Haunting Atmospherics With ANDREW CRAIGHAN From MY DYING BRIDE

It's hard to believe that a band who have dominated the global metal landscape for more than 35 years would be about to embark on their first ever Australian tour. Hard to believe, but also true in the case of England’s most disconsolate export, pioneers and kings of doom metal, MY DYING BRIDE.
Well known for haunting atmospheres and sorrowful tones whilst balancing uniquely heavy, desolate riffs with melancholic melodies, MY DYING BRIDE redefined musical misery with their earlier albums Turn Loose the Swans (1993), The Angel and the Dark River (1995) and Like Gods of the Sun (1996). A consistent flow of exceptionally sombre albums and EPs have followed, with highlights including The Dreadful Hours (2001), A Map of All Our Failures (2012), and today they continue their endless suffering like no other band of this ilk can.
Aussie fans finally get the chance to see My Dying Bride live this month (September) when the band makes the trek Down Under for two select dates in Sydney and Melbourne. To commemorate the occasion, HEAVY sat down for a great chat with guitarist Andrew Craighan.
"We're about to come to Australia for the first time in our 35-year career or existence or whatever you want to call it," Andrew reiterated, "so we're all really quite excited about that, and some of us are still in shock that it's finally happening. Some of us are still shocked that it's happening at all (laughs)."
We ask Andrew what he is expecting from Australian crowds, warning him that we do get a little crazy at times.
"I'm expecting that actually," he laughed, "and we're hoping that we can just hold it together to get the set done. We'll be happy with whatever takes place. These two shows that we're doing are very up close and personal type club shows. It's not like the festivals that we sometimes play in Europe, where the crowd's massive, and you're 20 feet away from everybody and 40 feet up in the air as well sometimes. So we appreciate it's very much a club show, and we haven't done many of them in the last few years, so for us, it's going to be almost like a blast from the past. We'll be going back in time to when people were really keen and really close at the same time, so it should be interesting."
In the full interview, Andrew talks more about the tour and what we can expect, why it has taken this long for My Dying Bride to make it to Australia, what the set list will look like, new vocalist Mikko Kotamaki and why he was selected, how crowds have been responding to him, My Dying Bride moving forward, the early days of the band and where they fit in, if creating music gets easier or harder the more you put out, new music and more.


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