Look mum, no teeth!

While scouring discogs for new or old industrial treats with which to punish my never-satisfied, punishment-gluttonous eardrums, I struck gold. There, in unassuming grey packaging, among the second hand CDs, I uncovered Leicestershire's darkest secret. No, I'm not talking about Black Annis, but the unremittingly grim, nasty, hard-as-nails yet strangely compelling techno-industrial-dub-brutalism of Indianhead.

Do you doubt n0teeth when we tell you this lot are the absolute fucking business? Here, strap on their "debut" (of which more later) for size, and tell me every single beat doesn't sound like bone meeting concrete:

Indianhead's sound is - and I don't think I can quite emphasise this enough - fucking HARD. 99% of "harsh" EBM bands out there would sell their own grannies to have drum programming as coldly and precisely devastating as Indianhead's.

It's not dub in the sense of warmly throbbing bass and ethereal echoes. It's dub in the sense of claustrophobic concrete clatter, greedily sucking up what little air seeps through the breeze blocks. It's the drum machine choking on broken glass snares in an airtight steel chamber its own creation. It's what Adrian Sherwood's suicide note would've sounded like if working with Al Jourgensen had pushed him over the edge as it would most normal human beings. Or what the third Ministry album would have sounded like if Sherwood had snapped, taken Jourgensen hostage and refused to let him out of Southern Studios until he'd recorded a ten times harsher follow-up to Twitch without access to any guitars.

Insofar as Indianhead have any kind of recognisable "lineage" within industrial music you could possibly make the case that they are continuing the more electronic direction Test Dept took in the 90s without sacrificing the polemic or the sonic brutality (as TD's forays into dance music did, for better or for worse). The music is possibly too rhythmic for the noise crowd, too abrasive for the club scene and too pared down & minimalistic even for EBM fans. All these genres seem to want a reaction from the listener: either get up and dance or submit to being pummelled by harsh frequencies. Indianhead don't want anything from you. They simply exist, like a hulking concrete monolith that has loomed over a town centre for so many generations nobody can remember what it was originally built for.

Within the extended universe of Indianhead's label, Serial Org, you will also find the martial/neoclassical industrial sounds of Autarky, ambient from Insular and a project called DAT500 which from its description sounds like Robin Rimbaud tuning his Scanner to exclusively online frequencies.

But enough of n0teeth running our mouth. The days of monologue are dead, let's have some dialogue with headboy / founding member Dean Selby, who was kind enough to answer a few questions when we contacted him out of the blue via online channels...

n0teeth: Let's get the most boring question you can ask a recording artist out of the way early doors. Why "Indianhead"? ("Autarky" will be entirely self-explanatory to anyone who's tasted that project's dark, militaristic delights).

Dean Selby (Indianhead / Autarky / Insular / Island Apes): That's an easy one. Band names can be tricky and it did take a little time, but we wanted to choose something that unified us, that came from something we all liked. Indianhead was a fairly diverse group of people but we had key things we all liked. Wade, our original guitarist, was watching Twin Peaks with Jay, our bassist, during its original BBC2 broadcast run, and there's a scene in the first series where there are petrol pumps with Indian Head written on them. We were all, and remain, massive admirers of David Lynch's work and after they mentioned it, we all instantly said yes.

nt: Have any photos or footage survived of the band playing live?

DS: There's no real film of Indianhead, we did try to do some super 8 filming, which may exist somewhere and a couple of promo band shots, but I have no idea where they went. We had a rough time in all our interactions with the music biz - many labels wanted to release a record with us but either folded or negotiations broke down, with the main one being Dynamica in Germany who signed Cubanate, but the deal was appalling and we hired a really good music lawyer who advised us to back out. There are lots of plans for Indianhead, including finally finishing an album that we've had many different versions of and doing some promo vids of older tracks online. I'm also trying to convince Neil and Ben that playing live as an electronic band is a viable idea, but that will take some time. Neil, Mick and myself were also in another experimental band originally called New World Chaos (we did one CD, A Victim of Lies, which is still available on Discogs). After Mick left Indianhead, we continued that project as Sound X - I will be releasing the two double CDs we did on Bandcamp soon.

nt: Even when sonically pistol-whipping the listener into a bloody paste, there are moments with Indianhead is downright danceable. Perhaps more in a "the beatings will continue until the dance floor fills up" way than a peace, love & ecstasy kind of way, but then if I didn't have that sadomasochistic urge to submit my body to the disciplinarian rhythms of industrial music I probably wouldn't have ever dipped my toes into the genre any further than the relatively playful, upbeat anthems of Nitzer Ebb. Have you ever thought of Indianhead as dance music?

DS: Dance music is a really important aspect of who we are. The problem with electronic music in general has been the widespread generic approach, lessening its impact. So much dance music is lift muzak, these days, enabled by a reliance on presets and sound libraries. I worry less about AI generated dance music than seasonal DJs using Serato on autopilot. However, the whole EBM scene was a very mixed bag. You basically had Front 242 on the good side and everyone else on the bad. We have a lot of love for Meat Beat Manifesto/DHS, Richard H Kirk, some of the R&S/Apollo stuff, Warp and SKAM's early days, the Electric Ladyland compilations and many more. We have a very wide range of tastes that certainly doesn't come from the obvious sources of industrial and electronic music. With all these things, though, it's simply asking ourselves the question, "is it any good?", "do we like these sounds?", whether it's dance, dub, extreme noise or ambient really doesn't matter. It just has to sound good.

"Dance music is a really important aspect of who we are."

Ironically one of Indianhead's most danceable tracks samples Steve Dahl, an American radio jock who orchestrated the 20th century's most embarrassing public display of dad-rockism in 1979: Disco Demolion Night.

nt: Did you play in Fudge Tunnel at some point? From the descriptions of the early IH stuff (which I haven't been able to track down and find so much as a single snippet of for love nor money) you started out as quite a sludgy, Godfleshy band - very much a sound I associate with the late 80s/early 90s Midlands - bands like Slab!, or Pitch Shifter when they were still spelling their name in two words and hadn't yet discovered drum n bass. There's something very harsh and confrontational about the Indianhead I've come to know through albums that are readily available, that suggests you weren't the type of band who'd be happy to be lumped in with a scene, get along with everyone, drop by Justin Broadrick's studio for a cup of tea & a spliff. Correct me if I'm wrong!

DS: I was Fudge Tunnel's live front-of-house sound man from 1991 until they finished in 1995. We supported Fudge three times as Indianhead. The only physical release of that version of the band was a 7" comp, which included a track called The Unseen. All the early stuff was self-released cassettes, primarily 5 track demo tapes, all using drum machines because we couldn't record drums at our studio. I can probably dig out an mp3 or two from those days, let me see. We debated doing an anniversary set of modern versions of old tracks, but the only one that survived was SAND III, which we put on Strategia della Tensione.

Funny you mention Pitch Shifter, Indianhead supported them at The Princess Charlotte, when they were very much a dodgy Godflesh rip-off - all drum machines and dreads with death metal vocals. We turned up with skinheads and attitude, boy we had attitude, I confess. So, it was amusing when they suddenly shaved their heads and did a more poppy metal industrial-lite thing. Although I know Johnny Carter well and he has bad memories of Pitch Shifter - we recorded the drums and bass at his studio for the Island Apes album, before they knocked it down!

An interview we did in the mid-90s confirms your theory about our dismissive attitude. We're nice people, really!

nt: Those early, noise rock influenced releases came out during the rave explosion - where were the members of Indianhead at (mentally, chemically & musically) between the second summer of love and the introduction of the "repetitive electronic beats" law?

DS: There's a reason the earlier material is hard to find, believe me. It's a purely nostalgic thing for the people who were in the band at the time and the memories linked to those songs. We have no interest in making them available. We'd only release ones that we re-wrote, like SAND III on the last album. As far as our lifestyles were concerned, we were split down the middle in terms of enjoying those aspects at the time. We were unified that we didn't buy into the naivety of ecstasy culture, we were all deeply cynical, mainly of politics and empty culture/consumerism, cynical of any kind of groupthink, really. The repetitive beats thing is interesting, as we'd really moved away from the established industrial bands. We found albums like Autechre's Tri Repetae and the early SKAM stuff far more interesting and far more in line with the mindset of those earlier industrial groups, than, say Nine Inch Nails or KMFDM.

nt: You've successfully pulled off that rare stunt of making live drums sound cold and mechanical while losing none of the physicality. Who and what are your biggest drumming influences - doesn't have to be artists, can be entire genres. And I'm well aware that's the second most boring question you can ask a recording artist!

DS: I was actually the drummer of Indianhead when we first started as a "proper" band. There's a combination of loops, samples, real drumming and drum machines on the albums. I used to play a lot of click tracks, which has never bothered me, so it worked well with any sequencers. We were massive fans of the good period Ministry/Revolting Cocks (mostly Bill Rieflin's drumming) and Skinny Puppy from ViviSectVI to The Process. Also, we really like Laibach, well apart from the mid-90s, which was a big reason I started Autarky because I was so disappointed with them during Nato and Jesus Christ Superstars. When we started to work on The Gun Speaks, we'd given up on the guitar/bass/drums/samples format and just wrote in our home studio. This is where I took on the production work and most of the performance aspect. Ben and Neil are self-confessed "non-musicians", but contribute to the overall ideas and sounds. It's something that we often consider when thinking of how we'd play live, as there are lots more options, these days.

"The groove was always more important than any flashy drum solos."

As I was Indianhead's drummer when we were a more traditional band, I can tell you what influenced me. The first time I was really turned onto drumming would be Adam and the Ants' second incarnation with the Burundi beat, Budgie from the Banshees, Bill Rieflin, the drumming of early SWANS, the sound of Laibach's drums, Cevin Key was a great drummer for Skinny Puppy, particularly live. Still, it's probably Keith LeBlanc and the whole On-U Sound label. He was peerless. As for Indianhead's drums, we'd always go with the sound alongside the style. When I was playing drums during our early days, I always played patterns, often to click tracks and the groove was always more important than any flashy drum solos. Simpler, larger and relentless was something I always strived for and still do.

nt: Indianhead's music certainly seems to paint a grim but sadly accurate picture of a society scarred by racial violence - is the nailbomb on the cover of Trap Them And Kill Them a reference to the London terrorist attacks carried out by David Copeland in 1999?

DS: In short, yes. We were very conscious at that time that we should be a little more ambivalent. Allowing the listener to make up their own minds. I mean, it's kind of obvious where we stand on things and if you knew us there would be absolutely no doubt. There were a few titles for that album but I really wanted to call it Trap them and Kill Them, as a right-wing absolute authoritarian stance. The fact that the terrorist attack was right-wing and against the types of people who the right-wing press would typically be against, added to the irony of demanding capital punishment for such terrorists, and that seemed a more creative idea for us. You can aim that concept directly against Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon apologists or those who think Jordan Peterson is an intellectual! SWANS' Public Castration is a Good Idea is a very important album for me and was also in the back of my mind, plus the exploitation cinema reference helped too. This was when the Daily Mail and Express took over from The Sun as tabloid readerships got older and more draconian, so there's a headline grabbing aspect to calling it Trap Them and Kill Them.

nt: Tell me about Leicester in the 90s. In more recent years it seems that when the city makes the news it's because the fash are on the march, smashing windows and terrorising the Asian community. Were things just as bad back in the day?

DS: That's really sensationalism by the media. You're not going to get many "Leicester had a great day of social diversity" stories if you're not living there. I've always felt that Leicester was a success story of British cultural integration. I've spent a lot of time studying, working and socialising there and I don't recognise it having more problems than other cities. We're all from working class backgrounds, so we remember the British Movement, National Front and their ilk during the late 70s and 80s. It was more a class issue than a fascist one. Disenfranchised youth looking for a purpose after manufacturing died and the establishment right presenting easy reasons for their failures by scapegoating immigration and foreign countries. Fascist groups in the UK tend to self-destruct due to in-fighting and internal power struggles. Britain is traditionally more right-leaning socially, so the mainstream tends to cater for those that might otherwise be attracted to the far-right. It will be interesting to see how Reform handles the various factions of its supporters, as this has generally been the reason the traditional fascist parties have failed when attempting to break into mainstream politics.

nt: I'm half Italian and have a morbid fascination with the Years of Lead - aspects of which make you sound like a conspiracy theorist if you talk about them, but the truth of what actually went on in Italy during the Cold War is so utterly dark, perverse, complex and fucked up it makes "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" sound like an innocent conversation about structural engineering. So upon discovering that Indianhead named their last album Strategia della Tensione, and that it was released "to coincide with the anniversary of the Italian Supreme Court's final sentence for the 1980 Bologna Railway Bombing" - my brain lit up like the Houses of Parliament if my boy Guido had got the job done. Were you aware that at the time a prominent member of the Italian far right connected to the bombing, Roberto Fiore, was running a language school in West London? He had been lying low since fleeing Italy right after the bombing as he was a wanted man. On arriving in London he was taken in by a friend with whom he would share a flat for a number of years - a fellow fascist by the name of Nicholas Griffin.

DS: It was Ben who came up with "strategy of tension" as the idea for the album title, as he'd been researching that area of Italian history. We always think of things conceptually rather than politically. If the subject is interesting that is enough, we don't want to imprint a definitive political line or decision. We like the idea that art should be open to interpretation and allow the observer to own it for themselves. The concept of governments facilitating and enabling left or right groups is fascinating and reminds me of Putin's strategy in Russia. We've used a lot of conspiracy theories and terrorist groups as source material and it doesn't necessarily matter if the theory has much authority to it, it's just down to how they inspire us artistically. But we're interested in all kinds of subject matter as inspiration, from politics to science, sociology, architecture, culture, media, etc. We're as happy writing about Boltzmann's entropy formula as we are about the Panopticon. The subject matter is the basis for an artistic idea, not just to strive for an accurate historical narrative or political message. You can equally equate Yamasaki's Dream as a song about 9/11 or the egotism of building skyscrapers and the desire for a catastrophic event to immortalise them. I spent a lot of time reading about British fascism, particularly the period through the 20th century, so, yes, I'm well aware of the history of Griffin and the lineage before him - with the irony that Griffin probably killed more fascists than most Antifa groups by getting them to demolish his asbestos shed! Still, we never want to punish listeners for not getting the references or not wanting to research the subject matter further. We are the type of people who want to know more about the things we like, though, so it's important to leave those breadcrumb trails for those who wish to investigate.

"The subject matter is the basis for an artistic idea, not just to strive for an accurate historical narrative or political message."

nt: Speaking of breadcrumb trails - what is the significance behind the number 322? (Part of Indianhead's Bandcamp address and also the name of an early release)

DS: Ah, we're back to the old, trusted Indianhead obsession with cults and conspiracy theories. It's the Skull and Bones AKA Order 322 Yale society, similar to Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head. Lots of famous members, known as Bonesmen, including three former US Presidents, William Taft, George Bush Sr and George Bush Jr.

We used their moniker for our second demo tape, 322, including the track The Unseen, which is about the society. There's another version of The Unseen, which was our only physical release as the band version of Indianhead. This was released on vinyl as part of Instinctive Record's Under the Skin series in 1994.

nt: What inspired Autarky's (oddly groovy, acid-driven) "Richmond Castle"? Have there been any conscientious objectors in your family? I'm not saying I found myself listening to that track in particular after catching wind of scare stories about the government reintroducing conscription but, well, you know.

DS: No conscientious objectors that I am aware of, sadly. Richmond Castle is just a fascinating and not widely known story. The whole paranoia around fifth columnists and the irony that most interned fascists were nationalists, first and foremost, and would have probably laid down their lives to defend Britain against Germany, intrigued me. It also poses a contradiction, which is a strong inspirational aspect of everything I've done with Autarky. I don't believe the moral war was motivation for the allies in WWII. Wars are primarily about obtaining or defending territory and resources, and people are always secondary in any conflict. The basic concept of Autarky is to take historical events and blur them, re-appropriate them for political, social and emotional artistic pursuits. The track from Autarky II, The Cold War, for instance, on the surface, could be about post-war East West relations. It could also be an imaginary opening title theme to a spy thriller or it could be about the souring of a romantic relationship. Are you listening with your brain, your heart or both? I fluctuate between those three positions, constantly, and the personal meaning of that work fluctuates too. I like art that evolves with its audience over time.

The closest Autarky has ever come to playing live was as part of my friend Sin's band, Imprint, at a goth festival in Bristol in 2010. Most of the music is hers, but there are a couple of tracks written by me, mainly the music to her cover of Crass's Reality Asylum, any orchestral embellishments, the coda to the track The Offering and I re-wrote the music as a "remix" to her track Let Me Go.

nt: Autarky is certainly a much more refreshing approach to martial industrial than just sampling an orchestra and belling about "the death of Evropa"...

DS: The key thing about sampling orchestras is to put it through a massive distortion and sound like you're hitting drums by throwing bodies off a roof onto them [editor's note: cry-laughing emoji supplied to assure the reader that Mr Selby has not caused death or injury by recording drums in this manner].

Communist party tannoy systems are always a desirable sonic goal. I'd pretty much finished Autarky III before I moved to Colorado, but I found the obsession with post war totalitarianism gave me comfort during my time in the states. Also my life in the US was a big influence on Autarky IV - plus the video for The Birth of a Nation was all filmed in Colorado.

nt: Tell us some more about your life in the States. Were you anywhere near Indian Head?

DS: I was in Colorado 2006-7. Living and working in Fort Collins, so not really near to Indian Head. One of the best things was seeing Meat Beat Manifesto in Denver with the full interactive VJ setup, with Mark Pistel from Consolidated, Ben Stokes from DHS and Lynn Farmer on drums in the band.

nt: And finally - here's the third most predictable question anyone can ask a musician: what does the future hold for Indianhead and Serial Org?

DS: The future is unclear. If I'm still alive and capable, I'll always be working on something creative. Indianhead continues, we're still the same three-piece we've been since we started The Strongest Weapon in 1996. We've got the basis of a new album, Swarm Control, which, conceptually at least, is fairly mature, but we previously scrapped versions of the tracks and started re-working them nearly ten years ago! I'm planning to resume the work this year, with the hope of something ready for release, next year. Autarky has two albums in progress that I want to release simultaneously, which will make sense when they finally come out. That'll be Autarky VI and Autarky VII.

I really want to play live. I dream of Indianhead playing gigs again. It would be very different to how we played before (but that was when we were a more traditional band) and we now have the equipment to do it justice, I think. I would also like to do some improvised live streaming events direct from SERIAL studio, but this will take time. Time is the enemy, always. I understand why Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson took advantage of being rich enough to stay in bed and just dream of all the possibilities rather than have to make a decision.

I did another "solo" project around the time of the initial work on Autarky, called Insular. It's more ambient electronica and dub, but there are slight hints towards the work I've done with Indianhead, but it is quite different. I've just uploaded the original CD masters to Bandcamp. Also, to mark Bandcamp Friday, I've just put out the "lost" third Insular album, moj produkt, which has many completed tracks but is mostly demos, as I gave up - the next Insular album will be in a more combined distorted and ambient direction, so these recordings no longer fit.

I'm also currently in another band, Island Apes, with my old friends MKJ from Meatfly/Force Fed/Sycophant Records and David Ryley from Fudge Tunnel/BGR Records and I became friends with Antronhy (Bivoauc/Dogentank/Jullian Cope) when he joined the band in 2019. We released our first album last year on God Unknown Records and we're currently working on our second. We've played a few gigs and are planning for more this year. SERIAL continues and reappears when there's something to put out, but I don't know if we'll release physical products anymore. I'm thinking of putting the label onto Bandcamp and linking to all the artist accounts and releases. I do dream of releasing physical SERIAL products, it's just the cost and the fact that running a label properly is a full-time job. I'd rather spend that time making music without compromise, even if the audience is miniscule.

Check out Indianhead's sounds on Bandcamp.
Find out more on Dean's new vehicle, Island Apes, on their website.

Note: to show how truly democratic the Serial Organisation is, Dean confabulated with his fellow 'heads before getting back to us. Or so he alleges. n0teeth has not received any evidence - photographic or otherwise - that the "band" we know as indianhead isn't just three or four little Dean Selbies in a trenchcoat.