An Interview with Leigh Marklew of Terrorvision

Yorkshire rockers Terrorvision are back with a long-awaited new album, and not before time! Victoria Holdsworth spoke to guitarist Leigh Marklew (pictured above, centre right) about the past, present, and future of one of the most loved bands in the UK…

Hi Leigh, how are you doing?
Great thanks, Victoria. Not bad for an old fella [laughs].

So, just before we get started on the questions, I just wanted to be nosey and ask about your job, as you are the brand manager for Leeds University, are you not?
Yes, that’s right. It’s where I am now, but I hate it being called my proper job. It pays the rent more regularly than the music business does [laughs]. I am on campus as we speak… Do you have any connections to the university?

No, but I did work at Leeds College of Music in a previous time.
Our drummer went there and did a jazz degree. Some good musicians have come out of there.

Terrorvision are back with a new album. Tell me about it and the inspirations behind it.
It’s our first album in a long time… about 12 or 13 years. It’s been in gestation for a long time before that though. We started writing it just before lockdown, but we weren’t planning on writing an album. We were just going to start and write some new songs, ya know, and then we kind of got a bit of a dispensation to break the lockdown rules a bit, so we could then get together and rehearse. We were in our musical bubble! So we got cracking a bit during those times, and it just gathered pace. Again, we weren’t writing for an album, we just thought we would write some new songs, and we ended up with about twenty demos. Then, we were thinking about the next steps, and our drummer left, which sidetracked us a bit, but then we got an old mate of mine called Chris in to cover that role, and the whole thing just took on a new lease of life pretty much straight away. It was like a fresh impetus, and he was certainly the bolt of energy that we needed. At the beginning of last year, we had gotten to the point where we were ready to record. We got recommended to Rick McNamara, who is the guitarist for Embrace. Although you wouldn’t really link the two bands together, other than the fact that we are only about five miles apart geographically, musically there aren’t a lot of similarities. So we met up and went through a few tracks with Rick, and it went really well. It was the funnest thing ever—really easy-going and relaxed in the studio that he has set up in his house, and it sounded really good, so we continued working with him. We recorded 12 of the songs we already had.

“It made us feel like we still meant something”

The concept was… well, when you are in a band and you’ve been around as long as us, you keep playing a set of twenty songs. Over the past twenty years, you play lots of those songs over and over again, so to have some new stuff to play live, which is why Terrorvision exist now, is to play live, which is the best part about being in a band. But to have some new stuff to throw into the set is great because if you don’t do that, you have a tendency to dry up like a frazzled old leaf. So we thought, let’s do this, and never mind anybody else, it will keep us happy, tuned in, and focused. It made us feel like we still meant something and were relevant as a band and as songwriters. Mark, our guitarist, came in one day and said he had an idea. We had been bandying around some titles for albums, and I’ll be honest… they were all crap [laughs]. Then Mark suggested ‘We Are Not Robots,’ and he had already sorted the album sleeve and everything, and lo and behold, we just ran with it. We love it, and we can’t wait to get it out to all our fans live. It will definitely take some people’s heads off with our new stuff.

You all started some solo projects after your initial split. Is that something you will still be continuing alongside your reunion?
Some yes, and some no. Myself and Mark had a number of different bands—well, I only had one, but Mark had a few—but that’s all on the back burner now. I think the rest of our lives, families, and other things… for example, Mark runs a tattoo studio in Baildon, and Tony has his coffee shop in Otley, so our lives became a lot fuller, with some interesting stuff. Although Tony does still go out and play solo stuff, and he’s very active as a solo acoustic artist. He pops up all over the place [laughs], and he’s even playing a few gigs this week. It’s a good outlet for Tony to get the world of Tony off his chest. In terms of any other bands and projects though, we will be just sticking with Terrorvision. I am totally focused on Terrorvision, and I’m one of those people that, if I do something, I wanna go all in and just do that one thing.

You mentioned in your previous response certain bands that weren’t really connected, which brings me to my next question. I saw you on the Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour. Were those gigs a conscious decision that you thought might get something going again?
Well, it certainly helped, because it made us realise that people did still want to see Terrorvision.

The bands that were doing the tour with you were all sort of lumped together under that Britrock banner, as you never really fit into any other categories, except the inclusion of Dodgy, which I always thought was a little strange.
Yeah, that was a bit of a weird one [laughs]. Did you see us in Leeds? It was a good little tour, and we enjoyed it. It gave us the impetus to start writing again. It’s good to see that Reef are still doing it though and bringing out new stuff. I think they’ve had a few more lineup changes than us though.

Their new stuff is certainly much heavier than in the older days.
I’ll have to check ’em out, but they were really quite chilled on that tour with us compared to, say, The Wildhearts, and we were in between. And then, of course, there was Dodgy [laughs]. I really don’t know what happened there [laughs].

For anyone who has never heard you before, which Terrorvision songs would you class as your most definitive tracks?
Oooh, good question… Well, obviously you can pick the big songs, which still get played live and are still the fan favourites, but I think if you were looking for three, I would go for “Alice What’s The Matter,” “Oblivion,” and “My House.” You would cover a mixture of the poppier side of what we do through to the heavier side. All of them are either lyrically funny or they’ve got social commentary hidden in them, which Terrorvision were never really known for, but for anyone who does know us, then they know that there is a lot more to the lyrics than first meets the eye.

What’s the best and worst thing about being in Terrorvision?
[laughs] The best thing has got to be playing live. When you are mid-gig and it’s flying, then there is no better feeling in the world! That’s why we still perform. We ain’t doing it for any other reason. We aren’t doing it for the money or to get a girlfriend or to try to look cool; we do it purely for the enjoyment of playing together. Don’t get me wrong, not every gig is a flyer, but we do tend to hit a higher percentage rate to the lower ones. The worst thing I would have to say is the smell of the tour bus after three weeks’ worth of gigs [laughs]. There’s no smell quite like it… rancid death. I’m hoping that we are all a little more mature and grown up now, so it should not smell as bad, but I doubt that’s going to be the case [laughs].

What’s the best band that you have ever seen live?
Wow! F*ck! I’m gonna have to go with Royal Republic, if anyone has heard of them. I could say Alice Cooper or KISS or Cheap Trick, as they were all brilliant live, but I’m going to be slightly more modern and say Royal Republic. They can really play and put on an amazing show. They sound so good live that it’s annoying [laughs].

“A real earworm”

How has the music landscape changed for Terrorvision since you reunited? Obviously, back in the day, when you exploded worldwide, only to be then dropped by the record label, with the politics of money and contracts involved with that, including behind-the-scenes issues which people rarely get to see or know about. What is different now for you guys?
Things have totally changed now! The music business and industry that existed back when we were signed doesn’t really exist anymore. The younger generation now don’t really pay for music. They just listen to it and get it wherever they get it from, like YouTube or streaming or whatever. That whole feeling of when record companies used to have and hold all this power has kind of gone now. Back then, if you didn’t get a big record deal, you kind of had no chance, whereas now, everybody can get their music out there somehow. It’s just, how do you make people aware of it? I think that’s trickier because, back in the day, there were, let’s say, about a hundred bands or so that people were aware of because they had those record deals, and everyone else had no one know that they really existed. Whereas now, there are thousands of artists out there with music and videos on the likes of Spotify etc. So it’s just… I’ll be honest with you… we don’t try and keep up. You’ve just got to plough your own furrow and do your own thing. With our new records, all we want to do, and all we care about, is getting as many people hearing it as we can. We are dead proud of it, so we don’t care what happens to it like in the past, as people don’t buy records anymore. But we’ve put a lot of work into it, and we are just really proud of it.

What would you say is the most standout tune on the new album?
Oh man! I think the single we are releasing… I say singles… whatever that means these days, are pretty good indicators for the rest of the album. But I think “Baby Blue” is a real earworm. There are a couple of other tracks that we haven’t released yet that are exceptional. There is one called “Don’t Spoil Tomorrow” and one called “Magic” that are very cool also. But it’s one of those albums that you can just put on, and it’s over within half an hour, so it’s a really brilliant whistle-stop journey through Terrorvision really.

What are your next hopes for the band?
We want to get these new songs out and be in front of as many people as possible. We are going to do some more gigs next year and hopefully pick up a lot of festivals for next year too. I think we would really love to get back to Europe. Back in the ’90s, we were big in places like Spain, Germany, and Italy, and we toured everywhere. So we are making enquiries into how we can get back out there. Apart from that, we hope to be writing some more stuff because it’s feeling really good at the minute.

Terrorvision play Leeds Project House 24th September – for more info visit: terrorvisionofficial.com