NAPALM DEATH TRIVIA
Trivia
Japanese hardcore is part of the story of Scum. Before the album was recorded, Nicholas Bullen told VICE, he and his bandmates had been listening intently to early Japanese punk bands such as GISM, Kuro and Crow. What delighted him was that those bands were themselves devoted to the noisy, feedback-heavy UK hardcore of the early 1980s. The Japanese bands reworked it in their own way, the British teenagers heard the result, and it pushed their own taste further still, a "bounce back" between the two, in his words. Finnish bands such as Kaaos, Cadgers and Rattus were in the mix too, swapped on cassette with people around the world in 1982 and 1983 by schoolkids who had no money for scarce imported records but could afford a pack of ten blank tapes and some stamps.
Napalm Death have turned up on Japanese variety television. Gekirock reported on 25 December 2014 that the band had appeared on TV Tokyo's You wa Nani Shi ni Nippon e?, performing "You Suffer" on the programme, and that viewers were talking about it on Twitter. The band had toured Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka with Brutal Truth and SxOxB that November.
Napalm Death have kept going back to the region hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake. According to Gekirock, the year after the disaster the band played Miyako, Ofunato and Ishinomaki as part of the Tohoku Live House Daisakusen campaign. The Napalm Death Melt-Banana Japan Tour 2019, announced in December 2018 alongside both bands' Extreme the Dojo Vol.32 dates, was to take them to Ishinomaki and Sapporo: BLUE RESISTANCE in Ishinomaki on 8 March 2019 was to be the band's third show in the city, and the Sapporo DUCE show on 10 March was also meant as a gesture of sympathy for the people affected by the earthquake there in the summer of 2018.
Shane Embury published his autobiography, Life…? And Napalm Death, through Rocket 88 in 2023. As the publisher describes it, the book is both his own story and a history of Napalm Death and their part in the development of grindcore from the beginning to the present; it runs to 256 pages in hardback, came in a signed edition as well, and the audiobook is read by Embury himself. He told Decibel that he and his friends used to joke over a few beers that some escapade was "one for the book", without his ever imagining he would write one, but when the idea was put to him he agreed at once.
Napalm Death have played NPR's Tiny Desk. According to the page NPR published on 15 July 2026, fans in black T-shirts and battle jackets got a small circle pit going a few steps from the desks where NPR Music's staff do their work. The eight-song set put songs from 1987 at both ends with a sprint through the rest of the catalogue in between, a "Scum sandwich" as NPR called it, and it finished with "Dead", "Scum" and "You Suffer".
Earache sums up Napalm Death's time on the label as eight studio albums, from Scum to Words from the Exit Wound, and has boxed them on vinyl as Liberation Through Distortion: The Earache Years of Napalm Death. According to the label's product page, the title was chosen by the band; the set is limited to 1,000 copies and comes with a four-panel fold-out poster of an iconic 1990s live shot and a download of all eight albums, following Earache's sold-out Carcass and Morbid Angel boxes.
"You Suffer", on the first half of the 1987 debut album Scum, lasts just 1.316 seconds. Louder traces part of the idea to "E!", a very short song by the Oregon crossover band Wehrmacht, and Nicholas Bullen's lyric runs to four words. Bullen, guitarist Justin Broadrick and drummer Mick Harris recorded it at Rich Bitch Studios in Selly Oak, Birmingham, in August 1986. Harris insists it is a piece of music rather than a burst of noise: there are around four notes in it, and the three of them played it as tightly as they could. If anything, he says, the reverb stretched it.
"You Suffer" made it into the Guinness book. In 1989, according to Louder, it was given away as a free seven-inch single with Earache's Grindcrusher compilation, backed with Electro Hippies' "Mega-Armageddon Death Part 3", and was recognised as the shortest single ever released. Mick Harris told Decibel the band never applied for anything: one day they were simply informed they were in the book, and could hardly believe it. The category is gone now. In 2012 Earache tried for a "world's shortest album" with a 25th-anniversary compilation, Earache: Worlds Shortest Album, which lasts one minute 27 seconds and opens with Napalm Death's "You Suffer", "Dead" and "Your Achievement". Guinness would not accept it, saying that a contest to be the shortest belittles the thing being done, and that it had given up keeping records for the shortest song, poem or concert.
John Peel was one of the band's earliest champions. Decibel credits the repeated plays of "You Suffer" on his Radio 1 programme with bringing his eclectic listeners out to Napalm Death gigs, and Louder notes that he once played the song a handful of times in a single show and had the band in to record several sessions at Maida Vale. Peel himself joked that with songs two seconds long there was no point asking for a retake over an out-of-tune guitar. Shane Embury tells it from the band's side: Peel's approval brought in people who would never otherwise have listened to them, and their audiences started to mix Repulsion fans with Sonic Youth fans.
Ask Shane Embury where the word "grindcore" came from and he names Mick Harris. Harris coined it, Embury told Louder, and meant by it mainly fast, distorted noise, though slow, low noise could qualify too: what counted was how harsh it was. Embury does not claim the genre itself for Napalm Death, though. The pioneers he points to are two American bands that gave punk and metal a jolt in the first half of the 1980s: Siege from Boston and Repulsion from Flint.
Scum is, in effect, a split album between two versions of the same band. Its two sides were recorded nine months apart by almost entirely different line-ups, Louder explains. The twelve songs of the first were the work of Nicholas Bullen, guitarist Justin Broadrick and drummer Mick Harris, most of them written in Broadrick's teenage bedroom in Shard End, Birmingham. For the sixteen songs of the second side, Harris was the only one left, now joined by singer Lee Dorrian, guitarist Bill Steer and bassist Jim Whiteley. Between them the two sides hold 28 songs in 33 minutes.
In April 1989 the BBC arts strand Arena broadcast a documentary simply called Heavy Metal. Most of it belonged to the genre's biggest stars, Louder recalls, but near the end it cut to four young men only just out of their teens, sitting side by side on a bed in a suburban bedroom whose walls were covered with horror film posters, explaining how far their band, Napalm Death, was taking things. Then came footage of them playing "Scum", the title track of their debut album.
System of a Down once opened for Napalm Death. Shane Embury told Louder it was at one show in 1997, before they had even signed a record deal. He has met the members of Slipknot a few times as well and says they know all about Napalm Death, which he takes as a compliment, though as he sees it both bands blended whatever they took from it with very different ingredients of their own.
The Grindcrusher tour of November 1989 was Earache Records' own package, put together to show off the label and four of its bands: Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower and Carcass, seven shows in seven days from 10 to 16 November. The first night, in Manchester, was Barney Greenway's first ever show as Napalm Death's singer, Decibel's look back at the tour confirms, and the first for guitarist Jesse Pintado too. Shane Embury remembers flying Pintado over from Los Angeles; he only made it the second time, having been turned back on the first attempt because he had no work permit. The Mentally Murdered EP had just come out, and there was a lot of interest in how the new line-up would sound.
Grindcrusher was a string of firsts for the bands on it. Shane Embury told Decibel it was the first tour that Napalm Death, Carcass and Bolt Thrower had ever done with a professional booking agent, and the first time any of them had travelled in nightliners. The halls held between 1,000 and 1,500 people and most nights were packed; Bolt Thrower's Karl Willetts remembers the final show, in London, as the biggest of the tour. Afterwards Napalm Death played their first show in New York, then came back to carry on across Europe with Morbid Angel.
What first connected Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys with Napalm Death was a cover of "Nazi Punks Fuck Off". By the time he sang guest vocals on The Code Is Red...Long Live the Code, he told Decibel, the two sides had long known of each other without ever actually meeting. Napalm Death had covered the song on Virus 100, a compilation Alternative Tentacles had put out years before, and he had known Dig Pearson of Earache by mail for ages, from the days when Pearson wrote punk scene reports. To Biafra, Napalm Death were one of the first underground British extreme metal bands to come out of punk and hardcore rather than out of the new wave of British heavy metal.
How many takes Jello Biafra needed on The Code Is Red...Long Live the Code depends on whom you ask. In Decibel's Napalm Death issue, Barney Greenway claimed Biafra had recorded more vocal takes for his one song than Greenway had for the whole album. Told of this, Biafra said it would not surprise him, since he cuts several takes in a row and then compiles the best parts, but he laughed that he had not done that many and put the rest down to Greenway's storytelling. It was analogue tape, he pointed out, so every fresh attempt meant winding back and recording over the last one, and the band may well have asked him to try a few more their way.
Napalm Death and the Melvins first teamed up for the Savage Imperial Death March Tour, six weeks of spring dates that opened at The Marquee in Phoenix, Arizona, on 26 March 2016, with Japan's Melt-Banana along for the ride. Announcing it, Shane Embury said his band had been fans of the Melvins, and friends, for years, and Buzz Osborne said Napalm Death sounded "like a gorilla on LSD firing a machine gun", adding that he meant it kindly. The ties went back further: in 2004 Osborne, Embury and Danny Herrera had played together in Venomous Concept. The name stuck. It returned for the seven-week Savage Imperial Death March Part II in 2025 and became the title of the two bands' joint album, Savage Imperial Death March.
"You Suffer" turns up as a notification sound in HBO's Silicon Valley. In "Chief Operating Officer", the third episode of the fifth season, Inverse reported, the programmer Gilfoyle, played by Martin Starr, sets the song to go off whenever the price of Bitcoin breaks a threshold he is watching. Bitcoin being volatile, it keeps going off and keeps startling the office, all through the episode, until Richard Hendricks is seriously thinking about firing him.
Napalm Death are routinely described as a political band, and Barney Greenway does not think the label quite fits. Talking to RAMzine at Download in 2022, he argued that what the band stands for are human ideas, which ought to rise above politics, so that in a sense Napalm Death could even be called apolitical; a "human ideas" band, as he put it. He makes no secret that his thinking has its roots on the left, where he grew up. People who disagree with him turn up now and then, and he is fine with that: he has no wish to force his views on anyone, only to show that there are better ways of doing things.
Barney Greenway has not eaten meat since he was fourteen. Talking to EMP at Bloodstock Open Air in 2021, he counted 38 years as a vegetarian and a little over ten as a vegan, adding that his diet had been close to vegan all along: the last few animal products simply went once he could see no reason to keep eating them. Intensive farming, in his view, cannot carry on as it is, and the world as a whole will have to shift towards eating mainly plants.
Campaign for Musical Destruction is a tour name Napalm Death keep coming back to. Mitch Harris told Decibel that it was first used for a European tour with Obituary and Dismember: the band wanted a catchphrase of a name, something in the spirit of "noise not music". The name stuck as the band's own, and they took it to America with a different bill for the North American tour of 1992. The name has lived on since. The Campaign for Musical Destruction Tour of 2023 was extended into 2024 with new dates in the UK and mainland Europe, with Primitive Man and Wormrot along.
The sleeve of Apex Predator – Easy Meat is a mock supermarket meat pack. It was the work of the Danish designer Frode Sylthe, who had already done Utilitarian for the band and had worked with At the Gates and the Haunted, Blabbermouth reported when it was unveiled. Barney Greenway explained that after several albums of elaborate, interlinked artwork the band wanted a single image this time, to make the point sharper. He loved the supermarket packaging the moment he saw it: take the plastic tray that usually holds some joyless processed food, fill it with the leftovers of meat production instead, and you have the "easy meat" of the title, standing for the people who are used up and thrown away to feed ever-growing consumption. Shane Embury saw in it consumerism and throwaway goods crowding out the simple human need to be happy and to connect with one another.
At the centre of the Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism sleeve is a white dove, again by Frode Sylthe. The dove stands for peace and cooperation, Barney Greenway explained when the album was announced in July 2020, and here it has been savagely torn apart and lies dead and bloodied; but an equality sign, drawn in its blood, can be made out on its chest, a hint that equality wins through in the end. He saw the same glimmer of good among the bad in the title, which he described as something of an oxymoron: humanity celebrated even while caught in the jaws of negativity.
When Barney Greenway began thinking about the lyrics for Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, the phrase on his mind was "the other". Announcing the album in July 2020, he described how suspicion of people seen as different, from migrants to people whose sexuality does not fit a fixed box, had been spreading fast and hardening into hostility that came close to violence. Not everyone goes that far, he acknowledged, but plain incomprehension can poison things over time, and attack-minded figures in politics had been feeding it. His answer, as always, was to argue for common humanity and solidarity with everyone.
Scum's 30th anniversary was marked in an unexpected way by one of the people who made it. Supersonic Festival in Birmingham commissioned Nicholas Bullen to give a special performance for the anniversary in 2017, VICE reported, and he played it with a mixing desk, several microphones, assorted effects units and samples, under the name Universal Detention Centre. Like Scum, it carried a clear left-wing message. Its subject, he explained, was the shrinking of people's freedoms, not in the sense the alt-right complains about, the right to say anything at all, but the physical restrictions actually imposed on people. Japan's Melt-Banana were on the same Supersonic line-up.
Shane Embury starts on the next album as soon as the last one is finished. In an interview Gekirock published in February 2009 he explained that writing new songs is what he does whenever he has a spare moment, and that some songs on the album then just out had been sitting around as demos for years. As a result Napalm Death need far less preparation time than other bands, since about half the material already exists when work on a record begins. Mitch Harris, he added, hoards riffs between albums too, and has built up a huge supply. A Warwick five-string bass and a Gibson Les Paul, he said, were what gave that album its heavier sound.
The grindcore voice owes something to electronic music and to science-fiction television. Nicholas Bullen told VICE that what caught his ear was the ring modulator Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle used, a device he found out later that composers of electronic music often put on voices, and the eerie, cold, faraway quality it gave. The television of his childhood, full of distorted and mutated voices, played a part as well; he names Dr. Who's Cybermen and the Sea Devils. At six or seven, before music took over, he was obsessed with horror and science fiction, and in the band the aim was to mutate the voice as far as it would go.
Napalm Death started out modestly, as a Discharge-inspired band playing political punk. Formed in 1981 by singer and bassist Nicholas Bullen and drummer Miles Ratledge, Decibel notes, the group landed a track on the third Bullshit Detector compilation on Crass Records, and only after that did guitarist Justin Broadrick join.