Ten years after ‘Z2: Rampage’s release, Ray Waters presents the story of our favourite Zipheads album…

The band formed… wow, it was 2005 or something when we played our very first gig! It was a very different lineup: we had a different drummer, we had bass guitar, and there was no rockabilly influence yet. We only played a couple of gigs like that and we abandoned it, and then we got into rockabilly and we became a covers band called The Runaway Boys – very original! –  with double bass and all that. We did that for years, just playing Rock n Roll and then we went back after about five years, and decided to write our own stuff. We couldn’t think of a new name for the band, so we just went back to being called The Zipheads.

Now we had double bass and we had our own set of songs. That was about 2010, when Will joined the band on the drums. In 2013 we put out the first album, ‘Prehistoric Beat’, which was self-released because we didn’t know anyone who would put it out. We were all actually quite disappointed with how it sounded, but that wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The producer, Andy J Davies, had these old analog tape reels, and because we were playing an older style of music, he was like, ‘well, why don’t we record it in this way?’ We agreed, but actually that’s not really our sound at all. It wasn’t representative of what we were doing live. We toured that for a bit, and by 2016, we’d found an audience in the psychobilly scene, which we didn’t really know much about until we started playing there. We honestly thought that we had invented Psychobilly for a while, like we were the first people to combine punk and rockabilly, and then everyone was like, ‘no, no, no, there’s this band called The Meteors…’.

We’d started listening to more psychobilly between the albums. There’s a lot of psychobilly that we don’t really like –  as is probably true of any genre of music, 80% of it, you think ‘it’s not for me’ – but we discovered some bands that we really liked, like The Quakes and The Long Tall Texans, I can really hear that influence in ‘Z2’. We’d grown up listening to punk, and that was what made us pick up our instruments, and then we got distracted by Rockabilly for quite a while. Everything we do is pretty punk, but this second album is definitely heavier, I would say, than the first. We’d also been touring and going abroad a lot, which was something we’d never done before, so we were doing that as much as we could pre-COVID and the scene was a lot stronger back then.

We recorded ‘Z2’ in a couple of weeks in the studio, I think. We knew what we were doing when we went in the studio, so it was all pretty painless! We were working with Tim Kramer, who’s more of a rock producer. Sonically, it was a lot more representative of how we sounded live, and probably a bit better than we actually sounded live at the time! We were very pleased when it came out, and relieved. I think that’s always how you feel when an album comes out, because it usually takes so long, although this one I feel came together pretty quickly. We were actually in Florida when the album came out in the UK. This is also October 2016, just before the US Elections. So, yeah, lots of stuff going on. I think we were just sort of catching our breath. We didn’t really have time to think about it. I was happy at the time and still am. I think it’s a great record. Obviously, I’ve been going back to listening to it because I’ve been posting about the old songs, and also we have to learn them all for the show at the 100 Club.

‘After All’ is probably my favourite Zipheads song, maybe ever. The chorus of that was probably the second song I ever wrote, even though it had different words and then it got changed around a lot. There’s also a track on the album called ‘Orca to Majorca’, and they’re both quite poppy. Ironically, this is our heaviest album, and everything’s really ‘big riffs and punk’. But of course, no, we got two really poppy songs that are poppier than anything we’d ever put out before. We were a bit apprehensive about this: can this be a Zipheads song? But we like hooks and and catchy melodies, so I really think that the melody line in that chorus is very strong. It’s also a very rare example of an optimistic lyric which I’ve written, maybe there’s been two…it’s not really optimistic if you peel it back though. I’d had that chorus in my head probably since I was fourteen or something like that, so to finally get it out on a record was really good and it’s still one of our strongest songs, I think.

I didn’t think too much of ‘Welcome To The Real World’ at the time when we wrote it. I remember a recording I had of just me on the guitar which was on my phone for like two years. It’s quite hard to play on the guitar but we wrote the rest of the song around it, and it’s a good song. It’s the quintessential Zipheads song. I think if someone was saying, ‘well, what are The Zipheads like?’,  you’d probably play them that one. It’s got a little bit of everything we do: it’s punk, there’s Rockabilly in there, but it’s not beating you over the head with twelve bar blues, there’s just a few rockabilly licks throughout, and a good chorus. A lot of the songs on this record don’t actually have a chorus, which is a big no-no in in song writing. It wasn’t a conscious choice, it just sort of happened that way. We did a video for ‘Welcome To The Real World’ as well, two years after the album came out. We were like, ‘well, push that one because it’s got a chorus!’.  It’s also the song we always soundcheck with: it’s got some backing vocals and it’s representative of most of the things we’ll be playing in an hour set. We also always play it second in our set for some reason. The opener changes, you want something good and you want to mix it up for people who’ve seen you before, but then we just want to know what song you’re going into right after that first song.

‘Last Man On Earth’ was the lead single of this album, ‘Rampage’ was our first album that a label put out for us. We’d signed to Bomber Music, and while that wasn’t the first song they put out, it was the first video, and and they gave really gave it a push in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to. The music video is very good as well, I’m very proud of that:  it’s got an apocalyptic theme, and we managed to pull that off for a very low budget, and it actually looked really good thanks to working with some very talented people, like Ben Jacobs who directed the video. Again, it’s got a chorus and it’s similar to ‘Real World’. It’s got all of the elements that make a Zipheads song. I think it’s just because the video is good that people like it. We’re learning to fall in love with that song again because we played it for a long time and I kind of got sick of it. I don’t want to be that guy: ‘Van Morrison never plays Brown Eyed Girl’ or whatever. You gotta give the people what they want, but I think a lot of it is to do with the music video.

I really like ‘Revenge II’, because I really like the lyrics – it’s like a little sort of poem – and ‘Patron Saint’. We used to play that a lot. It is very much a folk song, and one of the good things about folk songs is you can just go round and round with it, you don’t really need to write a chorus. ‘Damned’ is great, a magnum opus in many ways, I think if any songs are underappreciated, that’s on us. We should have done a video for ‘After All’, and we should have pushed those songs. We should have played them live after the album came out, which we didn’t for several years because we weren’t really good enough to play those softer dynamics. We were just going full throttle.

We love surf music, and ‘Surfquake’ was our first proper surf song. Since then we put out an EP in 2022, ‘Surf Wars’, and it’s very deliberately titled ‘Surf Wars Volume One’, because there will definitely be a volume two, and hopefully three. We thought we’d better put out a ‘normal album’ in the interim, so hence our third album, ‘Rock and Roll Renaissance’ last year. So now, maybe one more normal album and then another surf record. A lot of people liked it, and I think it’s great. In fact, most people did, but a few people were like, ‘Well, when are you gonna do some normal stuff again?’ Alright, we will!

I will say this to any young bands reading: don’t make your album covers black, because you will be selling them in very dark rooms! Our first album is bright yellow, and our second album is black. Guess which one we sell more of at shows? It’s the yellow one. We made sure the new one was bright pink for the same reason.

I’ll let you in on a secret though: all our albums loosely follow the chronology of mankind, so obviously you have ‘Prehistoric Beat’ first. Then ‘Rampage’: this is a bit of a stretch, it’s like the Stone Age or the Iron Age, right? Okay, we’re building ramps, and then fast forward a few hundred years to the Renaissance. The next one we’re thinking maybe the Industrial Revolution or something like that, you know. I might abandon that because sometimes you can paint yourself into a corner with these stupid ideas!

We’re playing ‘Z2: Rampage’ in full at the 100 Club to celebrate the anniversary of its release, and we did the same for ‘Prehistoric Beat’ when that turned ten. It’s nice to just play gigs, but to have an excuse to play is a bit better. There’ll be more records like for sure, so it’s not the end of anything, but it’s nice to stop and take stock of how far we’ve come. We’re doing a tour of Germany next year in January, which we’re very much looking forward to. We will be playing a bit less next year, I feel. We played a lot this year, earlier in the year, and so we’re gonna scale back a little bit. All more reason to come and see us next month!

As told to Kate Allvey

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