'Gravel-throated bluesman' Marc James met drummer Jimmy Cooke in their local music haunt The Horn Of Plenty back in January 95 and they formed a musical alliance that is now in its fourteenth year. Inspiration and influence came from by Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Ben Harper and many of the Seattle bands around at the time.
Verra Cruz announced its arrival in 03 with a limited edition EP called Soul Collides. Since then two albums (Emancipation Day and Innocence) and a live EP recorded in Denmark have followed released on UK independent Fierce! 'Neuer man am bass' Henry Cross completed the lineup in 2007.
Pete Willoughby met the band for Detonation Magazine.
Pete: First of all I’d like to talk to Marc and Jimmy about your time in the band, Dust, and how this progressed to Verra Cruz.
Marc: Originally I was working as a sound man on a government scheme for unemployed people. Rather than forcing you into a job that you didn’t want to do, you had the opportunity to train in something that you did want to do. I got a job working as a sound man at a local venue. It was just around the time when I’d been reading the bible for a couple of years and I’d taken my first steps into going to church. I dropped into a Vineyard church in St Albans and Jimmy was the drummer there. I could tell he was a good drummer. On the Monday night they had an open mike jam session at the venue and this band called the Wesley Brothers (Graham Ord) came down to play and I was in charge of the sound desk. These guys were all from the church and Jimmy was hanging around. After the gig Jimmy was skulking in one corner and I sidled up to him and said “What’s your vision?” We shared a brief conversation about wanting to do music which was about God and that meant something, not a surface pop thing, something that people could relate to. We didn’t get into a band right away, but within a few weeks we were drafted into someone else’s band. I began to write some songs and presented them to the singer of the band and he said “I don’t think I can sing that and I don’t really relate to that”. Then Jimmy suggested “Why don’t you sing it”. That started a power struggle over who was going to be the front man and we started playing in a pub and the band was called Abednego. We made a tape in Jimmy’s shed on a four track cassette and we drafted in a bass player. It was a great time; we just wanted to go out and played with metal bands in our area. We would play and preach about what God had done in our lives in a quite confrontational way. We felt very passionately about it and felt that God would move each time that we got up and played. Whether He did or not is another matter, but our intentions were good. Later that year Jimmy’s sister booked a missionary trip to Ostrava, in the eastern part of the Chez Republic. We ended up playing on the streets and it was the first time that id sung in public. We drafted in a temporary bass player and rocked our hearts out. The people there really loved it. We realised that we could really do this. It was a big moment when we combined faith and music.
Jimmy: After that we started to get more serious about the music side of it and did a couple of EP’s as Dust. ('All Or Nothing' (1997), 'See Red' (1998). Then we met this producer/engineer guy called Paul Burton and we recorded 'Spirit' EP (1999) and 'Invisible' EP (2001). We realised that we might have a bit wider appeal.
Marc: We did a lot of work in secondary schools doing assemblies and after-school concerts. We would say personal things about the songs and sometimes the response was incredible. The kids would be really moved by the songs and some of the things that we had said. Most places hadn’t seen a rock band before.
Jimmy: We have run into a lot of people around the country who have remembered those performances and remember Dust coming into their school. It was pretty scary. You would be given a little slot in assembly to play two songs to a thousand kids. You would have ten minutes to set up and you would be running around plugging the PA together. It would be eight in the morning and you would be singing songs and talking about Jesus. We were playing five or six times a week and learnt to play better.
Pete: What type of lyrical content did the Dust songs have?
Marc: One of the big influences on me was Bob Marley. His lyrics were very overt and spiritual, looking at the world and talking about judgement. Our first songs had very religious language. We used to play a song called ‘Sister’ about rape, from the experiences of a girl that we met at Greenbelt. We would play that song in schools. Kids can go through a lot at a very young age. You would be amazed at the things that had happened to people that we came across. I hope it helped.
Pete: How does the Vineyard album 'Come Now Is The Time' (1998) fit into this. The musical style is very different between worship and hard rock
.
Marc: It was really encouraging being in a Vineyard church. We had the senior pastor Chris Lane saying “Just go for it, we really believe in what you are doing”. They funded several missionary trips to the Chez Republic and supported us. We were always involved in worship at church. I’ve always felt that church was a safe place for us. I just landed there at a great time.
Jimmy: There were a lot of musicians there and people mentored us. They showed real belief in us and helped us mature. They invested their time in us. Graham Ord paid for me to have drum lessons. It was his help as a working musician to see that we gained life skills, and that he wanted to see us succeed.
Marc: Graham had spent years playing in pubs as a believer and learnt how to marry the two worlds. He encouraged us to write songs that people could relate to better. He explained that our hearts were great but we needed to find ways to say it that people could connect with; normal people who have never been in church or read a bible.
Pete: People expect Christians in a band to be playing Christian concerts. They don’t get the fact that you don’t need to play to Christians as they are already saved. You need to be out somewhere else.
Jimmy: One of the things that we didn’t expect is that when we played Christian events, people have come to see us play and then gone off to start a band. We haven’t become a famous band or earned a lot of money doing it, but we have had a small part to play in inspiring other people. We have always played in pubs and churches. When we play in churches there will be kids that are Christians and hopefully they will bring their friends who aren’t. We should always be doing both churches and pubs.
Pete: So what made you transform from Dust to Verra Cruz?
Marc: We had been going for a long time and played a lot of countries as Dust such as Chez, Latvia, South Africa and Poland. We were approached by a new company that had heard one of our cd’s and they wanted to push us into the mainstream music scene. We didn’t know what to expect with that. We realised that they were loads of bands called Dust in the UK and we needed to find a new name. So it was a fresh start, as we didn’t really have a following (fan-base) to lose.
Pete: So you didn’t change your sound?
Marc: Not initially, we were still playing the same songs.
Jimmy: We launched with a new EP Soul Collides (2003). If any it went a little heavier.
Pete: What influences did you have?
Marc: The common one would be Seattle grunge like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. A big influence for me has always been blues stuff from Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton. Me and Jimmy were on a Vineyard trip (with Brenton Brown) to Nashville, America. We rented a car and went to Memphis for a day. In this old music shop, at the back of the room I found a small guitar. I asked “What’s that?” and was told it was a lap steel guitar. So I asked to have a go on it and played all these bad chords. So the guy in the shop had a go and played these amazing riffs. I bought it, took it home and cranked it through my normal amp. Nick our previous bass player came up with a groove, Jimmy matched in with the tom-toms and I added this heavy riff and it became ‘Rock And A Hard Place’. Our manager came in, heard it and told us to go down that blues route. So the lap steel is the big difference between Verra Cruz and Dust.
Pete: Do you do this full-time or do you have normal jobs?
Jimmy: We have always been involved in worship and Marc is currently doing a new solo album.
Marc: I did a roots acoustic album ‘King Of Glory; King Of Grief’ in 2006 and the new album
‘Surrender’ (2010). Henry co-wrote one of the songs on the new album. Jimmy is producing a Vineyard worship album. We have all done a lot of worship stuff together. For me, worship leading is something that I really enjoy. I’ve often played a Saturday late night rock gig and turned up bleary eyed on a Sunday morning to play worship at two services and another one at night. I’m sure that’s familiar for a lot of christian musicians.
Pete: So Henry, how did you come to find these guys or did they find you?
Henry: It was interesting listening to all that stuff, as I was one of the little kids going to their gigs when they were Dust. Later I became a Christian through friends in the music scene. I’ve been at St Albans Vineyard for ten years, where I met Marc and Jimmy. To start with I couldn’t play two notes together, but I’ve always had music in the blood, so I got stuck in. The bass players were rubbish so I thought I could do better. The first time I played with these guys was on a pub tour filling in for Nicko who was unwell at the time.
Marc: We called him up on the day we were due to start the tour and said “Hey Henry, what are you doing this week, do you want to come on tour?”
Henry: That was my trial run. Nicko got better and rejoined the band for a year or so.
Marc: Then Nicko left after the Switchfoot tour. We didn’t know what to do and then seeing as Henry knew half the songs already, we asked him to join.
Jimmy: Henry seemed to fit really naturally.
Henry: Over the last couple of years it’s become a unit rather than me playing someone else’s bass lines.
Jimmy: Henry has become a lot more involved in the writing, especially on ‘Innocence’.
Marc: Henry put his own personality on ‘Innocence’. After that recording it wasn’t as if he was filling in.
Pete: What tours have you done?
Marc: We haven’t actually toured for quite a while now. We mainly do a couple of gigs and go home.
Henry: We all have family so it becomes so much harder to tour.
Marc: You don’t want to spend two weeks away as it puts a strain on things.
Jimmy: When we did our first album ‘Emancipation Day’ with Fierce they started booking us into these festivals in Europe that we had no idea about. We thought we were doing a bit of album promotion and ended up playing to 6,000 people in Germany. The previous year we were touring clubs in a van for 50 quid a night if we were lucky. We had opportunities to play big stages and we changed the way we were playing to adapt to that. The songs from ‘Innocence’ were birthed out of playing in Europe. We seem to have been able to build a fan-base in Germany. So now we have a german manager and the plan is to record a third album by the end of 2010.
Marc: Ralf really wants to push us out into the secular scene again. We tried so hard for five years to break that whole scene and we broke a lot of other things in the process. So we put out ‘Emancipation Day’, which we funded ourselves. We put it out through Fierce and we were playing all these big festivals in Europe. This was what id dreamed about when I picked up the guitar for the first time when I was twelve. We knew bands in England that were successful, but weren’t doing gigs like this. We took our foot off the gas and relaxed a bit. JB at Fierce wanted to push us out into the mainstream again with the single from Innocence. We had let go of it and other people were saying lets have another go. You can pick up our album at HMV, which is a huge achievement for us.
Jimmy: We also got a few things fall into our lap. We had the opportunity to play Download festival in 2008.
Pete: Yes I followed the Download story. There was a slot for an unsigned band and you each had to submit your own video. It was voted on by industry experts.
Jimmy: It was Daniel P Carter from the Radio 1 rock show, Katie Parsons from Kerrang and Olivier Behzadi A&R consultant. So it was a heavyweight panel and we won it. It was a video that Marc’s wife took of us playing at Shepherd’s Bush with Switchfoot. We recorded the gigs on that tour, did a live mix and put the two together. We thought it would be something cool for youtube and it actually came out really good.
Marc: I spent a day mixing the audio and sticking it on this video, like a complete amateur. My wife was shouting through “What are you doing in there?” and I’m shouting back “I’m working”. I thought I was wasting my time, but a couple of years later it yielded this gig at Download.
Pete: So it wasn’t a slick promo?
Jimmy: Marc’s wife was recording it on a tiny camera. Halfway through she clicked the black & white button and panned through the crowd. It looked like we were some really famous rock band playing a huge gig rather than the support band that no-one knows. Again it was a lap steel song.
Marc: They said that the hair was standing up on the back of their necks whilst they were watching it. Which for me was about God, not us.
Jimmy: We did Download and got some press out of that. Kerrang did a feature on the band and Total Guitar mentioned us. We were asking God what is this. And then a week later Kerrang wrote a really bad review of the album.
Pete: Kerrang gave you 3/10. Classic Rock gave it 6/10.
Marc: It was cruel. The guy obviously hated the album. The Kerrang review for Download was 4/5, then they did a page spread with a photo shoot, and a week later we got shot down.
Henry: He must have been a heavy metaller, who doesn’t like grunge. It was bad journalism.
Jimmy: The girl that wrote the feature about us tried to get it retracted. One minute we were on the new bands page, championing us as a new act, and then shooting us down the next week.
Marc: I believe the sentence was ‘The second worst song ever written; only surpassed by the next song on the album which is the worst song of all time’.
Jimmy: A bad review can really kick you into touch. It took the wind out of our sails. The mainstream is really tough. So now Ralf is talking to us about new songs and radio play. We are thinking ‘Can we do this?’ and ‘Can we go through this again?’ It’s been up and down. Every time we pop our heads up into mainstream we get a good kicking. It’s not like we are really pushing that door at the moment.
Marc: It doesn’t let us go. Just when we think we are satisfied with what we have got, then something opens up and you are back at the start again.
Jimmy: In Berlin, we were playing a big industry showcase. There were some people who loved it, and others said it wasn’t good enough. It’s hard because in the Christian scene it’s a lot more forgiving. It’s not as cruel, if someone doesn’t like it, they probably won’t print it. We need to make a third album and make it the best thing that we can possibly do. Where it ends up in the marketplace is not really our problem.
Pete: You can see that Christian rock bands do really well in the UK, but France, Holland and Germany really go for it. I was surprised how popular the Narnia album was, to have a melodic power metal band from Sweden being accepted. Europe seems to be more open to different styles of music.
Marc: One of the things we have experienced in Britain, the press and radio are obsessed with hype and cool. That’s how NME sells magazine.
Henry: They tell people who to listen to, who’s cool. And people buy a magazine because it has Pete Doherty on the front or whoever, so they must be cool.
Jimmy: We know that we are not a cool band by those standards. In Britain we are not going to appeal to those types of people. We are a rock and roll band into playing music and not trashing hotel rooms, getting wasted and falling off stages. But in Germany there is appreciation for a band for their music and whether they are good at playing live. Sometimes playing in England the crowd are hard to win over. In Germany and Europe if they like it, they will instantly embrace it. There is a real sense of freedom in the crowd.
Marc: It’s quite liberating for us to play in that atmosphere. If you are a known band, the English crowd can be as good as you will get anywhere in the world. But there can be a reticence or shyness.
Henry: You almost need to be overwhelmed with the anticipation of going to a gig, before you’ll go for it. There are some gigs where you can’t wait and you go mental.
Pete: Thank you gentlemen.
Jimmy: Thanks man.
Marc: Thanks.
Henry: It was a pleasure, feels like we have written our memoirs.
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