Devilskin is a Kiwi metal band from Hamilton. They recently kicked of their New Zealand tour in Dunedin on the 31st of August. Just before their Dunedin gig, Victoria Ranson caught up with Paul Martin, the bassist and founding member of Devilskin.
Critic: You’re about to go on tour around the country, are you excited to be returning to Dunedin? You were last here in 2017?
Paul (Devilskin): Yeah! We were here last year, we don’t like to miss Dunedin out ever on a tour because it’s such a fun town to play in. Union Hall is a great venue, that’s a favourite for us. Dunedin is the first date on the tour as well so you’re gonna cop the lot. That’s gonna be massive, we can’t wait.
We really appreciate (small towns), it’s really special to have people giving a stuff about your band that they want to travel to come see your show.
You’re the man who formed the band. What was the inspiration behind forming the band?
I had been doing a radio show called The Axe Attack, it started out on Contact FM and then moved to The Rock for 20 something years. Years ago I get this demo from Jennie Skulander’s (Devilskin vocalist) band Slipping Tongue, based in Rotorua. She was 16 at the time and as soon as I put it on I got goosebumps from her voice, I just thought she was amazing. The demo was pretty rough *laughs* but her voice was outstanding. I just kept an eye on her as Slipping Tongue did more and more.
Nail (Devilskin guitarist) and myself are good friends from other bands and Jennie was just such a spectacular singer that everyone wanted to play in a band with her. So when Slipping Tongue broke up we had a chance meeting and said “Hey, wanna jam?” She had been burned a bit from the last band and wasn’t really keen to rehearse too much or play gigs out of town. She says “Ok if we’re not going to do much then I’ll give it a go” so we just had a jam to see what happened and then next minute…*laughs*
The coolest thing is now that she’s married my wife’s little brother she’s my sister-in-law, so she’s stuck with me now. And our drummer is my son (Nic Martin), her nephew, so she can’t get away now. She’s stuck with us.
So you guys are like a family band! What is it like performing with your son as the drummer?
It’s the coolest thing ever. Without a word of a lie he’s definitely the best drummer I’ve ever been in a band with. He works hard and he’s really conscientious about the music. He takes a big part of the songwriting and production duties. He's fully immersed in it and when he’s not doing Devilskin he’s got another band called Seeds of Conflict and they’ve been up and down the country kicking their asses off so he’s really busy. He’s a confident musician, he doesn’t just play drums he also plays piano on our second album (Be Like The River). I couldn’t be prouder, every night when he’s playing on stage with these amazing drum solos I still get goosebumps.
And he was only 15 when he joined the band?
I was really pestering him into the band it was either “Come do some gigs with us or you’re grounded.” *laughs* We had another drummer at the time but he had to have an operation on his shoulder so he couldn’t do this tour that we booked. So Nail, Jennie and I just looked at each other and said “We have to have Nick. We just have to.” He works really really hard and I couldn’t be happier getting to tour the world with my boy, you know? It’s wicked.
Did you guys have any idea the amount of success your band would get when you first got together?
Hell no. We had no plan of that. The first night we got together we jammed three songs that are still on our set list today, Little Pills was the first song we wrote together. Nail said “I’ve got this riff, my old band hated it.” And I said “Dude, this is awesome.” And then we did Fade and Until You Bleed so the first rehearsal things were sparking up, ya know? We were just “Wow, this feels really good.” But we didn’t go “Ok, in two years time we want to be playing Download or touring the country,” it was just really organic just thinking about the next rehearsal and thinking about the next song we’re going to write. And then when we book a gig we're thinking about that. And then the gigs got bigger and we got more people along. It kind of grew quite naturally for us and as soon as we signed to management more doors started opening, then off we go overseas. It’s been a crazy trip, but we didn’t actually plan any of this! *laughs*
What advice would you give to aspiring bands?
Well we threw ourselves in there and worked really hard at everything we did. The small gigs we started playing in we’d get like, 40 people or so, but we’d still spend all day there making the stage look amazing. We’d get out these red curtains all around it just to make it look stunning. We just wanted to always give people a show and make it a better show the next time we went there. So my advice for bands is to just get out there and start doing that, and as soon as you get a bit of momentum just keep it rolling because momentum can be hard to get. It’s got to inspire you to work even harder just to keep everything rolling.
It’s no picnic in this country, it's tough for bands because there’s a lot of great bands and bugger all venues and bugger all breaks for the bands to get anywhere. But the ones who stick with it and are staunch about it and can keep a line up together, that’s probably the hardest thing these days...the hard work pays off, you just gotta stick with it.
You’re about to go on tour around Europe with Halestorm, are you hoping that international success could be the potential for more music?
Oh, definitely! It’s a bigger market, obviously. We do quite well in Germany and the UK, we get a lot of radio and TV time over there. Germany has really embraced us, it’s been awesome. This will be our fifth trip back there. It’s one of those things where you’ve got to keep chipping away otherwise they’re going to forget about you so we have to keep going back. Ideally we want to sell records over there so this next trip back to Europe we’re doing 11 countries in 21 days with Halestorm. Its pretty full on, we’re going to be in front of their (Halestorm) crowds every night and they’re pulling 3,000 people upwards so it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to get our music heard and that’s what we want. We want to hit that European market and for everyone in Europe to know who Devilskin is. It’s all good for New Zealand music, it’s putting us on the map!