He was a really cool guy, and then we had a great conversation on the phone, and I said, okay, why don’t you send over some demos, let me check it out. Additionally, I had just passed on the idea. I think Australia, for me … I’m in San Diego, California, so Australia is almost as far away as you can get, for trying to have a band. It’s not like you just jump in the car and be right over. At first I was reluctant, because of the distance. After I had the chance to meet Chris during that tour, about six months later, Chris contacted me, and told me that Danny had this new band going on, and was trying to put a band together, and really wanted me to be involved with it. Chris was a publicist for Soundwave, and he’s also a friend of Danny’s.
It started with a gentleman by the name of Chris Merrick, who I was introduced to in Australia back in 2013, when I was performing with Slayer and Anthrax at the Soundwave Festival in Australia. How did you come to hook up with the other guys? We’re all core members, and we’re just four guys that are trying to make great music that we really enjoy playing, and we hope that everyone else will enjoy it as well. Meshiaak is a band, and it’s not a project, it’s not a collaboration, it’s a band. Me personally, I don’t look at it as a supergroup. Then obviously me, with the bands that I’ve worked with. I think maybe because those bands do fairly well in their home country that maybe that’s where the phrase got coined, as a supergroup, because of the involvement of them and their bands.
I know that Danny was in a band, 4Arm, and Dean currently has another band called Teramaze. I don’t know how it got coined that in the first place. The press release uses the term “supergroup.” I just wondered how that term rests with you personally, or is it typical PR and just doing their job? Danny might have a different answer, put as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t have a particular meaning for a song. Whatever it was, it was something that was a reflection of whatever he had in mind that would be great for this Meshiaak record. He’s more of the artistic one as far as drawing and things like that. Danny is also a tattoo artist in Australia.
It’s actually, that was something that Danny had worked on with an artist, and that was his conceptual idea, design. I don’t think it was specified for a particular track. What about the album cover itself? Is it linked to a particular track, or how did that come about? It has the typical thrash influences there, but with a modern twist. įirst of all, wanted to start by saying congratulations on the new album, Alliance of Thieves.Ībsolutely fantastic. Thrash drumming legend Jon Dette took some time to chat with us on the recent promotional tour for the release of the album. It is the combination of the embarrassment of riches-and richness of ideas-embedded in the songwriting team of Tombs and Wells, with the band’s warm and yet locked-down rhythmic beds that conspire to make tracks like groovy thrasher “Chronicle of the Dead” and conversely the textured and proggy “At the Edge of the World” so easy-drinking and yet thought-provoking of detail. Debut album ‘ Alliance of Thieves’ will be released on 19th August 2016 via Mascot Records/Mascot Label Group (Black Label Society, Black Stone Cherry, Monster Truck, Counting Days, Stoneghost)įormed in Melbourne, Australia by 4ARM’s Danny Camilleri and Teramaze’s Dean Wells, the band is rounded out by bassist Nick Walker and major rhythmic weapon Jon Dette, of Iced Earth, Slayer and Testament fame, not to mention his gig as temporary replacement for an injured Charlie Benante in Anthrax. In a thrash world gone metalcore, blackened or conversely, NWOBHM-scrappy, it’s hard justice indeed that a band of brothers has come together to champion songwriting, performance, production, arrangement and even sequencing this forthrightly, Meshiaak bestowing on the scene an egregiously confident and “old soul” record that evokes the magic of Ride the Lightning, Rust in Peace, South of Heaven and Burn My Eyes. Interview with Jon Dette of MESHIAAK Interview by Mark Dean || Photos by Scott Martin
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