Simone Pennucci & Pietro La Tegola - Bird
Simone:
We’re all native Neapolitans, that’s the same for all the ex-members of the band. We can say that we feel dominated by the so called “Parthenopean culture” in both, the glorious and degrading aspects. As you can denote from our latest album cover (in which also the mighty Vesuvius mountain appears), “The great beast from the sea” is a sort of dedication-title to Naples and to all light and darkness of “her”. Growing up in Naples has been very contradictory: it has been full of fun, full of beauty but also full of weirdness. Our city has more than a thousand faces and souls, and we can say that this has been also one of the nice thing about growing here: lots of humanity, lots of troubles, lots of occultism and legends could be found in this place.
For what concerns music, we all basically started during the high school days with our first bands playing covers of our heroes. Later we started a project called “Whiskeycold Winter” that was a sort of previous nucleus of BIRD. Fun fact, Bruno(Lucrezi, our actual drummer) was a forming member of the first Whiskeycold line ups and now he’s back in the saddle again! I basically started playing guitar, then, during the first-school band rehearsals, it occurred more than once that the singer was absent, so I started mumblin’ at the mics in order of not leaving it all instrumental and… Hey that was cool, so I started singin’ “officially” too.. After a bunch of years, almost nothing has changed… Except my age!
Pietro:
I started playing guitar when I was 15, basically due to the fact that I fell in love with Iron Maiden and I wanted to play just like them.
Simone:
Talking about influences and favorite bands, this would be a very difficult question: I like a lot of things and would be hard to make a list, of course I had many phases concerning music tastes (you know, the hard rock era, the blues era, the folk one etc.), but the nice thing about my little trip towards music is that I’m still in love with what I liked as a teen-ager and ,then, during the years it also happened to add lots, and lots of pieces more: nowadays, if I give a look to my Spotify playlists I see that during the same day I can easily come across different listenings, going from Muddy Waters to Spiritual Beggars, passing towards (casual names) Gov’t Mule, Hendrix, Eels, Uncle Acid, Rainbow, Spidergawd, Blue Oyster Cult, Grateful Dead, CSNY, Black Keys, or even Pentangle…
And the list could go on for several hours! Most of it is about classic things or nu-vintage, but I don’t even deny modern LO-FI, or electronic things! Bruno was a former member of Whiskeycold Winter, the previous project we had, in the early days and a childhood friend of mine. Then I met Pietro and totally fell in love with his playing, after a while we became close-friends and he joined the band too! We’ve had lots of line up changes, then the “Whiskeycold experience” collapsed in 2017. From that moment we decided to create a new project and to experiment something new, so BIRD took life. We are also all part of other musical projects, some of them, such as Lee Van Cleef (Pietro), or The Dhaze(me) are always based on “heavy psych sonorities”, anyway, all the bands we’re in, have an equal importance!
None is second to none! It’s sure that italian music is not too famous for the heavy side, even if we have a lot of marvellous bands such as Messa, Giobia, or Witchwood that proudly defend our country name abroad! Coming back to us, while our previous band was a sort of “southern rock’n roll” thing, with BIRD it’s all influenced by 60’s and 70’s music, we all love hard blues, early prog, British folk, psych music, proto-metal stuff and, of course, SABBATH riffs! The first BIRD line up was different and included, out of me and Pietro, Emanuele Musella on backing vocals/bass and Lorenzo Manna on drums (Pietro was playing guitars at the time).
This is the line up with which we recorded “Mother of pain”, “In the night he comes” and “The great beast from the sea”. Then we morphed into a trio , Pietro moved to the bass and Bruno came back, but we have also a mysterious live guest who moves synths and mysterious modules! We don’t have a main rule in writing music: Sometimes we jam along til we get a nice idea, sometimes we start from demos and then go on arranging it together! Mother of pain was our first auto-production and was almost totally recorded and mixed by me and the band, we did not have yet our own studio so it sounded very garage oriented. As I said before, it started from some pre-recorded ideas, and then, playing around it we found the final structure together. The song is a little tribute to Dario Argento’s “Three mothers trilogy” and this also inspired the artwork , released for us by Francesco Bauso at Negative Crypt Art.
Black Night instead, was more a sort of funny game for us… We just tried to imagine how would a Deep Purple song sound if… It was played by Sabbath. So, we got it slower, we liked it and… We did it! A bunch of musical Easter eggs appear during the song and, by the way we still have a offer that cannot be refused: we owe a couple of beers to anyone finds all the references to other songs! Between “Mother” and “The Great beast” we had a couple of single releases. “In the night he comes” was written and recorded during autumn 2019 and had to be a sort of “Halloween special”, also due to the horror topic of the lyrics. In a second moment we decided to engage Silvi (Pearl) to sing on it and we kept in touch with the guys of Electric Fire Records (Austria) that were interested in releasing the digital single as a part of their label’s catalogue.
As often, the song started from some guitars/vocals demos, then the band played on it and we recorded and re-amped all the instruments in our rehearsal room. All the production phases were managed by me under Pietro’s supervision, except for the mastering that was released by Thomas Ranosz. Differently, “La Danse des Cadaveres” was created during the first, damned Covid-quarantine and considering the fact that we couldn’t move or meet each other, I started the project in my home-studio and then the guys sent me their parts. As I said, we’ve always been big admirers of projects like Fairport Convention, or Midwinter and all that British folk, so this was our first unplugged release. In a second moment , this song begun part of the official track-list of “The Great beast”, creating a sort of continuity with “Wintertale”, that already had that kind of mood. As you noticed, we also recorded some covers such as Uriah Heep’s “The Wizard”, or Rainbow’s “Man on the silver mountain” , the reason is very simple: it’s funny!
We love those songs and this is our humble way of awarding our youth heroes! We generally use cover songs as digital b-sides for our singles. The Great Beast from the Sea’s approach was slightly different, we decided not to to face the entire recording approach alone and to just concentrate on music. Almost everything except of vocals, synths and acoustic instruments (that once again we recorded in our place) were recorded in another studio and under the supervision of Seb Di Martino at his SDM Recordings studio. Seb is a very good sound engineer and he has already worked on “The Dhaze” debut album “Deaf, Dumb, Blind”, he did a cool job, so we decided to work with him at the new tracks.
He recorded electric instruments and drums, then mixed and mastered all the whole thing. Even for what concerns the sound, the direction slightly changed: while the first releases was darker and doomy, here we wanted something much more vintage oriented. Talking about lyrics, once again we do not have strict rules, but certainly we’re basically very influenced from a certain kind of mood: all that concerns occultism, myths, legends, horror/supernatural tales have always fascinated us a lot but those topics tend in our vision to become symbols to explain, narrate and describe our inner and external reality. Allow me now to give you a little spoiler, it is very probable that our next release will be mainly based on our local folklore and superstition!
Pietro:
Pandemic was just a pain in the ass, for people like us who are trying to work with music was even worst, but we never stop playing during the lockdown: we felt like criminals, cause we were quietly breaking the law! But as I said we kept on tracking music and taking at least a weekly rehearsal, having care of each others and being very careful about the virus. We never been taken by covid though! We recorded No Gold together with all the songs you can listen in the first EP; there were a couple of side tracks we used to play since the beginning of the band, so we decided to share with you those songs too and the best way to make it possible was to release a single for every song in the Great Beast album, together with one of those b-sides. Maybe there will be another single bundle.
We still have a couple of covers we’d like to introduce before a proper new album As I said we never stop playing and making our music, even during the pandemic. Living in a city like Napoli, without a proper rock n’ roll scene, we never been able to play a lot of gigs, because you know, there wasn’t any gig at all, most of the time! That’s the reason why we’re trying to arrange some gigs outside Napoli or better outside Italy: we really hope to spread our music at least around Europe, as soon as possible! We have a new album on the way, it will be a sort of concept, involving the dark and millenary history of our hometown, which Is full of alchemy, black magic and folklore; our goal is to try to let people discover those sides of Napoli, beside the over abused pictures of the Sea and Pizza. I wanna thank Primitive Man for giving us the chance to speak about our band and our music; just keep on listening to Bird and please, don’t let real rock n’ roll die!
https://www.instagram.com/bird_heavy_rock/
Dakota Brown
