Interview: Meet Reverend Beat-Man

Hailing from Bern, Switzerland, Reverend Beat-Man has created his own rock & roll fiefdom with his own label, his bands and his solo performances.

His label, Voodoo Rhythm, is home to Delaney Davidson while his latest album, Baile Bruja Muerto teams the good reverend up with Mexican songstress Izobel Garcia.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda put a call in to Bern and caught Beat-Man just before he was set to take the stage for one of his notorious solo gigs. 

You can listen to the conversation here:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: What is a typical, if there is such a thing,  Reverend Beat-Man gig like? Do you play with a band or are you on your own? How does it work?

RBM: It’s mostly by myself. It’s a one man show but I have different musicians with the new record…  Izobel Garcia, she plays the organ and I play the half of the drum and she plays the other half, she sings and I sing but mostly I play alone.

MD: Uh huh, alrighty. And you’re a native of Switzerland, are you? Is that where you’re from?

RBM: Yeah I’m born in Switzerland, raised and probably going to die in Switzerland. I like it here, it’s a pretty square country, very small, probably similar to New Zealand probably, I don’t know. The people are really great. My town is the capital of Switzerland called Bern. I know everybody in the town and everybody knows me. It’s kind of very practical.

MD: It does sound like New Zealand and Auckland then.

RBM: Yeah, see. I was in New Zealand once and I see the similarities, totally. Just a different language and their pies are better than our pies!

MD: We do have it on the pies, that’s for sure. You’ve been running your label, Voodoo Rhythm, for 25 years or so, how do you manage, because let’s face it, Switzerland isn’t known to be a hot bed of rock and roll and especially the kind of stuff you’re in to. How did you manage to do that from there?

RBM: You need to know, Switzerland has no musical culture. It was forbidden, until  150 years ago to make music. It was only allowed in churches or if you played outside of church music, you would get chained, arrested or hanged as treason or something like that. So we don’t have very good folk music in Switzerland. We have folk music that is 150 years old, a bit strange, it comes from German music. So we have to come up with our own music styles. That’s what I do right now. I think I kind of make our own Swiss culture I try to create my home Swiss music in the idea I have that Swiss music has to be. So when I started to make music nobody wanted to put out my records because they were too strange, too weird. So I had to start my record label. When I was touring I had several bands I was playing with, they had the same problems. They were too weird and not comfortable for the music scene. So I chose to make this label to produce those bands and I’m really happy I did.

MD: Very cool. One of the people on your label is a Kiwi, Delaney Davidson, right?

RBM: Yeah, the fun story about Delaney, he was the cook in a restaurant he normally played and I drank my beer and we were talking and that produced a Swiss funeral orchestra that were searching for a drummer so I set him up because he told me he was a drummer and then he started to record by himself. He lived in Switzerland in my town, he got married in Bern and he was always recording on his tape desk, his strange music. That’s why I started to put him out. He’s amazing, he’s amazing musician.

MD: Delaney was making music with Izobel before you, is that right?

RBM: No, it was the opposite. I met Izobel in 2014  in Los Angeles while touring and then on tour Delaney was in Bern and Izobel kind of fell in love with Delaney and they became a rock and roll couple… and they were touring and they moved back to LA and then we toured again because her voice is just mind blowing.

MD: Now you guys have an album out, can you pronounce the title for me, because I can barely speak English yet alone any other language.

RDM: Yeah, it’s ‘Baile Bruja Muerto’. It means ‘Dance Witch Die’.

MD: And where did that title come from?

RBM: I kind of went through the internet and searching for some nice words and I Googled translated “dance witch death” and those three words became that, as simple as it is.

MD: Very cool. So you and Izobel, do you share a common musical background? Because it seems like a joining of two different things but there must be some commonality between what you guys do.

RBM: Yeah of course, it’s rock and roll music so I have a child in LA so I was in LA and we have similar friends and we hang out at the same gigs, that’s how we met. It’s basically destructive, negative, stupid teenage rock and roll punk, that’s we write.

MD: The good stuff!

RBM: Yeah, the good stuff that nobody wants and everybody needs!

MD: That does seem to be the situation these days, it seems like rock and roll has become the underground music again. Are you finding that you’re turning people on or are people aware of what you’re doing, is it kind of an underground thing you’re up to?

RBM: It’s totally underground, that’s for sure. Its more underground than my band ‘The Monsters’, I have a punk band called ‘The Monsters’ and we are super loud and distorted, people in my ages they don’t come to my shows anymore so it’s kind of too wild but with Reverend Beat Man I have people my age in my shows as well because there are lyrics they can understand and there’s sometimes a decent good guitar solo. But it’s definitely on the underground side of the music that’s for sure.

MD: We can talk about the album. Where was it recorded? Was it recorded in LA?

RBM: It was recorded while we were touring Europe, we managed to get in a studio in Venice, with a friend I have we recorded half of the album over there and then she recorded some songs in LA, I recorded some in Bern, Switzerland and we recorded one song, ‘My Name Is Reverend Beat Man’ in another studio in Bern, it’s kind of a mix, its how we work together because we live in different towns, there’s a whole world between us so it reflects the world of what we do and we record different studios and we have different sounds and I think that makes the album pretty interesting for me to listen to as well.

MD: Funny you mention Vienna because I just spoke to, I don’t know if you know him, Tav Falco, he’s based in Vienna (click here for the 13th Floor Tav Falco interview)

RBM: Yeah I know him, he’s a nice guy.

MD: Thought you might know each other because you guys are on the same wavelength.

RBM: In one of my shows I blessed him, took the devil out of him.

MD: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

RBM: It’s a good thing, he’s happy since then. He’s the happiest man alive.

MD: Excellent. You guys do some covers on the album, one of the most unlikely ones being ‘Black Metal’ the Venom cover which apparently from what I’ve read is your favourite band. So maybe you can tell me a little about how you approached doing it in your own style.

RBM: When I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s Venom came across my way and I was just blown away by the brutality of this music. You know there was nothing like that in this time. There was Motorhead of course and stuff like that but Venom was so badly recorded, everything is fucked up, the lyrics are super bad and everything is amazing, for a teenager to hear that, you just think this is the most amazing stuff ever. This is so outside, it cannot get more outside than this. And then it’s loud, and brutal, and parents hate it forever so for me this was my holy grail of music. But after Venom I found out they took the roots of rock and roll. If you listen to Venom records they have the blues, they know what rock and roll is. They know what blues is. And then I started take in Blues music listening to Lightning Hopkins, Howling Wolf, all that stuff. Then I was more into blues than rock and roll and stuff like that. And this is where I am now, this is my tribute to the band I adored as a teenager in my style of music I play now.

MD: Very cool, and then on the flipside you guys do what I understand as a Mexican folk song, Macorina? With Izobel singing. It seems you pretty much handle anything. How did you decide to record that one?

RBM: That was Izobel’s idea. She was born and raised in Mexico so she came from a part where this song comes from. And so it was difficult for me to find out the chords to play but I think we did a quite interesting version of that song.

MD: I think so too. And then others like ‘Come Back Lord’ and ‘I Never Told You’, are these songs that you’ve written? Have you and Izobel written them together? What’s their origin?

RBM: Come back Lord is an old Reverend Beat-Man song, I’ve played it for 20 years now. But ‘I Never Told You’ that’s an Izobel only song, she wrote and recorded that song by herself.

MD: Interesting that music wise on the record at least, it sounds like they came from the same place, had the same kind of treatment to them, which is this kind of psychobilly sound…

RBM: We definitely have similar music styles. We like similar music so you hear that in the songs.

MD: And I should mention there’s a Doors cover as well, Love Me Two Times. What made you sing that song out of any other Doors tune you could’ve?

RBM: For me The Doors is, people say that’s too mainstream and stuff like that, but when I hear The Doors I hear how the organ fits in that music because if there is a solo it’s completely out of somewhere else. The solos are from outer space. And this for me was amazingly attractive, how they write these songs, it’s so catchy. But still it’s so strange. I try to do that with my song and what I did was a guitar solo. So I recorded it and I tried to play the guitar completely opposite to what I played in the song. I start to understand how The Doors worked playing this song and how much fun it was probably for the band to create their music. The organ, really good.

MD: And I was wondering are you a Dylan fan at all? Because ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’ kind of reminded me of mid-60’s sounding Dylan even though it sounds like you as well obviously.

RBM: No I’m a Dylan fan of the person but I’m sorry that I’m not a Dylan fan. It sounds so stupid but I like his acoustic stuff, I’m so sorry but Dylan is an amazing person, super, he’s like God. But I just don’t like the music. It’s like with The Clash as well, it’s the same. Joe Strummer is probably one of the best person to live on this planet but I don’t like the music.

MD: Fair enough.

RBM: I’m sorry!

MD: No reason to apologise! The last track on the album which is 7 and a half minutes long, ‘My Name Reverend Beat Man’, completely different to anything else. And you kind of allude to a planet of hate. Is it kind of a manifesto? What’s going on there?

RBM: Yeah it is a manifesto. It’s actually from a session I did with the band New Wave, together so this was a opening track for the whole songs we did together and has kind of spread all the people apart. It’s kind of a strange song. But I like to preach. It’s like ‘this is Reverend Beat man’ as a character and I use it to have a speech.

MD: So what’s the plan? Are you and Izobel touring in Europe, you’re up in Switzerland doing your own thing? What does the future hold?

RBM: Yeah she flies into Europe at the end of March and we fly over to Tel Aviv and have a show there, and then the rest of Europe for 1 month, Spain, Italy, France Germany, everywhere we can play, we play.

MD: Any chance of you coming down to these parts?

RBM: I hope so. Delaney said he’s going to help me set up some shows and I hope to come over to New Zealand because I love New Zealand, it’s a beautiful country.

MD: Sounds like the gigs will be lots of fun as well so I think we need to have them.

RBM: Oh I’m so sorry, my promoter, he kills me. I have to be on stage in 10 minutes and I have to set up.

MD: Okay, we better run! Thank you very much for doing this, I appreciate it!

RBM: Thank you so much! Bye bye.