INTERVIEWS: Jamie Hough of Dead Happy Chats to Mucka!

What was the last album you purchased?

Tesseract - Polaris. Been following these guys from the beginning and have loved their approach to recording and distributing music in the unavoidable digital age. Their recordings are pristine and I love the bass - it sits perfectly in the mix. See them live, its impressive.

If your music could be used in an advert on TV, what would you most like it to be advertising?

We have a very healthy obsession with bananas, we could advertise the shit out of them. An ad showing loads of people dancing in a neon-light drenched club scoffing bananas like there’s no tomorrow with our track ‘Banana Bloodbath’ blaring over it all would be my suggestion. That would shift a few I’d imagine.

If you were to do a cover of a song, what would it be and why?

We’ve actually done loads, but the one that we enjoy the most is Rock Lobster by the B-52’s. The original is a lengthy and beautifully weird surf rock riff-fest laden with subtle changes. We love the fun element of bands like The B-52’s, they don’t take themselves seriously and put fun before technicality - something we think is missing in the rock/metal world at the moment, so decided to Dead Happy-fy it. What we ended up with was a punchy 2 minute slab of heavy guitars and camp synths that goes down really well live and we love playing it.

Dead or alive, which band would you most like to co-headline with?

For me Tool are the band that I couldn’t pass up playing with. We have absolutely nothing musically in common with them, but their music has helped shape the person I am today - if I met them I’d fanboy out and 100% make an ass of myself.

What has been the most memorable moment in your musical career so far?

There’s been many but I guess the most memorable was when we were chased out of a venue we were playing by a biker gang. We finished our set and were sitting backstage when security came and locked us in as there was a biker gang in the venue who disliked our music so much they wanted to start trouble with us. The venues sound guy packed down our equipment for us and we were escorted out whilst security pushed back members of the gang. So a pro-tip to anyone who’s interested - Midlands-based bikers don’t like freaky disco metal - don’t play it to them.

If you had the opportunity to change something about the music industry, what would it be?

If the big names in the industry would take more of a punt on smaller and slightly ‘out-there’ bands again, I think things could change for the better for everyone. Everything is too safe now - so many bands try to replicate old sounds and images/trends - it means that modern equivalents of the great subcultures that developed around music in the past (rock/metal/punk/grunge etc), aren’t able to emerge as there’s nothing for people to grab on to like there was before. There are plenty of great bands out there, but they don’t get onto the bigger labels and thus don’t have the impact they could have, its a real shame.