Roarrock caught up with Evil scarecrow for a chat before they hit Prestatyn.

You must be pretty excited to be playing Hammerfest?

Yeah, we were thrilled to be asked to play and even more so as the line-up unfolded, it’s brilliant for us to be playing the same event bands that we are huge fans of like Anthrax and Amon Amarth, we can’t wait! The only slightly disappointing thing is clashing with Evile who we really respect as musicians and people, we played with them a few years ago at The Snooty Fox in Wakefield and have watched their amazing rise in popularity, hopefully we’ll get to play with them again at some point.
What can we expect from your set?

Err… possibly the first ever audience participation pyro show, that’s if we’re able to get it organised!? Of course there will also be the usual robot dancing and assorted nonsense too. It’s going to be a challenging day for us as we’ve got to make sure that the whole band manages to get to our 00:25 start time without either falling asleep or getting horrendously drunk, if you see any of us before we go onstage under no circumstances buy us a drink, save it for Saturday when we’ll be allowed to get drunk!

How are things going for you as a band at the moment?

Things are pretty great at the moment really. There have been lots of gig offers coming in this year keeping our management busy and the feedback we’re getting has never been better. We’re all really excited about everything that we have coming up in 2012.

What plans do you have for the rest of the year?

Well after Hammerfest we do have a lot more gigs planned which is always a great feeling. Amongst many others we have a couple of important shows in April, our return to London and a hometown Nottingham gig. In June we’re off to Ibiza on the Hard Rock Hell Road Trip, we certainly didn’t ever expect to be playing in Ibiza so that’s really exciting. We also have our English seaside summer holiday in July with gigs in Portsmouth and Bournemouth. We’ve got bookings right through to October so please keep checking our Facebook page for the latest dates to be announced.

When you’re on stage do you feed of the crowd?

Absolutely, the crowd are almost part of a Scarecrow show, if we get a crowd who don’t seem to understand what we’re doing you can rely on Brother Pain or Dr. Hell to bully them round to it. Our best shows are the ones where the crowd is with us whether there are ten of them or several thousand.
What are your career higlights so far?

There’s no doubt that Bloodstock 2011 is the biggest highlight at this point, seeing several thousand people in the SOPHIE tent is going to be hard to beat, we were pretty overwhelmed especially when they started robot dancing with us. We’ve had lots of amazing experiences though; playing in Hamburg was brilliant we would love to get back to Germany again or anywhere on the mainland. The main stage support slots at Rock City have always been brilliant, especially for GWAR and obviously opening the main stage at Bloodstock 2008 was amazing if a little petrifying at the time.

Regarding new material and releases what’s in the pipeline?

Well between all the gigs that we’ve got this year we are writing the new album. Some of the songs will be getting a bit of airing over the next few months just to test the water with our audience. We don’t have a release date as yet as we intend to make sure that we’re really ready to present this, hopefully we’ll be recording before the year is out. Once the new album is well on the way we’ll be looking at making another video, we had great fun with the Robototron and Blacken the Everything videos so it’s about time we made another one.

Do you have any endorsements for gear at all?

No so far but we’d really like some, if there is anyone out there who would like to endorse us please get in touch! We have thought about approaching Baby Wipes, we do seem to spend a lot of time removing make up or perhaps Wetherspoons our pre gig dinner venue of choice!

Do you have a message for the Hammerfest crowd?

Hiya! *waves*! Umm, there are a few things I guess… don’t get us drunk before we go on stage… please come and watch us and of course how many robots are there out there???

Finally can you tell us a couple of funny stories from the road?

Oooo, it’s always difficult to know what we can get away with talking about in an interview! We’re answering these questions in a Wetherspoons in Burnley so I guess we could tell you some of tales of Burnley woe. This is one of those places where something always seems to go wrong.

This one time… in Burnley… during the Final Countdown when Brother Pain ran across the venue to perform his solo he leapt on to a table in the dim light only to find that it wasn’t quite as long as he had expected and to the horror of the sound engineer and our manager he slid the full length of the table and off the other end dramatically smacking his head on another table as he fell to the floor. For a second there our manager actually thought that he might be dead (who can say whether potential pound symbols flashed in her eyes). The rest of us were oblivious to what had happened assuming he was just clowning about as usual. However, much to the amazement of all of those at the rear of the venue the notes of the solo still began wafting over the crowd as a very probably concussed Brother Pain heroically continued to play from the floor. That’s the kind of dedication you get from Evil Scarecrow.

Last time we were in Burnley Monty accidentally knocked over the drink he had onstage which then poured in to the power sockets on the floor and killed the power in the middle of our set, that was a bit unfortunate too. No drinks on stage tonight!

*management edit* Later on that evening we returned to the venue to find that Dr. Hell’s amp head had switched itself off and had to spend about 15mins trying to get it to switch back on properly, the band finally took to the stage about 30mins later than planned, as the set continued it turned out that I had made an error writing the setlists and missed one song off three out of the four copies and then just before Robototron was played someone knocked a pint over Princess Luxury’s keyboard which for some reason meant it got stuck on the Glockenspiel Voice… it was a slightly unusual rendition. So there you go… something always goes wrong in Burnley! Apologies to our Burnley fans but at least you always get a unique Scarecrow experience!

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