Alan Averill
Alan Averill (pseudonym AA Nemtheanga ) is an Irish musician best known as the singer of the Irish pagan metal band Primordial .
Life
Averill grew up in what he claims to be a "normal family in the north of Dublin ". The only unusual thing was that his mother was Catholic and his father was Protestant, as only three or four percent of the Irish population are Protestants. Therefore he grew up "without Catholicism, never went to church and was not baptized". His parents were very open, wanted a secular upbringing for him and encouraged him to develop artistically. As a result, he "automatically took an interesting position in Irish society", "both internally and externally". This enabled him to see a lot from a different perspective than most of his compatriots. Otherwise nothing was unusual in his childhood and youth. He was "just a Teenage- black metal - Satanist " was. Averill's parents “weren't musical themselves, but they liked music”. His first memories are of English folk , The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell , which sparked his interest in music. When he was eight or nine years old he met ZZ Top and AC / DC and heard hard rock for the first time . In the mid-1980s, at the age of eleven or twelve, he was watching a television show he was watching at his grandparents' house that played Judas Priest , AC / DC, Celtic Frost , Exodus , Slayer and Megadeth . Slayer's song Hell Awaits was "initially too heavy" for him, but after two months it appealed to him. Iron Maidens Prowler fascinated him the first time he heard it. In order to save bus money for music albums, he always got off a stop in front of the school. The first album he bought himself was likely AC / DC's For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) .
At school, Averill was "always in trouble" and did not want to subordinate himself, but also managed to get his job done "without too much effort". The corporal punishment, which was still common in Irish schools at the time, which involved “being thrown around”, did not cause permanent harm, but it may have increased his distrust of authorities and his will to undermine them. During Averill's youth in the 1980s, Dublin was "a very rough city" with teenagers fighting every weekend and "constantly getting caught up in street fights". Members of the metal subculture had to "fight to be allowed to be metal". However, Averill was able to avoid ever being arrested. The English band Venom exerted a great influence on him, but it was above all Bathory's Under the Sign of the Black Mark that “made it clear to him that I couldn't do much with current mainstream metal [...]. I bought it on tape in late '87 , and when 'Massacre' crashed out of the speakers it had the same effect on me as Maiden's 'Prowler' a few years earlier. This was a moment that would change my life. Bathory became my band, our band. The 'Not' Thrash kids and skateboarders despised us - but we felt validated when ' Blood Fire Death ' came out. The moment I saw the album alongside all the Ed Repka art, I knew that our musical tastes would never be the same again. And I was right. Bathory actually sounded nasty ... “In 1987 or 1988 he also started tape trading and discovered bands from the black metal underground of the time. In 1988, at the age of thirteen, Averill went to his first concert, one of the band Metallica .
Averill gained his first own live experience “in very mediocre school bands that gambled on talent competitions”. At that time he played “more badly than right Venom's 'Witching Hour' or Discharge's 'State Violence State Control' on bass” while his parents watched in the audience. In 1991 he joined a band called Forsaken because of an advertisement in Dublin's most important metal shop, to which no one but himself had answered. According to his own statements, he was "terrible" at the first rehearsal, but brought in knowledge of the underground scene that he had acquired through contacts in the underground over several years and as an author of a fanzine . The band first performed with him in September or October at the Skerries Community Hall. She also began to write her own songs. The following year the band gave a few concerts in Dublin. In the summer of 1992 a sampler cassette with a rehearsal room version of The Darkest Flame was released , which, according to Averill, is probably the greatest rarity for potential Primordial completeists. This compilation was the first of its kind in Ireland and, according to Averill, one of the major turning points. Due to satanic and occult references in the band's first own songs, the band and the rest of the Irish scene fell out. The band also wrote the song To Enter Pagan , which still belongs to their live repertoire, and renamed themselves Primordial in December. In addition to experiences with mushrooms containing psilocybin , when he lived with the band Mourning Beloveth , he sometimes consumed excessive ecstasy with them .
He was also the singer of the funeral doom band Void of Silence , but left them on April 17, 2009 due to his employment with Primordial. He is also the front man of the Bathory tribute band Twilight of the Gods .
In 2008, Averill received a Diploma in Journalism from Dublin City University and worked for Zero Tolerance magazine . At the beginning of 2010 he traveled to Canada to record the vocals on Blood Revolt's debut album Indoctrine with Vermin and J. Read ( Axis of Advance , Conqueror ) . The album was released in late 2010 through Profound Lore and Invictus. Since 2010 he has also been a representative for A&R at Metal Blade Records , he founded his own label Poison Tongue as an offshoot.
ideology
While Averill's band Primordial wrote their first two songs, Nefarious Affliction and Prince of the Sky , and whose naive, satanic and occult references, according to Averill, led to a discord between the band and the rest of the Irish scene, he and his band increasingly saw their way into black metal related and Death Metal as "mostly settled and boring". When asked whether he had “any idea or belief about what comes after death”, he said no in 2014. He currently believes that the energy of mortals “just goes back into the earth, where it came from”. It is a "godless existence" and this attitude can also be found in Primordial's music. Averill is “fascinated by the Golden Dawn and other hermetic , occult movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries” and “in search of knowledge and answers”. This search "probably never" ends.
Nemtheanga said that he saw himself more as a political and less a spiritual person and indifference as a modern evil. However, he tries not to let his interest in politics "shine through too much in Primordial". In particular, the (mostly English) lyrics of the band expressed an intensive preoccupation with Irish tradition and history ; In contrast to the band Void of Silence, in which Averill is also active, the lyrics in Primordial are less about him than about more general topics. Black Metal, on the other hand, as he emphasizes, “was always based on a spiritual or idealistic point of view. The [...] texts and the general aesthetics had to be satanic , esoteric , occult or even religious in order to pass as ' orthodox '. Plain and simple: no deviations, no compromises. I saw it that way in 1992, and I still see it that way today. ”Among other things, Averill is inspired by statues in old European churches and the brutality they represent. Primordially, he understands art and not entertainment. In interviews and song texts, he often emphasizes values such as strength, honor and fighting spirit.
Discography
With different bands were released with and by him:
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Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Conny Schiffbauer: Schwatzkasten . Alan Averill. In: Rock Hard . No. 328 , September 2014, p. 14 .
- ↑ a b c Alan Nemtheanga: No deviations, no compromises . In: Rock Hard . No. 269 , October 2009, p. 69 .
- ↑ a b c d e f A.AN: Biography. (No longer available online.) Primordial, archived from the original on October 25, 2014 ; accessed on October 25, 2014 (English).
- ↑ a b c Conny Schiffbauer: Chatterbox . Alan Averill. In: Rock Hard . No. 328 , September 2014, p. 16 .
- ^ VOID OF SILENCE Parts Ways With Vocalist ALAN 'NEMTHEANGA' AVERILL , accessed January 26, 2013.
- ^ A b c Marcel Tilger: Alan Nemtheanga . Struck by forgotten Grace . In: Mørkeskye , No. 12 / Sounds Under the Surface , No. 5, pp. 303-311.
- ↑ http://www.discogs.com/artist/AA+Nemtheanga
- ↑ ELUVEITIE: New Album Track Listing, Guest Musicians Revealed , accessed January 26, 2013.
- ↑ ELUVEITIE: New Album Track Listing, Guest Musicians Revealed , accessed January 26, 2013.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Averill, Alan |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nemtheanga, AA (pseudonym) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Irish musician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 20th century |