DEVIL'S ISLAND featuring Tommy Concrete
Welcome to this weeks edition of Devil's Island! Every week we maroon a band or artist on the island and see what they get up to, how they cope with being all alone on a small island in the middle of the ocean. It's not your average desert island and we'll see just how each person copes with the extreme conditions.
This week when we arrived at Devil's Island we found Edinburgh based Tommy Concrete sat on the beach. The island is far from his home, so how did he end up here and how did he cope with life on Devil's Island?
Find out now...
Welcome to The Razors'e Edge and our somewhat lovely, warm desert island. Don't worry about it's name I'm sure it's not as bad as that would suggest.
So you're marooned here on this island, but before you ended up shipwrecked you chose one album that you couldn't live without. Which album did you each chose and why?
Hawkwind – Space Ritual Live. Even though this is a hypothetical question, I have actually been in the real situation of doing a runner from a premises and taking only what I could fit on the bus and the one album I chose was this. Funny because if you were to compile all the interviews I have ever done there is always at least one answer where I spout off about Space Ritual, in fact I could quite easily answer every question in every interview with ‘Space Ritual’ as the answer. Now I am guessing that whilst packing this album on this particular hypothetical sea voyage I would in fact not be aware of the impending shipwreck, but Space Ritual would in fact be the perfect choice if that knowledge to be known. As Space Ritual has the power to transport the listener to a multitude of ‘realms’ so being stranded on a desert island would be immaterial as Space Ritual would transport my astral soul to unknown realms.
Just behind that palm tree is a shack for each of you to stay in, with enough space for you to put up a poster on the wall of one album cover. What album cover do you each chose?
Khonsu – The Xun Protectorate. Which is my personal choice for greatest album of the 10’s, it also has a magnificent painting of a nightmare space craft / city. The album is a concept LP about the final days of humanity existing as androids on a floating space station, one of the droids becomes self aware and realises the best thing he can do is to send the craft into the sun, destroying the last evidence of humanity. So as I would be alone on a desert island I would be entertained by the incredible artwork, reminded of wonderful music and fucking chuffed to bits that at least my solitude does not take the form of being a nihilist android acting out some existential euthanasia/genocide. Like fuck that, at least I’ve got coconuts and hopefully/probably a wee monkey pal.
There's also a bar on this here island. But alas each of you only get to choose one drink for the entirety of your stay. What's your tipple of choice?
Belhaven Best on hand pump, so I can be reminded of Edinburgh. Also it’s not that strong, so it would take much longer and a concerted effort to become dependant on alcohol. It would also be easier to reduce the intake and thus avoid withdrawal if that were to occur, after-all I wouldn’t want to die of liver failure on a desert island paradise. As well, for purely stupid reasons. A bucketlist of mine has always been to drink twenty pints of it in one sitting, most I ever got was twelve. So I could get that ticked off for starters.
Your suitcases were lost when your ship sank, but you each managed to salvage one item of band merch. What’s the merch and for what band?
If I owned a Manowar Christmas bauble I would pick that, but I don’t own one. So it will have to be my Motorhead tankard, this would be absolutely perfect for pints of Best and would also double of wonderfully as a container for all sorts of shit. It’s made of metal so it wouldn’t fuck up and would last longer than me so when my stinking corpse was eventually discovered it would be holding a pristine Motorhead tankard.
You’re sat on the island thinking “I’m stuck here on this island with my bandmates for eternity”… who would you rather have been shipwrecked with?
I am a solo artist who has no bandmates so I would be thinking about all the people I have ever been in bands with one after the other and being glad I wasn’t stuck on a desert island with them. But hold on, ‘for eternity’ is this some sort of purgatorial shit? So it’s not a regular desert island then, interesting. Doesn’t change any of my previous answers though. I’m guessing there are animals on the island, so I’d be pals with them. So yeah, basically being chuffed I was a solo artist for the millionth time, but this time in ace weather.
There's a walkman in your pocket, on the tape inside is the recording of the one live show that stands out for you. It could be any show, from any band, anywhere in the world. What show is on that walkman?
Tangerine Dream – Encore. Double live album from the ambient Swiss synth gods. Many years ago when I was a kid on holiday in Grand Canaria I spent the majority of the holiday listening to this concert on my Walkman, and really digging the sounds and how they went with the location of the beach surroundings. So yeah, this is a tried and tested answer, for the location.
You're getting desperate, you decide the only course of action is to put a message in a bottle and hope someone finds it. Your message could be to any member of any band, but should be the most suitable for a rescue attempt. Who is it?
Nick from UK doom titans Serpent Venom. Because he is a lovely salt of the Earth reliable nice bloke, who I could absolutely trust to not only inform the proper authorities of my predicament, but to give them a ring back to see how the rescue was going if he’d not heard anything for a few days.
You've been stuck here for a while and food supplies are running low. There's only one thing for it... which fellow band member gets sacrificed to help the others survive?
Well, as a solo artist I am going to interpret this question as ‘which part of your body would you eat first’. To be honest I would rather die from starvation than self cannibalism, and if it really came to that, I would get myself over to the bar with my monkey pals and drink myself to death with pints of Belhaven best in a Motorhead tankard whilst vibing to Tangerine Dream and Hawkwind…. Sound great, where do I sign up?
Finally, when the ship sank you each managed to save one person from the wreckage. That person is the one musician that has influenced your career the most, shaped your way of thinking and your outlook on life. Who did you save?
Joey Shithead from D.O.A. His OG hardcore DIY skillset has lived through worse than shipwreck and cannibalism, so we would have a thriving totally inclusive hardcore venue rocking by the first weekend. Word would get out and within no time we’d be receiving message in the bottles from touring bands wanting to crash on our palm tree hammocks and if the tropical paradise ever got too much we could just hop in their van to the next gig.
Thanks for your time. We hope you get back to dry land before you're next due out on tour!
Me too, but to be honest all of that sounded like a pretty rad situation to me, but yeah buy my new album at…
