Ol Drake is enjoying life. He just got home from work – a job in a warehouse, before you ask – and not even the manure a farmer has spread near his house can dampen his mood. (When a strong smell of shit can’t get you down, things are going well.)
In between work, playing Xbox and having a few drinks with his mates, the former Evile guitarist has made a solo, instrumental album wittily titled Old Rake, and featuring such profoundly named songs as Guitarists Playing Guitars. No, he is not taking himself too seriously, and yes, he’s out just to have fun this time – not that we should be surprised, given this is a man who spent one Bloodstock made up like Abbath.
“Even when it came to naming songs, I thought of some names and thought, ‘That’s a cool name,’” he explains, “but it didn’t work, it didn’t feel right, because I’m not serious. It’s best to laugh at yourself. I wanted the song titles to be funny instead of Black Skull Death Goat.”
Ol doesn’t appear to regret his time in Evile. While he seems to have found that not everyone in metal is as appreciative of its funny side (“A lot of people take metal very, very seriously. I found it a lot more when we went to places like Germany – they’re very serious about metal!”), you don’t get anecdotes like the one he has about Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine anywhere else. This story comes from when Evile supported the thrash gods.
“He [Mustaine] was telling us about someone’s liking for Japanese porn,” Ol recalls. “And specific porn, involving ‘number two’. He decided that he’d re-enact some of it. He asked his personal assistant if she had a banana, and she said, ‘No, but I’ve got a bread roll,’ so she gave him the roll, he stood down the hallway a bit, squatted down, then dropped the bread between his legs onto the floor, and said, ‘That was exactly like what the porn was like!’ While it was happening, I was thinking, ‘I used listen to this guy when I was 16, and I idolised him, and now I’m watching him dropping bread and re-enacting Japanese shit porn.’”
With tales like that, it’s possibly for the best that Ol kept his album instrumental rather than autobiographical.
Old Rake is out now via Earache
