Spear Of Destiny - Interview

  by Denzil Watson

published: 8 / 7 / 2025

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Article

It seems that if, at any point in time, you consult the UK Gig Guide with the aim of seeing Kirk Brandon play live, in either of his two guises, fronting Spear of Destiny or Theatre of Hate, you will not have to wait too long to see him. The Westminster-born songwriter has been in the music business in a career than now spans six decades. It’s not always been an easy journey from Brandon, but, through his various creative outlets, he has repeatedly proved to be one of the most prolific and consistent talents to have emerged from the post-punk music scene of the late 1970’s. Pennyblackmusic’s Denzil Watson was lucky enough to catch up with Kirk mid-tour, promoting the recently released ‘Janus’ double album, where Kirk and his band have revisited and re-recorded no less than 24 tracks tracks from Spear of Destiny’s late 80’s albums, 1987’s ‘Outlands’ and ‘The Price You Pay’ from 1988. PB: You're currently on the road with the Janus Tour at the moment. How’s it gone so far? KB: Yeah, two weeks in, It's been good, really good. PB: I saw the show in Barnsley and I thought it was a really, really cracking gig. KB: Thank you. PB: It's nice to see gigs at somewhere different for a change, like Barnsley. KB: Yeah, yeah, it's good to get out. It's nice to go somewhere else. PB: One thing that struck me at the gig was just how good the current Spear line-up is. KB: Yeah. I'm very lucky. Very lucky. PB: I've seen quite a few Spear line-ups over the years and, for me, this ranks as one of the best line-ups. KB: Yeah, these guys have been with me a long time. The keyboard player, Steve [Allan Jones] has been with me thirty years. Craig [Adams] has been with me about twenty-five years, when he's not playing bass in The Mission. And Adrian [Portus], the guitar player, used to play in New Model Army for years. He's been with me about twenty years too. PB: I'm just thinking about your musical peers, and you must be one of the hardest working of them all. KB: Possibly. I always think of Jake [Burns from Stiff Little Fingers] in relation to work ethic. Jake's always on the road. And Seggs [from Ruts DC]. They're on a tour with From The Jam. That's been going on for about three or four months. The schedule's going on at least to the end of this month. They're out there, four months on the trot. PB: It's not easy being on the road, is it? KB: It is quite tiring. PB: Do you just love playing live so much as possible? Is that what motivates you? KB: Yeah, I really love going out and just playing with people. You know, even after all this time, you're still learning your craft. You're still learning how to do it. Every night it's still a challenge. Every night is a different [set of] circumstance. There are so many things that could go wrong. It's surprising that it ever goes right. Incredibly, it does. PB: Yeah, I think that really comes across. KB: I guess one of the things that keeps your interest and I don't know if reinventing yourself is the right word, but you keep doing different things rather than just going back through the same old greatest hits set. If we just played a couple of albums from the early to mid-80s, you'd be your own karaoke band every night. Thirty years, thirty-five years later, frankly, it'd be ridiculous. I enjoy playing the old songs and we will go out and play a tour of just the good old tunes from back then, but this tour is the music done in 1986, 1987 and 1988, so it's not exactly recent. PB: I've just had a listen to your new album ‘Janus’ and I have to say it sounds fantastic. As do all of your three previously re-imaged Spear albums. I think ‘re-imaged’ was the term you used when we spoke last time. ‘Outlands’ was a commercial success and you cracked the Top 20 with it, but I remember you saying you weren't happy with how it came out as an album. KB: Well, ‘Outlands’ was all done on a Fairlight 3 programme, and it was the company's idea and the management thought it was a great idea. It was a case of “Just give it a go”. I just reluctantly said yes, but in reality that was a mistake. Most of the best stuff we’ve recorded has been done with just me and the drummer. And then we filled in around it or we were lucky to have somebody in the studio with us, which is the correct way of doing it. PB: I'm guessing you're really, really pleased with how things have turned out on ‘Janus’. KB: Yeah, very pleased. There's some really obscure stuff on it, like ‘The Jungle’. That dates back to the ‘World Service’ period, I think, and it was never played live. PB: It was tucked away on a B-side of ‘So In Love With You’, I think. KB: Yeah. It was never played. It was just a studio song. In actual fact, it's a really good song and we open up with it every night. PB: It's the first track on the album as well, isn't it? You think, “Wow, that’s ona B-side”. KB:I know. And there’s quite a few of the songs like that, like ‘March Or Die’ and ‘Somewhere Out There’ . ‘Soldier Soldier’ and ‘Pumpkin Man’ weren't on the albums either. They were on the 12”s or B-sides. PB: At the time when I bought ‘Outlands’, I remember listening to the album and being a little bit disappointed, and thinking actually the B-sides like ‘Embassy Song’ and ‘Jack Straw’ they're actually better songs. KB: Yeah, ‘Embassy Song’ and ‘Jack Straw’. We never played ‘Jack Straw’ live. So, there's at least six or seven songs that I would call obscure, but in actual fact deserved to be on the albums, as opposed to what was actually ending up on them. PB: Was that down to your record label Virgin and their say so? KB: Yes, they deemed some of the lyrics to be too controversial. Now, looking back on it, I don't really think they're controversial at all, but they got scared, I think. They just wanted a pop star or pop artist, whatever you want to call it. Anything that might hinder that, they got rid of it. In those days, the companies used to have virtually all the say in what went on a record. If they didn't like it, it didn't go on there. PB: But I guess from their point of view, ‘Outlands’ was a success with it cracking the Top 20. KB: Yeah, definitely. PB: One thing that struck me when I listened to ‘Land of Shame’ was that the song hasn’t dated and it really reflects what's going on at the moment. KB: Yeah. ‘Land of Shame’ actually was meant to have been part of the ‘World Service’ album. It dates back even earlier, but it didn't end up on the album and ended up on ‘Outlands’. It's quite an early song from Spear. Yeah, it's totally in the now. ‘Land of Shame’ and ‘Strangers in Our Town’. They really are now songs. PB: I think that really comes across and the narratives of both those songs are very much relevant to today’s times. KB: Yes, yes. In fact, perhaps more pertinent to the times now than ever. They were written back in the 80s, so that's a long time ago, but they do ring true now. PB2: Up until now, for the re-imaging, you’ve done it on an album-by-album basis, but this time you've taken ‘Outlands’ and ‘The Price You Pay’ together. Is there any particular reason for that? Did you feel that they were a suite of songs that worked together? KB: It's a eally difficult one. No, in answer to your a question. With ‘The Price’ album, most of the material on it is looking backwards. It was quite a retrospective album. I was very ill at the time, so I suppose there was always going to be a certain amount of retrospection to it. Whereas ‘Outlands’ was very forward-looking at the future. So, one looking back, one looking forward and hence the title ‘Janus’ [the Roman God of gates and doors/beginnings and endings, pictured with two faces, looking in opposite directions]. PB: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. KB: And that was the reasoning behind it. And also, from the B-sides and the 12-inches, all these songs that were omitted on both albums, I thought it'd be nice to put them together on this album. That was the logic. PB In terms of songs from original albums that have been left off ‘Janus’, I think ‘Outlands’ took a bigger hit than ‘The Price You Pay’. Is that because the B-sides from ‘Outlands’ were so much stronger? KB: Yeah, yeah. PB: I listened to ‘Never Take Me Alive’ with interest because I didn't think you'd be able to top the original recording, because I thought that the original recording was really good, but I think you've managed it. KB: If you say so. With the new version, there's not so much layering as there was on the original. There was a lot of layers to it, especially all the orchestra stuff. The actual sounds were from Beethoven's ‘Master of the Dead’. That's where the orchestra sounds came from. PB: So, when you were sort of going through the process of selecting the tracks and recording them, which song surprised you the most in terms of how the re-imaging came out, relative to the original version? KB: ‘The Jungle’, without a doubt. We’ve done a band version of it and I think it's cracking. A lot of it was down to the drummer, Phil Martini, really. He held the thing together and he had the arrangement pretty fixed. I think I did that with me, Phil and Craig. Even when we were in error, Phil just said, “Don't worry about it, just keep playing.” He’d got the arrangement. But it is a band kind of recording. In fact, they all are. PB: When you listen to the original albums separately, they are very different and I think a lot of that is down to the recording and production process. But when you listen to ‘Janus’, it comes across as a really cohesive body of work. KB: Well thank you. The other song which really came to life, again, because of Phil's drumming, and Adrian's guitar part, which he invented for it, was ‘March Or Die’. It’s quite different because the original was just me playing a semi-acoustic and singing. Now you've got that, but you've got this drumbeat and this guitar line, which appear in the choruses and that really enhanced it, I think. It gave it a very shamanistic kind of sound. PB: Yeah, I was getting that sort of vibe as well. I think the album's a fantastic addition to your extensive back catalogue, which is now quite a body of work now, isn't it? KB: Yeah. And funny enough, all the backing vocals you hear are Mark from The Chameleons. PBM: I remember seeing a picture of you with him in the studio. KB: Yeah, Mark Burgess is doing all the backing vocals. Which was kinds of him. He came up with some really good ideas which I’d never of come up with as I don’t think that way. PB: I guess when you have written the song, you are playing guitar and are so deeply immersed with the lead vocals, it’s then difficult to approach it from a different angle and come up with the backing vocals. KB: Yeah, exactly, unless you are Lennon and McCartney and you are thinking that way right from the beginning. But I don’t think that way. PB: Looking into the future you’ve got the ‘Westworld’ album tour with Theatre of Hate in the Autumn, but what’s next for Spear? KB: I haven’t thought that far ahead so I’m not sure. We’re going to do some more shows later in the year, in the second half of October, but obviously not a thirty-day tour. PB: Looking at the number of songs you’ve written, you don’t appear to suffer from writer’s block. Are you writing new songs and thinking “This fits with Spear, this is more of a Theatre song”? KB: Yeah, I am. PB: I’m guessing it is a constant sort of process rather than locking yourself in a room thinking “Now I’m going to write ten new songs for the next Spear album” KB: No. I can’t do that. I did try that once and it didn’t do me any good, and it took a while for me to get back to where I was. PB: Thank you. Photographs by Denzil Watson

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