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Interviews : “I love dark imagery…” – An Interview With Lucas Stone

By on May 5, 2017

Lucas Stone is the former frontman for Gold Coast heavy hitters Helm, who sadly parted ways a couple of years back after a barnstorming seven or eight year career that yielded three savage but highly interesting albums and literally hundreds of slamming live shows that had to be seen to be believed. Tiring of the relentless grind of being in a full-time band, he laid the band to rest, playing their last ever show at Melbourne’s Espy in early 2015, and embarked upon a solo career.

Stone has just released the first single (called Carry the Black) from a new solo EP that will receive a gradual release across the course of this year, and as he explains from his home in Kingscliff, he has resolved to do things very differently with this new project.

“I’m releasing a digital book with it,” he explains, “musically, and with the book as well, it’s a slow release. This thing, I’m giving it no end. The first release of this project is six tracks, but there’ll be a slow release thing, because I want people to digest the song and the book content. So there’s a song and a chapter.

“So another song will get released over the next few months, so then we’ll have two chapters, I’m not sure yet. I have written a lot of the stuff and I’m piecing it together as I go, as I get driven by the feelings that are created by the music.”

The song is hefty slab of pounding heavy rock with some dynamic and progressive elements to it, that will undoubtedly still appeal to fans of his former band. Stone confirms that, while you can take the boy away from the heaviness for a while, it is very difficult to take the heaviness out of the boy.

“Prior to Helm, I had a metal-ish approach to music,” he states, “my previous band to that, Tension, was technical math-ish metal with lots of hooks and stuff, so I always like to return to that side. And obviously Helm had a lot of that kind of weight to it as well.

“To be honest, it’s my favourite kind of music to play and write, it just depends on what moods or landscapes my head’s going through at the time. Whatever I’m expressing at the time spews out the shit that comes out!” He laughs.

“The stuff that I’ve written for this project is all heavy. There’s melody and hooks and stuff in there, but it’s all definitely of a darker nature.”

And that heaviness carries through to the song and the EP’s lyrical content as well, as Stone pulls no punches expressing how he feels about the state of the world and our race right now. “I think I try and express a global feeling or approach to what I’m trying to get out of myself on behalf of who we are as a species, not just myself personally,” he says, “you’re just trying to vent what you’re trying to say through your own experiences. At the same time I like to use a lot of global or planetary fuck-ups or glitches in the system as a subject and a voice to get it out.

“I love dark imagery, even as a kid I gravitated towards what other people might call satanic, I’m not really into religion at all, but it’s voiced as an evil kind of overtone, or effigy that exists in everything we do as a race, and attacking the big issues with that type of metaphor, but on behalf of us, if that make sense?”

Carry The Black, out now on iTunes.

Stone takes these ideas further, citing the dichotomy of modern living versus our attempts to save the planet on which we live as another inspiration for the concepts that he is putting forward in his lyrics, music and imagery. “It’s obviously a deep topic to try and get into and try and explain,” he says, “it’s the angst that we feel, getting up every day and having to wallow in the shit that we’ve created for ourselves and then digest it and try and justify to ourselves that we’re a good thing and not a negative thing when we do more destroying than creating, and then what we do create we tend to destroy anyway. And what we’ve been given as far as nature is concerned, there seems to be very little respect, or acknowledgement for its loss.

“I fuckin’ hate it, I try my best to be a half-decent human, as I’m doing what I’m doing throughout the day, but it’s real fuckin’ hard when you’re thrown into a capitalist society and you’ve got to work and make a living.”

That different approach to his new solo career will also extend to the touring and playing live side of things, in that it is highly unlikely that this new music will ever be taken on tour, or even see the inside of a live venue, as life as a touring musician appears to be behind him.

“No,” he states definitively, “I think I’ve played around 1500 shows in my life and I’ve never left the country. I’ve been a bit of a road dog, but it doesn’t really interest me much any more. Especially in Australia, it’s a hard slog, and not really rewarding.

“I’m happy to do it at home, just write and record this music.”

Follow Lucas Stone on Instagram – www.instagram.com/lucasstonemusic

Lucas Stone’s ‘Carry The Black‘ is the first single and the first chapter of his EP/Book “Tsuji”.

About

Rod Whitfield is a Melbourne-based writer and retired musician who has been writing about music since 1995. He has worked for Team Rock, Beat Magazine, themusic.com.au, Heavy Mag, Mixdown, The Metal Forge, Metal Obsession and many others. He has written and published his memoirs of his life and times in the music biz, and also writes books, screenplays, short stories, blogs and more.