There is tradition and there is tradition. You can follow the footsteps of the ones that walked before you or you can walk new paths in the spirit of the time in which those forefathers walked. Not only lyrically The Lamp Of Toth is inspired by old Victorian times and all literature written in that era, also musically they play classic doom from a time it was known just as heavy metal. With just a mini CD unleashed I just had to have a chat with bandleader The Overtly Melancholic Lord Strange (what’s in a name) about these influences and their debut album ‘Portents, Omens and Dooms’.
Hi there, how is the Lamp doing these days? What are you up to at the moment? We are doing very fine thank you very much for asking squire! At the moment we are applying the finishing touches to our debut album ‘Portents, Omens and Dooms’. We shall be playing the Doom Metal Inquisition in Bradford in June and then later on this year we shall be at Hell’s Pleasure in Germany. We have a couple of smaller gigs in between too and are hoping to get more, so this summer is going to be action packed!
Tell us the history of The Lamp Of Thoth? When did you get together and discuss the possibility of a band? What influences of bands or philosophies were/are present? What were you thinking to achieve at that point? Any goals achieved already? I don’t think there really is a philosophy in the regular term of the word, just a shared love of doom and traditional metal, and a healthy interest in guitars, the occult, literature, mythology and all things Yorkshire. Put these things together and you get the amalgamation known as The Lamp of Thoth. Our influences are pretty much what you would expect from a band of our type: Saint Vitus, Pentagram, Manowar, Cirith Ungol, Solstice, Hell, Manilla Road, Slough Feg, Iron Maiden, Deepswitch, Saxon, Judas Priest, early Trouble, early Cathedral, Gates of Slumber, Reverend Bizarre, Hawkwind, Arthur Brown, Motorhead, Dawnwatcher, Pagan Altar, Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, E. R Eddison, Dave Sim, Fritz Leiber, Alan Moore and Arthur Machen, but to name check a few.We try in the construction of our songs to capture the atmosphere of Yorkshire’s rich and varied pagan heritage, its weird stories and events; to put a flavor of what we feel living here in the West Riding amongst the pagan monolith’s of yesteryear, which stand dread and immortal against our vain civilizations’ illusions of ‘progress’. The nefarious activities of the clandestine freemasons go on, the satanic mills are same as they ever were, and prisons of the senses abound!
If you could choose three records that are of the greatest importance to The Lamp Of Thoth, which would that be and why?
Pentagram: Relentless Madcap motherfucker in an ashen funhouse
And a vampire points at the dark circus
He wants me to repent but I know he doesn’t mean it
Check your repentance at the door sucker!
This sermon is a wall of solid rock.
Where a guitar is made monolith and our whims are broken on its seriousness
We discern a prophet who wears a clown’s skin
Aghast with blood drained from the face
A bony scarecrow invites us charmed ravens to feed
And we are dragged down; the entire world’s a stage
But here’s the trapdoor and here’s the world’s gaunt stagehand.
After the crowds have gone home, just before closing time
The world’s gaunt stagehand gets his chance to shine
But chooses not to.
And a vampire points at the dark circus
He wants me to repent but I know he doesn’t mean it
Check your repentance at the door sucker
This sermon is a wall of solid rock.
Saint Vitus: Children of Doom With notes like tears down a ghost’s mournful face
A wounded wolf howls at his heavy chains
By such bondage forced to join dark refrains
The guitars cannot escape the gravity of the bass
Though notes are in economy this monk is not poor
The sweeper of a sweet hell in e-minor’s chord
Can ten thousand angels dance on a fretboard
And of sound’s sonic prison unlock the door?
Speakers shake under pain and duress
Pushing tones intended for the melancholic ear
And I must listen though the meaning is not clear
Does the phantom voice lament at this weakness of flesh?
The needle marches on towards the circles’ last fate
The answer is silence: and for silence we wait.
Cirith Ungol: One Foot in Hell A red eyed albino curses up a winding stair
And howls to twin moons, as distorted shadows bend
Morose mysteries beckoning; Let Chaos descend
I watch the black mathematics malign the air.
A flaccid cosmic spasm spews over all,
From a black machine gouging itself on logic
And as lackeys fall under the lash of the legion whip
A kaleidoscope of gaudy radioactive nightmares form
On the ground; distant men are striving to save
Small burning specks of worthless dust
Their cracked planets trapped in orbits of rust
As the black circle coils round its electric grave
These unconscious armies arise, their banners unfurled.
It’s the 1980’s again on another world.
You are heavily inspired by Victorian times in your lyrics? What attracts you to that era? The ghost stories that started in those days? Can you recommend some reading we must read from that time? At the moment I am reading Wilkie Collin’s ’The Woman in White’, which is not really a ghost story per se, but does contain a lot of gothic elements. There’s some great fantastical literature from this period – surely everyone has read ’Dracula’, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, ‘Zanoni’, ‘The Coming Race’, ‘King Solomon’s Mine’s, and of course ’Wuthering Heights’ (for any fan of Robert E Howard’s philosophy of barbarism versus civilization – Heathcliffe is Conan in another world!). Yes, we are heavily influenced by the Victorian times, perhaps because living here in the industrial North and especially in Keighley we are surrounded by a lot of its architecture, in the mills and the houses built for the workers. In Alan Moore’s ’From Hell’ (another great Victorian novel, albeit a modern one), he plays the idea of architecture as a medium for inducing psychological responses in people, and compares it to history, asking the question of whether history also has an architecture and a shape, but one of which we are unaware; that sequences of related events can be seen as shapes in the fourth dimension. He deals with the ripper murders as a splash in a pond and traces the ripples through history – the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors Murders, and even the conception of Adolf Hitler!
I think that maybe true to a certain extent. The mills still loom large and the Victorian terraced house is oppressive in its uniformity, and as I write this I can see them stretching over the green hills of the Worth Valley like some stubborn army whose war was forgotten long ago, but who patiently waits for hostilities to return. In 1888, the same year that Saucy Jack was murdering his way around Whitechapel, the Horus Temple of The Golden Dawn was operating in Bradford and a rival sect with a claim to the Rosicrucian title who according to the Golden Dawn were ‘untiring in telling how they can raise Elementals, and [were] on the point of forming a circle for obtaining information of a forbidden kind,’ set themselves up as ‘The Lamp of Thoth’. In 2006 a circle was formed to harness the elemental power of doom metal which also went under that singular moniker. History here repeats itself; the architecture of the fourth dimension influencing events through its unseen form? The same form or being that influenced a group of individuals in a small mill town in 1888 to produce their own magazine and set up their own occult organization I think has influenced me a hundred and odd years later to emulate them. For what are our bands really but little covens based on pacts and philosophies in regards to the universal magic of doom metal? The idea of this coven existing in my town and operating from a terraced house I had walked past a million times had a profound influence on me. I love the story and the mythology of it all and I think the Victorian fixation stems from there!
You mention The Old Ones in your biography. Are you an HP Lovecraft adept? Which of his stories do you like most and which one does capture the atmosphere of your music. I am certainly an H.P. Lovecraft adept. I discovered his stories around the age of fourteen and the impressions that they made on my young mind can never be erased. I remember reading an article on him in a magazine somewhere around this time. It was a very fallacious piece that informed me that he used to write all his stories on acid and that both his parents had died in a lunatic asylum, and other such things, which I have since found to be untrue, but it was enough to arouse my curiosity. I think I read ‘Dagon’ first and then ’The Tomb’. I can still remember the effect that the latter had upon me more than the story itself – the strange central image of a man sat outside a tomb every night, just the sheer fucking weirdness of it all. I think that’s the thing with Lovecraft, the way he affects your sub-conscious rather than your conscious mind. The thing that you think you read rather than what is actually there is part of his enduring popularity. As literature he’s pretty rock and roll, in that he is associated with that kind of rebellious thing, in that he evokes all these old gods that are not just set against Christianity in their immenseness but against science and humanity as a whole, as aesthetically he is against the modern schools of literature of the time (yeah! Fuck the trends!) he keeps his literature pure. There are no messy love affairs in his tales or invasive evocations of sexuality, or emotions, or pretentious stabs at existentialism, just this amazingly clinical point of view set against something which is indescribably alien and which it cannot hope to contain but tries to anyway – the heroic scientific last stand. There are two strands in Lovecraft. This immovable scientific point of view which endures beyond the human (for every victim who dies insane another is there to take up this rational voice in further stories and it is precisely the medium whereby the alieness of Lovecraft’s universe is communicated) and the amorphous twisted shapes of the unconscious which stand behind everything, the utter meaninglessness of the words beyond the atmosphere that they evoke. This is doom metal in literary form to me!
Robert E Howard and his tales evoke the same thing but from a converse point of view. If you just substitute the scientific viewpoint for civilization (which he sees as weak and corrupt) and equate his use of barbarism with Lovecraft’s ancient beings (every ready to sweep aside all in their way as barbarism is ever ready not only to overwhelm civilization but also the individual) you can probably see why these two writers are so closely associated with Heavy Metal. For me, Heavy Metal is the perfect combination of these barbarous urges and the civilizing of them through the music – they are given form in their expression. It is interesting that etymologically the word ‘doom’ is indelibly associated with law and judgement. In doom metal, the ethos and meaning of the word meets rock and roll in a way in which it does not in any other form of music, the transforming luciferic (I just made that word up and bound the devil in grammar!) power of rock and roll meets the law and finality of man’s last fate – the individual and final death which presides over all. This is the tension I love in doom metal and in Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
The name of The Lamp Of Thoth is something from that time as well, is it? Cast your mind’s eye through time and space to the year of our lord 1888 and you may find yourself in the mythical town of Keighley situated in the West Riding on the frontier betwixt North Yorkshire and hated Lancashire. Under the grey clouds which seem to have taken residence over the sloping hills, the grim skyline is dotted with satanic mills and stark chimneys caked in lime; the putrid smoke of their indefatigable industry winding down for the evening after a long day bellowing into the sky. It is winter. The mill bells ring and the dirty unwashed move out from the dark bowels like charcoal zombies, bleary ants stung by labour. Under a coarse cloth cap the yellow eyes betray the stoic obedience of the working man as he moves to his day’s reward, for some the warm confines of the public house and a warm pint and a pipe, for others the meager evening meal with an equally as stoic wife. Cast from a mould hard and grim, they dine in one of the many uniform terraced houses which cluster around their dark satanic masters like untold minions. And, as the night draws on with all the stealth of the winter’s darkness and weary heads fall onto pillows in expectation they feel all the weight of their chains and their fat masters upon their backs drawing money as if from their very souls. They are slaves now to machines and the bright among them may balk at the unfairness of it all, they may curse the social conditions and the politics which had led them to this point, the errant mill owners becoming fat on their industry. The religious workman would take comfort in the fact that the bastards may own his body and his labour but rejoice that his immortal soul was free.
But would even the most superstitious among them; of those who dwelt in a life of such narrow scope, dare make the strange supposition that those self same masters and apparent pillars of the community, those who masqueraded as Victorian philanthropists; who espoused the notion that capital can make the world a better place and improve the lot of their fellow men; whose deep belief in the Protestant emphasis on work and industry had been believed as their Gentlemen stood dressed fine and dandy in the summer’s day at the annual work’s outing, giving speech, and revelling in their own generosity over the men and women had a more sinister purpose?
What would the reaction of the average working man be if he knew that now that same fellow who had stood suited and respectable in the summer sun, also stood robed in the sigils of ancient Egypt, before the eerie light of a strange altar. Would he recoil in horror at the coarse vibrations echoing, the guttural consonants of far flung gods strung together as a human tongue attempted to articulate that which was not intended for it? Would he shudder at the sight of pillars of the local community those who had preached hard Christian values to him engaged in unspeakable and outrageous acts? Or would some imp of the perverse draw him into the mystery and wonder of it all, implant in his mind a desire to experience the sensation of such a strange ritual – the strangest and maddest of myths made transparent before his eyes? In number 14 Parkwood Street, Keighley, he would have seen such things and more. To what would the incredulity of the common man bear witness?
Phantasmagoria summoned from the fourth dimension, the unseen master speaking in tongues, faint and wheezy tendrils that rode shapeless through the air? A priestess naked in ecstasy – conjoined with some unseen entity, her belly pregnant with inter-dimensional lice? The nascent eyeballs of the mystic hewn to the heavens, clouded in laudanum before the demon inspired painting hung on the wall that watched all with a satisfied cackle; the goat’s ripped throat casting a dirty but vibrant crimson across the hearth, the creaking and chattering of beings invisible moving in unseen spaces, brushing lightly but forcefully on the mind which threatened to split asunder with the sheer horror of it all? If he could keep it all together, would he realize the nefarious plan of the unseen master, the strange Jarbulon they gave to? Would he wonder at the gift but secretly know that it was his and his fellow’s souls? Would he know that his son and his son’s sons were born only to serve? That the unseen fingers delved into everything and touched all; that nothing was safe or private, that the evil they had unleashed was built to endure. With his last strength before the final madness can you imagine a strange vision washing across his mind, as he becomes himself a being as much a visionary as the strange souls that coven before him? Forward through time may his thoughts flow as ours have moved in reverse – the fourth dimension discriminates not. Would he behold in wonder the two coming apocalypses, more fierce and mighty as the dreaded reckoning that the Sunday school had flung into him, the acres of dead friends; of souls condemned and reaped and the pregnant peace after the holy era that housed a bastard? As he had seen how it had started, he would know how it was to be continued, the twentieth century with its technologies sprung up to spread the message further and wide, the flat and sonorous voice of the radio which shimmered in the air, gave way to the dirge like music of the future and he would hold his head marveling in wonder at the misery at once so familiar and at once so alien. He would behold a thousand devils at a thousand cross roads and witness the birth of a million little covens spread like glorious mantles across the rehearsal rooms of England. One name would stick in his mind due to its attachment to the place where he was born and raised and he would revile at the horror of it: The Lamp of Thoth. He would know that these local gods of repression and sacrifice would endure in whatever form; he would feel their presence, always at his back, always the imperceptible shadow that hung around the edges of his perception, the meaning and motive in every seemingly random and cruel event that affects him and his kind.
Fast forward through time, a hundred and twenty something years later and in a dingy room not far from where the very events imagined (?) took place; three people stand in unison around a central dirge which conveys a strange fascination. A Dickensian wraith with warning on his tongue, the ghost gazes on, astounded at the free and easy use of both blasphemy and electrical power once reserved only for the elite of society. Do they know what they do? Do they not recoil at the symbols they wear, or is it that they no longer hold any terror for them? Do they see the shapes that bend and flow in the guise of musical notes across the ether of uncalculated mathematical spaces; the rage that hides in the lightning harnessed from the wall? The alien concord of ancient gods and dark psychological spaces of bleak Yorkshire landscapes, with which the unseen master sacrifices, through labour and sweat is played out in this performance; the creeping and ever watchful demon now beguiles his victims more overtly and yearns for an audience. The horror of it all washes over him as two hundred watts of raw electrical energy cloaked in the vengeful form of the musical figure of DAMNATION blasts his Christian soul to hell with all the force of a gleefully eerie ‘I Told You So!’
But what is the Lamp exactly? The original Lamp of Thoth was the name of a magazine published by an obscure occult group who operated in Keighley around 1888 (the same year The Golden Dawn set up their Horus temple in nearby Bradford.) They sometimes went by this moniker amongst others, and were made up of some very influential people from in and around the Keighley area. Only two issues of this magazine were originally published (although other people have published magazines on the occult and used the name), and in the short space of their existence (or before they went underground), they managed to put the willies up Madame Blavatsky and MacGregor Mathers who urged their followers to stay well away from the teachings of this group. They accused them of ‘sacrificing goats and raising elementals' and their notoriety was sealed in print through a memo sent to Golden Dawn members, and a warning printed in a Theosophist magazine. Crowley would have loved them!
You use great nicknames, how did those come around? I think it was just the urge to have a stage-name really; they seem to suit what we do in the band, separate ourselves from reality. Lady Pentagram the mysterious mistress of metric diabolism, The Overtly Melancholic Lord Strange, purveyor of strange truths and mundane fantasies, and Randy Reaper, the perfect combination of flash lead guitarist and morosely grim doom merchant!
Doom metal is a genre that frequently has female members. How did Lady Pentagram (if she would like to answer) get into The Lamp Of Thoth? Does she get many remarks or stupid question like mine about her being a female in a doom band? Not really. Feminism was started as a counterpoint to the traditionally patriarchal structure of society and it is only natural that this should filter through all aspects of culture and music and into the doom metal genre. It is a little known fact that Germaine Greer was in a doom band called Eunuch. Their debut album featured a song called ‘Burning Bra’ and Virginia Woolf was in a doom band called Woolf. Their debut album was called ‘A Doom of One’s Own’. Plus, since Lady Pentagram was the instigator of this band, the question should be how did such and intelligent and serious woman fall in with such degenerate and sexist men like me and Randy?!
OK, finally to your CD EP. You just re-released your ten-inch as a CD EP. Why? And why choose live songs as a bonus and no new songs? I think it was quite simply for the people who didn’t have record players. The live songs were chosen to preview the new album and to give a sense of what we are about live. Plus I just love bonus live songs!
Why did you choose Miskatonic Foundation, Lovecraft again maybe? Are you pleased with the promotion and all they do for you? Best label in the world! Everything is geared towards the music and the bands, and everything is put back in to the label to help more bands and keep the underground alive. We are very pleased and honored to be part of such a thing.
You also released a special version of the CD EP, what’s that all about? Do you fancy such limited editions yourself, in music or otherwise? Do you collect anything? What exactly and why? In today’s strange and alienating culture of mass consumption, of trends and mass production, of everyone watching the same films and television and eating the same things, in this climate of the gradual but steady globalization by corporations, we have lost the simple pleasure in the unique and individual merits of the artisan, and of the individual and unique thing. I think that that is what the limited editions that Rich Walker and others like him put together give not just the record collector back, but the music fan too. It becomes not just a recording on a piece of plastic, but an experience in itself and a true work of art, wherein the music, the philosophies and style of the bands become one with the art and conception of the presentation. I am very proud of the limited edition of ‘Cauldron of Witchery’. Rich did a fantastic job on the cover artwork, layout, and the t-shirt that came with it and I think this attention to making it the best that it could be carries over, and that the care taken in presenting such things reflects the effort and support that such people give to the doom metal scene, and is one that goes beyond any financial interests or gain.
What’s up with a new record, a full length? Any progress? Do you have songs ready? Any titles you want to share? Our debut album ‘Omens, Portents & Dooms’ is recorded and we are just awaiting the final mixes. The running order will be as follows:
1. I Love The Lamp
2. Witchcraft & The Law
3. Wings Of Doom
4. The House
5. Blood On Satan's Claw
6. Victorian Wizard
7. You Will Obey
8. Pagan Daze
9. Hand Of Glory
10. Satan's Hammer
We can hear some live songs on the CD EP. How would you describe The Lamp Of Thoth on stage? No nonsense doom metal played in the old styles with one hundred percent conviction, displaying a natural ignorance towards trends, a mocking middle finger to all posers, a friendly ‘fuck yeah’ to all those who worship the Sabbathian style riff and the NWOBH ethos, and a hearty salutation to all the bands and individuals who do the same and keep the underground doom metal scene alive by going out and playing live and/or organizing the gigs instead of sitting on their arses or who go out to listen to live music instead of lamenting times long gone whilst being spoon fed the crap the mainstream serves up!
And when will we see you guys and girl on stage in the Netherlands? I hope in the near future! We will play anywhere and to get out and play in Europe is a dream come true for us.
Any more questions I forgot to ask but which you would like to answer? No I think you covered it! Great questions! Cheers and Hails from The Lamp of Thoth!
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