Welcome to The Riff Report 🤘🔥
We’re buzzing to have Zadkiel UK joining us. From studio lock-ins to live mayhem, you’ve been doing it the right way — so let’s get into it.
🎤 THE INTERVIEW
1️⃣ For anyone discovering you for the first time — who are
Zadkiel
, where are you from, and what sort of noise are you making?
Zadkiel are a four piece Alt Rock / Modern Prog band from Nottingham.
Dan Heathcote – Vocals/ Guitar
George Beedle – Lead Guitar
Josh Marsh – Bass
Michael Bawldry – Drums
2️⃣ How did the band originally form — and was it smooth sailing or absolute chaos from day one?
The current line up came together mostly in 2015. There were previous incarnations prior to that, with our drummer Michael joining in 2019. Zadkiel has been active since the early 2000’s. The first 2 Eps Inverted Heaven (2003) and The Ethereal Fear (2007) and the first album The Saturn Return (2011) featured various people including my brother Tim, but we broke up after the first album. I reformed the band with the new members later. I met George through joinmyband.com in 2013 and we wrote some songs together.. then Mark Duckers joined on drums bringing his friend Josh in 2015. Mark left and was replaced by Michael in 2019. Its been more of an evolution that a chaos. That’s the way I choose to see it.
3️⃣ Describe your sound to someone who’s never heard you — without using genre labels.
The lyrics are HR Giger’s otherworldy futuristic visions combined with William Blake’s spiritual symbolism..
Darkly euphoric, hauntingly beautiful, visceral. Atmospheric music with attention to detail
Weird tunings, odd timings.
4️⃣ What bands or artists first lit the fuse for you growing up?
Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. I saw Radiohead as a teenager on The Bends tour in the mid 90’s in a small venue. Nothing is going to beat that in terms of mind blowing impact. But that’s inspiration. You have to harness it to find out who you are. It was the catalyst but not the blueprint. Jeff Buckley’s death in 1997 also affected me. It added a sense of urgency, at 19 I decided that I had to be a songwriter no matter what. Life’s too short to not do what you love. It was a calling, my soul was wanting to make music, regardless of how it might be perceived. So with 2 of the best vocalists as guides, I went about finding my own voice.
5️⃣ You’ve currently got the entire Zadkiel UK back catalogue online, with exclusive tracks on Bandcamp too
— how are you feeling about it now that it’s out in the wild in its entirety?
It’s there and there is a sense of completion in terms of an initial phase. I want us to go further though.
It exists mainly for others to access. But it’s also mine and the band’s body of work. I love the songs but I tend to not play them myself online that much because I want to get on with creating the next thing.
I hear them more often playing them live and that’s the way it should be I think.,
To answer this question with more clarity, not all of the back catalogue is currently up on all streaming platforms. The whole discography so far is on Bandcamp though. We decided to pull them down for a bit when considering Spotify’s lack of integrity in terms of A.I. and investment in Military applications. The songs are in the process of all going back up, as there’s only so much we can do about that in our position, we need the exposure. I prefer Bandcamp as a platform but understand we need to be as visible online as possible.
6️⃣ Pick one track from your current releases that best represents the band right now.
Probably would be Hypersleep in terms of new Zadkiel, from Transient Resurrection. It’s a collaboration between me and George musically and lyrically. The even newer stuff that we are recording for the 2nd album at the moment would be Joan Of Arc. It has established itself as a live favourite with the audience.
7️⃣ How do songs usually come together in Zadkiel
— riffs first, lyrics first, jamming, or full chaos?
My own songwriting is music first then lyrics. However I write poetry every day, and my method is kind of cut-up technique when assembling the lyrics, except rather than randomly it’s with intention to cherry pick the best bits from all of writing so far. I write more abstract and George writes more narrative. Those co written songs become more story telling with stream of consciousness as juxtaposition.
My own songs that I write are more elliptical but with direct lines and context about relationships and places be they imaginary or real. Once we have songs written they tend to get vetted and curated a bit by the bass player Josh, he’s often an early adopter in terms of listening to them before we work on them. Sometimes they have to wait their turn.. but once we all buy into them they come to life quickly. Any chaos comes from experimenting with sounds and structure and that happens also.. Some songs already written are pretty much fully formed to begin with.
🎛️ STUDIO TIME & SURVIVAL
8️⃣ When you’re locked away in the studio, what’s the vibe like — intense focus or organised chaos?
Both Focus and Organised Chaos. The Focus is the passion and precision of playing the tracks well and expresses ourselves together as a collective and individually, The Organised Chaos is the experiment and the emotion that we bring to performing. The passion is losing ourselves in it. The emotion is transmitting feelings to the audience and each other. Some of it is dark and uncomfortable in terms of the material but we have built up trust. And when we get heavy it’s with the understanding that we seek catharsis from the process rather than indulging in bad moods. The music goes to both ends of the spectrum. Music should move in different ways.
9️⃣ Be honest — what’s the band’s
go-to food and drink in the studio
?
Monster Energy drinks for the bassist Josh.. Coffee for me and Michael, and Coca cola for me and the guitarist George. None of us drink really before gigs. I’m more of a caffeine addict. We do drink alcohol after shows. We don’t day drink or drink at rehearsals, thankfully. Food wise fast food sometimes or pub meals when we’re out… nothing out of the ordinary.
🔥 LIVE GIGS, BEST NIGHTS & ABSOLUTE DISASTERS
🔟 What does a
Zadkiel UK live show feel
like from the stage?
People have responded to our live gigs really well, seeming happy, even if some of the music we make is not happy! its both dark and light, yin and yang. From my perspective on stage we get lost in the music with hypnotic melodic passages, but then are awakened but jolts of distortion and more hard hitting chords and riffs.
It’s a roller coaster sometimes playing the more complex songs and we are human and don’t always nail it, but for the most part we do and I think audiences can see that. We as musicians focus on hangups but the crowd tends to see the bigger picture. Unless it’s not your kind of music, I’d say listeners come away feeling they had a decent experience, possibly a moving one. That’s what i’ve heard from those that have spoken to us afterwards anyway. That’s from both strangers, acquaintances and friends.
1️⃣1️⃣ What’s the best gig you’ve ever played — and what made it so special?
That’s a hard question, probably the Zadkiel Saturn Return album launch at the Maze in 2011 in Nottingham or when we headlined our own one day festival in 2016 also at The Maze which has closed down now. Both shows we got to choose our support bands and we chose Awooga from Sheffield on those occasions.They are a psychdelic prog metal 3 piece, really good musicians they’ve been featured in Prog magazine.
They own a venue we like called West Street Live and we met them there. So getting to watch them and then perform ourselves afterwards on both occasions felt special. The album launch show probably edges it though cause we sold enough records on the night to cover the recording costs of the album sessions… where as the After Dark All Nighter was more work organising with 8 bands on the bill and lots of logistics to sort out. The event actually overran and we nearly didn’t get to play it, we went on at 1 am with an hour to go before closing, which was surreal but there were still people there! The Maze has shut down now which is a shame, I have good memories of it on the whole.
1️⃣2️⃣ The flip side: what’s the worst gig you’ve played so far?
The worst gig I’ve probably ever played was a solo one where the PA blew up while i was performing acoustic, The Desk just went dead. That was with this cool band from New York called The Schizophonics. The venue Faradays managed to get hold of another one, my friend Lee Heir organised the gig and was instrumental in making sure it still went on. However someone from one of the other bands called The Evil Tones! was blaming me for the desk dying.. (My acoustic guitar which is electro-acoustic) was running off of a 9 volt Duracel battery, which seems pretty unlikely to have caused a power surge. You learn that other people have so much riding on their own performance that they look to blame others for problems with the equipment, when cooler heads prevailed and the show went on. Anyway the gig still happened despite technical issues everybody got to perform albeit an hour late. I feel sorry for whoever paid for that desk at the venue, or maybe they got it cheap on ebay!
1️⃣3️⃣ Have you ever had a gig go wrong before you even hit the stage?
In Chesterfield once a couple of years ago, we played an event where they were hosting the football at the same time and we got there and there were raffle prizes and presents in the stage area as well as people. We had to put our equipment in a basement, whilst other bands dumped all their gear on stage and it was packed, so when it came to our turn onstage we had to fight to get out amps upstairs and on to the stage it was a war zone. It turned out to be a case of the wrong kind of place. Someone got very upset about sharing the microphone because of getting very ill during covid. I can understand to a degree but it became an issue because it was not spoken about before and there were several other bands who thought there would be a sound guy which there wasn’t. The venue just booked the bands without one and relied on a PA nobody else there could use… so we ended up doing our own sound onstage. Not the most enjoyable gig from the get go. Luckily I brought a spare microphone.
1️⃣4️⃣ What’s the smallest, weirdest, or most unexpected place you’ve played a show?
I’ve played in a cave solo acoustic a few times in Nottingham in the late 2000’s at a place called Loggerheads that lost its music license but got round it by putting acoustic acts on downstairs in a series of caves in the basement. That was a good experience, in terms of trialing out new material to smaller audiences. It closed down in 2010 but it had an interesting subterranean vibe. There was a singer songwriter scene that frequented there as well as the Acoustic Rooms. It would have made for good video content but was before the rise of the smartphone and Instagram.
1️⃣5️⃣ Any gigs where everything went wrong… but the crowd saved it?
I’ve had gigs where my pedal set up hasn’t worked. Luckily my amp and guitar are reliable and haven’t let me down though. So when we are thrown on to change over in less than 15 mins you have very little time to change any of the cables or identify any issues. In those situations I’ve put my pedal board aside and plugged straight into the amp and just played. My Fender Strat has a sustainer and sounds good raw, the amp is a Marshall JCM 900 and has decent clean and distortion.. so the basics do the job.
I played a gig in a different project with a covers band in the past that someone in the band decided to bail out of on the day. So me and the drummer had to get another friend of ours to come down and play from a set of notes I wrote for them, which they studied half an hour beforehand. We played a few of my own songs and Creep by Radiohead and the crowd loved it and bought us drinks all night. We winged it, and couldn’t believe that people could like it so much when it was so last minute. Moral of the story is: don’t work with people who cancel with less than 24 hours notice. It works against your reputation if you let venues down by not letting them know in sufficient time. Whatever the reason to cancel it’s unprofessional. Luckily that was not with Zadkiel. The crowd wanted more. I just sighed a sigh of relief that the rest of us turned up and did it and it went ok.
1️⃣6️⃣ Which venue, city, or festival always delivers for you?
Other than Nottingham where we play most, we’ve always had a good reaction in Sheffield. We played at a place called West Street Live and always came away feeling things were going well. That was up until covid, but since then we’ve not really played there because they are focusing on covers bands now to pay the bills, in modern times it seems like the safe bet to keep the lights on. Hopefully we can play there again in the future though if the policy changes, sometimes thats to do with the demographic of punters who go there. Some of them are what our bass player refers to as Normies.. a crowd more into mainstream non challenging music certainly not into Prog.
1️⃣7️⃣ Is there a gig moment that still gets talked about in the band now?
A recent gig where I cut my finger and bled all over my guitar. I ended up smearing the blood onto my face to avoid getting it on my clothes, hands and the stage. It looked worse than it was and we kept going. I didn’t change the guitar, we just powered on through it. Took me an hour to clean my White Strat afterwards. The venue was very kind and had first aid. I must have taken the tip of my finger off but it was a minor injury and not too painful, it’s fine now.
1️⃣8️⃣ Pre-gig rituals: what has to happen before you walk on stage?
The other bands have to have finished their set and begun taking their gear off, so the usual change-over protocol of being respectful and ready. Basically my ritual is to stay calm and present and not drink before I go on stage. Not that I had or have a drinking problem, it’s just that I am the sort of performer that does have nerves, even when confident about the material and the practice going into it. It’s just adrenaline and it’s there to be used during the show not before. Once I’m in the moment and getting into it I’m lost in it and want to be there onstage.
1️⃣9️⃣ What’s the one thing that can instantly kill the vibe at a live show?
Anyone who shows up to the show that you’re not really friends with anymore who didn’t come and see you whilst you were friends. That’s not a long list but awkward acquaintances have happened to both me and our drummer Michael. He’s had a stalker and I’ve had unsupportive former band mates, not anyone who was in Zadkiel before though, but from other projects that didn’t really go anywhere. Ex Zadkiel members have been very supportive and they made it clear they valued their time in the band, especially the ones from Mansfield and the friends of my brother who used to play bass in the band. They are always welcome at shows.
2️⃣0️⃣ Do you write songs with live crowds in mind?
Not really. We’re not that kind of band. We’re not signed at the moment there is no record label pressure, national radio play / press hype to live up to. We do our own thing and it is generally well received by the people who see us. Some of whom come back to see us and talk about some of the songs, so that gives us an indication as to what’s working. That could change if we became more successful.
2️⃣1️⃣ Dream support slot or festival booking — who are you sharing the stage with and where?
Dream support slot would be supporting Radiohead, dream festival would have been Glastonbury but more likely somewhere like Arctangent nowadays or All Points East. But more of a down to earth aim would be to play with Amplifier. I’m friends with the main man Sel Balamir and they are successful in their own right having been in Prog magazine and toured Europe and run their own label Rockosmos. They are a brilliant well kept secret that deserves to be bigger. They showed some interest in us at one point but there were a lot of other great bands signed to them too and it didn’t happen at that point. I’m hopeful of working with them some day maybe.
2️⃣2️⃣ After the noise, the sweat, and the adrenaline — how do you chill as a band once the gig’s over?
A beer or two and talking to the audience, either friends or new acquaintances (some of whom become friends!) then packing up the gear and taking it back to the studio. When I get home I like to blast some music in my room and feel the buzz or channel any frustrations. Then it’s time to sleep, switch off and onto the next day, the next gig, the next recording session, the next song.
🎶 THE BIGGER PICTURE
2️⃣3️⃣ What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far as a band?
We’re all human and we make mistakes. Not a litany of mistakes but there are off nights sometimes or circumstances beyond your control. That goes for everyone in the band, but the important thing is that we learn from them. Feel the fear and do it anyway. I’m driven to play music, some nights are more enjoyable than others but I’d rather be doing this than anything else. We’ve learned to compromise with each other without compromising our integrity, our sound or the mission. There are times when we have to adjust when the band member’s work schedules can get in the way and we have to be patient about progress. Other times the momentum is happening and sometimes we have to sacrifice our down time. The pendulum swings both ways.
2️⃣4️⃣ The rock and metal scene runs on community — who do you want to shout out?
Shout out to Noisemakers’ Guild and Blackwater Lightship who we are playing with on May 1st at The Salutation Inn in Nottingham. Especially Lee Heir, the singer from NG who has been instrumental in helping us book shows. His band is like a cross between Echo and The Bunnymen and The Doors. Some great lead guitar playing from Jez, almost stadium rock in the best sense of the word, and a glam Bowie/Suede type rhythm section from Kevin and Kikey.. Lee’s vocals aren’t bad either. Bowie would be proud if he could see them now.
2️⃣5️⃣ What’s the ultimate goal for
Zadkiel UK
?
A cult following, Touring the UK and possibly Europe. Releasing more albums.. being prolific and keeping the attention to detail and quality up. Making a comfortable living from music. Being a modest success.
2️⃣6️⃣ What’s coming next — new music, tours, festivals, or secrets you’re not allowed to spill yet?
We are working on our 2nd album and have recorded 7 new songs and are about 3/4 of the way through the recording process. We have 2 songs mastered, however we can’t release anything until we have finished the record, but are hoping it sees completion by early 2027. It’s recorded by Tom Henthorn in Sheffield, who did some sterling work with (heavy shoegazers) New Ghost on their album A Dagger In Every Tide.
2️⃣7️⃣ Finish this sentence:
“If you like your rock/metal loud, honest, and played like it means something, you should check out ZADKIEL because…”
We are original, authentic and are doing new things with the songs especially lyrically, pushing the envelope for Prog in terms of atmospheric escapism!
🔥 RIFF REPORT SIGN OFF
