Skindred singer Benji Webbe is a self-proclaimed super-fan of Korn.
So when Korn frontman Jonathan Davis was unable to perform with the band at Download in 2006 due to illness, it was lucky for the Bakersfield quintet that Webbe was onsite with his own band.
“Fieldy approached me, and he actually asked me to sing Twist and A.D.I.D.A.S., but I didn’t want to do two in case the crowd thought I was shit and they started throwing piss at me,” he reveals. “So I just did the one in the end.”
Luckily, his appearance passed without incident. And because of that very reason, we thought it seemed fitting to have the self-styled King of Newport select his top 10 tracks by Bakersfield’s finest…
TWIST (Life Is Peachy, 1996)
“I was on tour in Holland and I kept seeing these t-shirts with these weird ‘Korn’ logos on them, and I remember thinking to myself, ’What the fuck’s that?’ All these metal kids had them on and I didn’t know what the fuck ‘Korn’ meant. Anyway, in record stores back in the olden days they used to have these posts with CDs, and you could walk up to the CD player, stick on these headphones, and press play. There were a couple of albums in the one I went up to in Amsterdam, and I noticed one was by this band Korn. The first song on there was a song called Twist. I put it on, and I’ve never been so fucking shocked in all my life, bro. I instantly fell in love with the tune, and I must’ve stood in that booth for about 45 minutes, just playing Twist over, and over, and over again. So that was my first ever introduction to Korn, and I felt this feeling of like, ‘Wow! This is freedom.’ I was expecting them to sound like Sum 41, or something – some massive radio song by some American punk band. And I was happy that it wasn’t that. It was experimental and fucking weird, and I was blown away.”
BLIND (Korn, 1994)
“I never bothered listening to the rest of that album in Amsterdam. I just fell in love with Twist, and that was it. Then later on I’m in this club, and I hear the intro to this song and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, this sounds like that band.’ The song was Blind, and I think it was the fact that there was a live vibe to it all that I was drawn to it. They didn’t seem to be trying to write a radio song, which a lot of people at that time were. It was the Zeppelin-ness of it that I liked, and the sound of a band in a studio just recording a live song. It goes out of time, and it’s just so real, and that’s why I loved Korn in the early days.”
WICKED (Life is Peachy, 1996)
“The reason I love this song is because it’s an Ice Cube cover, and the way them [Korn] and Chino [Moreno from Deftones, who provides guest vocals on the track] took it apart and put it back together, I thought was wicked – pardon the pun! For want of a better word, when nu-metal bands do rap covers, they’re normally shit. But I’ll play this song whenever I DJ, because it’s a killer tune and it just works so well.”
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SHOOTS AND LADDERS (Korn, 1994)
“I like this song because of all them weird fucking nursery rhymes. I like the way they fuck with what should be little children’s night-time songs, and turn them into weird, evil satanic forces. I love that.”
GOOD GOD (Life is Peachy, 1996)
“This is one of those songs that gets me pumped whenever I go to the gym – that isn’t very often, but when I do this is always a song that’s on my training playlist. And the intro is just fucking evil. I love it.”
FREAK ON A LEASH (Follow the Leader, 1998)
“This was when he [Jonathan Davis] reverted back to the stuff that he used to do on the earlier records, during the middle of the song. It’s that insane, blabbering craziness that he’s so good at. And the chorus is huge. I liked him on the earlier stuff more than the later stuff, because I think he was more experimental. He wasn’t a parody of himself back then, if you know what I mean. I love all the demos from the early years as well, when he was just discovering his voice. I collect Korn demos and I love all that early stuff, even from back when they were called L.A.P.D. There’s some fucking banging stuff from those sessions, before Jonathan joined the band.”
FALLING AWAY FROM ME (Issues, 1999)
“This was when they started doing more electronic based stuff, and Falling Away From Me is great for that. I love all the spooky stuff they do, and this song has that really fucking eerie intro.”
GET UP! (The Path of Totality, 2011)
“This one song they did on the dub-step record was a return to form, for me. I’d just got into dub-step myself, and when I first heard this I was so excited because I never expected Korn to do this kind of stuff. But they smacked me in the face with this and I was like, ‘Yeah! This is why I love them.’ It’s like with The Clash and Rock the Casbah – that’s not a punk rock song. But they used what was around them with the dance influences, and bands should do that. They have to do that to move with the times. Expect if you’re AC/DC, of course.”
A.D.I.D.A.S. (Life is Peachy, 1996)
“When I got the chance to sing A.D.I.D.A.S. for Korn at Download Festival in 2006, it was one of the highlights of my life and my musical career. A.D.I.D.A.S. has always been a classic Korn song to me, and when I was asked to sing it in front of 80,000 people I was more than happy to do so. And from what I’ve heard and what I’ve read, I did it justice, which is one of the best things that could’ve ever happened.”
LOWRIDER (Life is Peachy, 1996)
“Last but by no means least, let’s throw their cover of Lowrider in the there, just because it reminds me of Cheech & Chong. Done.”
