appeared in 1989 Steer left Napalm Death to concentrate on Carcass.
Reek of Putrefaction, the 1988 debut, was kept out of the larger shops by its sound and its lyrics, and at the same time drew John Peel of BBC Radio 1 to it. Metal Hammer's retrospective records that Peel played tracks from it on his show and named it his favourite album of 1988 in an interview with the Observer. The same piece suggests the rough recording was part of what caught his attention.
The murk on Reek of Putrefaction was not the plan. Jeff Walker told Metal Hammer that the record was spoilt by a really lazy engineer who could not give a damn any more, and added that it was a shame, because there were killer riffs on there, muddied by the production. Bill Steer has said for his part that the album was not very focused and was just about being fast and heavy. It was recorded in four days at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham.
Jeff Walker and Bill Steer talked about James 'Nip' Blackford, who replaced Tom Draper on guitar in 2021, in an interview given during the band's Japanese tour of April 2024. Steer gave as the reason that their previous guitarist, Tom, had issues with his green card application, and that James was the first choice in his mind because they were friends and he knew he was a good player. Walker said Blackford did not just come into the band and work musically but worked on the personal level, and that with James they have the best of both worlds. Walker also recalled that when he first spoke to him about joining, Blackford said he might make mistakes.