Bill Steer thinks he was too young to appreciate Carcass' achievements – and he was convinced he'd failed when they split up in 1995.
The guitarist was persuaded to take part in their reunion in 2008, which led to the release of sixth album Surgical Steel last year.
And while they’re held in high regard now, he’s not sure what changed in the meantime.
Steer tells Faceculture: “Presumably someone’s name-checked us along the way. We get respect now for the stuff we did, but it wasn’t really like that at the time. There’s people touting the third and fourth records as influential and that’s lovely – but at the time they weren’t very popular. We were just about treading water; we could play a few shows across Europe and the States, but we weren’t a big band.”
But he’s not certain they deserve their label as pioneers of grindcore. “I wouldn’t want to take credit for anything,” he says. ‘If you speak to certain American bands that are very big, for them it started with At The Gates and In Flames. Carcass was old music to them that wasn’t even worth bothering about.” He concludes: “I don’t even try to think about it.”
It took bandmate Jeff Walker a while to talk him into rejoining. “I thought I’d failed,” he admits. “I was just a young guy with no life experience.” But that changed when he picked up his guitar and started playing Carcass riffs. “I was worried it would be really hard, but it was a lot of fun to do it,” he recalls.
And his thoughts are turning to the band’s eight studio outing. “At some point we’ll get together and start jamming on a few riffs and take it from there. We’re not going to rush anything – if we do a new record it has to be valid. We can’t repeat the last record.
“We just have to get together in a rehearsal place, like we always do, and hack through all the available material and see what we come up with.”
Carcass have touring commitments until November so studio work is unlikely to begin until at least next year. They play this year’s Bloodstock festival at Catton Park, Derbyshire on August 7, the Limelight, Belfast, on September 19 and the Academy, Dublin, on September 20.
