Band Interview: Conjurer – Conor Marshall (Bass)

Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life are very pleased to bring you an interview with Conor Marshall, the bass player for British extreme progressive metal band, Conjurer! We absolutely loved their new album ‘Mire’ which is out on the 23rd February 2018 via Holy Roar Records. Read our review of the album here.

1. Tell us a bit about the origins of Conjurer.

Conjurer started after Brady had put a post on Facebook or something saying that he wanted to start a band in the vein of Gojira, Black Dahlia etc, Dan responded to that and showed him a few ideas he had, some of which ended up becoming the first Conjurer songs, and it’s just gone from there really. I joined recently after they’d just finished recording ‘Mire’ – we’ll see how that goes…

2. What can we expect from the new album, Mire? It’s a hell of a listen.

Thank you, it’s a varied album that’s a few years in the making really, some of the songs on the album were written even before the EP we released and so a lot of ground is covered. I guess most importantly there’s riffs. Lots of lovely riffs.

4. What messages, if any, are you trying to convey with Mire?

I don’t think there’s any one singular message being conveyed, if any message at all really. Its pretty miserable in tone throughout I guess but that’s about it.

5. Do you think streaming services and the rise of YouTube has helped or hindered you as a band?

They’ve not really made that much of a difference to us to be honest, streaming services in particular are just how music is consumed nowadays, we’ll be using Spotify or whatever ourselves when driving to gigs or practice or whatever, we’ve got our stuff on there as well for people to listen to so it’s definitely not hindered us in anyway, whether it will particularly help I guess remains to be seen.

We don’t really focus on that sort of stuff as a band though, we have social media and such because we understand that it’s just part of being in a band and promoting yourself now, but we’re more interested in actually getting out there and playing shows than we are in Facebook likes and posting memes on twitter.

6. If you could ask rock & metal fans one thing to help the band, what would it be?

Same as any band really, come to shows, buy merch, tell your friends. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff we want to do and obviously any support we get to help do that we’re eternally grateful for.

7. Games, Brrraaains (horror) & Head-Banging…what do you enjoy the most?

Between us we enjoy all of it, Dan’s very into film and music in general, and has recently got back into gaming so he’s got all bases covered really. Then the rest of us all have one or two that were particularly fond of. Jan and I are both fairly into games, and Brady’s well up for going to shows and the head banging side of it.

8. What’s the plan for 2018 in regards to touring? Any UK dates planned?

We’ve got a small run of UK shows in late Feb to promote the album when it comes out and from there it’s really getting wherever we can, we’re hoping to get over to Europe at least once this year so that’ll be cool if it happens and then we’ll be going up and down the country like we normally would anyway, so come say hi!

We’d like to thank Conor & Conjurer for taking the time to speak with us. You can order the new album here and merchandise here. Find out more & keep up to date with news via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.