Hello Frank. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview.

No Problem.

So, can you tell me where you are at the moment and what is happening around you and the band? Getting ready for those January Dates?

Yes, we are rehearsing pretty hard at the moment. So, our bass player isn't going to make it for these 3 gigs so we are rehearsing with a session bass player to get the live set ready.. And at the same time our drummer is rehearsing with our original bass player on a new material. Because it is about time to put a new record out. So there are two versions of Fen in parallel at the moment and yes it is busy. So we are looking forward to the weeks or two in the Christmas Holidays and in January we will be hitting it hard. It is nice to be busy. It is what we live to do so i cannot complain that i can play live and make music.

We are already past the middle of December and people are usually making new year resolutions and looking back to the year that has passed. How was the past year for Fen and you personally? What are you looking forward to in 2025?

Yes, well it has been a great year. It is the first year that we signed up with the Mythology Booking agency at the end of last year. And they are really great, because they really help us in terms of getting out there and playing some shows and festivals in Europe. We haven't played a lot of gigs in 2024, but I think we played good ones, if that makes sense. So that's really helping us and we are keen to continue working in that trajectory. But obviously the big thing for us in 2025 is to get a new album recorded that is front and center of the priority list. Obviously, “Monuments to absence”, came out last summer, so it's not been out for a very long time, but it took quite a while for that album to actually be released. So we haven't been in the studio and recorded anything for nearly three and a half years. For a band like us, we're quite active and that feels like quite a long time. Normally, we like to keep the new material moving. It's very, very important for us. So yeah, the new year resolution, over everything else is to get Fen album eight confirmed, completed and tracked.

That was, actually, my next question, why did it take so much time for the previous album to be released?

A number of things fit into that. So It came together pretty quickly. Came together because a lot of stuff had been written. And then we had the pandemic, so in 2020, we couldn't really do anything. So I was just frantically demoing material. We did have access to a little commercial space where we could get together and jam. Obviously, there were no gigs on the horizon, so we just absolutely distilled all our focus into getting that new album put together. So it came together very, very reasonably quickly compared to one before. And then we thought, well, we need to just keep this momentum going. Get into the studio, get this recorded, just get released. Then it is label schedules. They will schedule you into their calendar when things are ready to go. Then …i know it sounds ridiculous but for example we needed to do some new photo shoots. Because people kept catching COVID - we had like four photo shoots canceled over the space of like six months. So that knocked everything back another six months. And then there was some confusion over approving artwork. It was just all sorts of small irritating things that wouldn't be a big deal on their own, but if you add it together suddenly. It took nearly two years for the album to come out, so that was a bit of a shame. But here we are, we've been playing and supporting that record in the last year, year and a half. But from a creative perspective, we really need something new now. We need some new material. We need some new energy. And all three of us feel that we've got an enormous amount of stuff to work through, a lot of stuff written, a lot of stuff rehearsed. We now need to sort of shape it, finalize it, decide what it's going to look like.

So good news. I wish you best of luck with that.

Thank you.

You have been asked a lot about the name of the band and let's not do that again. I will just put a Google link to the Fenlands here. But I actually wanted to ask you something else: How important for your music was growing up in such an area and landscape?

It's very important, and as I've been getting older and thinking back on it. I realize how important it actually is. We grew up in that area. We moved there when I was a child. I left technically, as an adult. Between the ages of 10 and 18 you do a lot of growing up in that period and you go through some quite challenging times as an individual. I think very few people can say they enjoyed being an adolescent. You know, it was, and..

These are the most important years of everyone's life!

Yes! You learn an enormous amount about yourself. But it is challenging. You go through all the changes. Your emotions can be up and down. You know, school was tough. Yeah, there are some tough things going on at home and it was difficult. I was feeling pretty isolated and down during a lot of that period. And it seemed to be reflected in the landscape around me. It's very, very flat, it's pretty bleak, it's pretty desolate. And that almost felt like it was a mirror as to how I was feeling internally. And that became a sort of reflection of myself and reflection of how I was feeling about things. Bring into that, discovering metal, discovering extreme metal, discovering black metal, all in that same period. Аll this stuff was feeding into this whole idea, and I don't think I was conscious of it at the time. It wasn't something I was looking at going for. But you know that bleak people, that bleak peak field, that small patch of trees, swaying and winter wind. That feeling is just something that sort of seeps into you subconsciously. And so we started to do FEN. And that it was an idea I've been toying around with since I was about 18-19. Never really got around to it, and then eventually I was like: “No, I'm going to take that idea and expand it, develop it.” I had written some material that wasn't appropriate for the band I was in at the time. It was more atmospheric, had more post-rock elements in it, more shoegaze, and it felt the perfect way to try and embody that mindset I was in when I was growing up, and also to reflect that landscape and all. It was almost like this three pointed triangle of ideas coming together quite nicely, and it's just grown from there. Everything we do in Fen, comes back to that initial idea, we just move around it.The last album we did was quite angry. It was talking a lot about humanity in general. And there's a lot of confronting. But the essence of FEN always goes back to that root. Every time when we might not know where we want to go with some idea. Like, what do we do now? Where does this go? Go back to the root. There's enough there, and that's just, almost like an anchor. It's like a solid anchoring part.

Wherever you go, you look back to where you started.

Yeah, this is exactly the roots. You go to the roots, and you can find endless inspiration there. In fact, this new stuff we're working on, lyrically, conceptually and musically. It's like.. it feels almost like those early rehearsals when we first started the band nearly 20 years ago. There's a sense of that. I've really said to the guys: “Let's go back to this. Let's drill into this. Let's really mind that fire”. There's still a lot there to take away from it. It is the bedrock of the band. So yeah, your question is very prescient, because you ask how important it is and it's absolutely fundamental, and certainly where we are now,...I don't want to use that “back to the roots” thing, which bands do talk about, because it implies regression. It's…

Different types of roots. It's the roots of the emotions and inspiration.

Exactly. It's reconnecting with the impulse that we originally had to create and do this. But with what we've learned over the last 15-20 years, about ourselves, about our music. What Fen now is. Fen is now defined. It exists almost independently of the three of us in the band. It's now a concept that it has a life of its own. We're just there to service it, and it represents something. We're custodians of it. We must make sure that we do it justice and we do the right thing for it. So we've learned a lot through that, and I'd like to think that we know where we should go with this next and certainly drilling into those very fundamental inspirations behind the band and I'm inspired by. It's giving me energy to write, to put lyrics together and work on things like that. So, yeah, it's exciting

Do you think it actually adds a lot to your authenticity?  As a lot of bands actually find inspiration in other bands and peoples ideas. For example having a band from Portugal singing about Nordic forest landscapes and viking mythology? We even have Bulgarian Pagan bands that are into nordic mythology when we here have even larger pagan heritage and myths and legends.

It is what we're confident doing. What you pointed out - Portuguese bands singing about nordic mythology, things like that. That's the heavy metal storytelling approach. And that's fine. Heavy Metal and hard rock and prog Rock has always had that element of the narrative. You know, Iron Maiden were singing about Egyptian pharaohs, time traveling and things like that. That's heavy metal storytelling and that's perfectly fine. That's been an important part of heavy metal. It's been about escapism, you know. You look at all the classic metal bands and they were telling stories and all had elements of fantastical storytelling and singing about things that interest. I think when you talk about authenticity, it's important where is that line? If you're presenting something as you are literally singing a story about something that you're not claiming ownership over, that's fine. I think it becomes disingenuous if you're trying to claim something that isn't necessarily yours. And for me, what we're trying to do with Fen: This isn't 100% escape storytelling. We are bringing the listener into our world and trying to get them to resonate with what we're trying to say. In a way that's quite personal. So sort of fantastical storytelling isn't really appropriate for that, and therefore it has to be authentic to our experiences. We may talk about landscapes out here that are different, but that's normally sort of metaphorical, that's usually to reinforce a particular point within a lyric. Like “The mountains of my birth” It will talk about mountains as an embodiment of something or something hard, cold, strong and permanent, and then that's used in a metaphor in that way. But in terms of trying to claim someone else's mythology, or to try and be disingenuous about some sort of spiritualism or spirituality that's not where we go,  that doesn't work for us. And I hear what you're saying. I do. Even bands, when they are singing about their own culture and their own heritage, sometimes it could feel a bit on the nose. It could feel like, you know “Hey, we're Viking, we come from that land. So we just can ram it in your throat”. It's like, Could you be a little bit more subtle, you know?

Okay, so where do you actually draw the line? Where do you think it is the line between posers and authenticity? And what are the first signs that you can tell if certain bands are poser or authentic?

Oh…I'm going to sound like a massive hypocrite now, because I love Manowar and stuff like that. I also love Enslaved. I thought Enslaved were absolutely brilliant. They were doing the viking metal back in 1993. They were like 16 years old, and it was steeped in authenticity. I intrinsically got it. They didn't turn it into a joke. There was an element of ridiculousness about it that always is with heavy metal. Heavy Metal without ridiculousness is like beer without alcohol.

There's a thin line to make this work you know. Iron Maiden are still having a walking puppet on stage, but somehow it never looked ridiculous.  

It is great and totally appropriate for them, and it doesn't demean them in the slightest. I think for me, it's when you can get that sense of authenticity. You also get that sense of fakeness. You get that sense of bands taking the piss. And there are Enslaved; they sit there in their medieval armor, in their Viking longhouse. Yeah, through the prism of somebody looking from modern, pop music, normal culture perspective, they probably laugh their socks off.  I think that's extremely cool, but I also appreciate that it's slightly silly, but it's really, really cool. But then when you got that wave of pagan folk metal bands with accordions and stuff like Turisas and stuff like that …nah. Now this has started to get a little bit like a joke. There was too much of a joke vibe, you know, floating through there. I remember going to see Turisas at the underworld in 2005 and they did a cover of Rasputin. And everyone's like “Oh, this is hilarious” and doing the Can-can. I was just like No, no, no. This has now crossed the line. For me, this has become a little bit of a self aware ironic joke. And it's, it's punching down a bit. It's almost like the kind of crap that people would yell at you at school to take the piss out of the fact you're into metal in the first place. And that for me, made me feel uneasy, and a lot of that started filtering into the metal scene very quickly, and it left me extremely cold. I had no time for that. As soon as you enter the realm of vaguely comedic metal, but openly comedic one. I can't have that sorry.

Let me take you back to the Fenlands .., Despite the specific landscape there are a lot of folk myths and legends about this place, like the Black Shuck, The Lantern Man, The toad man. Have you heard some of those and what is the weirdest thing you have experienced while growing up there?

He-he-he an interesting one. I'll be completely honest, I haven't dug deep into the actual myths and legends of the Fens. Actually, our bass player is probably better for that sort of thing. He's hugely into folk and folklore. And obviously all the kids at school have heard about Black Shuk, and stuff like that. And I was aware of things like Hereward the Wake - the freedom fighter who would disappear into the tunnels of Isle of Ely and stuff like this. But I've stayed away from getting too specific on that, because I don't want Fen to do an Iron Maiden style of storytelling.  You know “Let's talk about the mythology of the Fen” and in “1843 there was this”. I don't want to be delivering history textbooks through heavy metal. That doesn't interest me at all. So I've deliberately kept away from that side of things. Because for me, again, it's about… (this is going to sound a little bit self indulgent), it's about a personal interpretation there. I don't want to tell someone else's story. I want to tell our story, but in a way that people can resonate with it, you know, have it sort of chime with their experiences and join us on that. So, yeah, I wouldn't be able to tell you too much about that.  But in the case of specific weird experiences… the Fens … they're weird. I'm not going to lie to you and say I've been walking the paths at night and saw ghostly light or heard a strange noise. There's enough weirdness there anyways, enough weird people. There's enough strange things going on. There's just, an atmosphere of strangeness. Enough where you don't necessarily need ghost stories to make it stranger. Obviously authors, like M.R. James grew up in Suffolk and Norfolk and the Norfolk broads, you can tell why they're inspired аnd why those landscapes inspire that kind of thing. There's always a sense that there's just something else out there. There's always a sense there's something just out of your field of vision that might just be looking at you. It's so wide and flat, you can see so much so far. My parents live on a hill. I think it's 30 meters above sea level, so not very high. And you can see the cathedral, and that's 15 miles away. There are moments where you just think, what is going on, what's in that little ridge of trees over there? Yeah, I can say I've had spiritual encounters and all that kind of stuff. But there is just a strange atmosphere, and it is nice sometimes to just walk out in the autumn, just let that steep in and just let the winds cut into you and just feel it. Just feel that, you know, there's history there on your feet. You know there's something.

UK Fenlands / Photo: Shutterstock

You and your brother are the founder members of the band and write 100 % of the song. What are the pros and cons in working with your brother? 

It's pros mainly. I picked up a guitar when I was 15. So it was like: “You can learn the bass so we can form a band”, because we're in the middle of the fens and there's no other fucker out here (laughs). So we've been working together for a long, long, long time, and I think we're both lucky enough to be quite well aligned. We got into music, metal and rock at the same time. We shared a lot of passion for a lot of the same bands, and we were definitely aligned as to where we wanted to go musically. So that's great. He's an extremely creative fellow. Far more talented musician than I am and he intrinsically gets it. Conceptually, does a lot of the artwork. You know, he's quite graphical, and  does a lot of visual art. So, yeah, it's a huge bonus. And the disadvantages, there are some disadvantages you know. When new people come into the band, sometimes they can feel a bit kind of like an outsider. We obviously had this working relationship for such a long time now, we almost don't really need to talk. Sometimes we'll just start jamming, and before you know it, a new song is there on the table. I think some people find that a little bit alienating. And also, because we are quite close, obviously we're family, if we need to push back with criticism, we sometimes have to word it a bit more carefully. But I think that's the same with anyone you work closely with. You don't say “Oh that is shit!” You have to be diplomatic. So because it is a working relationship, you wouldn't say that to somebody at work. It's very easy to be destructive in that sense. But okay, bring a solution. So you know how we would try and work its like, try different  pieces here and there. Maybe a more natural transition, or maybe speed that bit up, or something like that. It's about what is best for the collaborative project that you are working on together. It is about leaving your ego at the door and just do what is better for the song. And it can be difficult. Sometimes you get really attached to a part of a track or a transition, and then somebody comes up with a suggestion, you let it go anyway. So I think ultimately the creative relationship is good. We just have to tip it around a bit sometimes, as you would in any creative relationships. So, Jesel is in the band from early 2020, and we are very, very eager to get him involved as a voice, in terms of working on material, helping with arrangements, bringing them into the fold there. We don't want him to feel that is just us two and he must do what he is told. That's not the vibe we want. It is a genuine three piece band. If JG does turn up and say, “I've written some pieces here”, then we will be more than happy to hear them. It's not some sort of exclusive ego trip. It just so happens that I am a bit obsessed with music, and I end up locking myself in my music dungeon most nights and writing, it's my escape, it's my catharsis, and it's my purpose.

Okay, so speaking about music and inspiration. From my experience and the people that I interview. Musicians usually listen to all kinds of music, and sometimes even surprisingly different to what they usually do. What kind of music you usually listen to and what inspires you.

I listen to a lot of different things, if I'm completely honest. I mean, just this week, I've been blasting out quite a lot of hair metal, which, if anyone who knows me knows that's actually not that rare for me to be doing. So I was listening to Ratt and Lion, Dokken recently at extremely loud volumes, W.A.S.P. I really want to get some energy going, with bands like that. But then a lot of classic metal, so Manowar has been on quite heavy rotation. A more epic metal from that sort of persuasion. So bands like Virgin Steele, Crimson Glory,

Oh Virgin Steele is a totally underrated band, to be honest.

Yes! I was speaking with Adam, our bass player recently. So me and a friend of mine have been waxing on Virgin Steele for decades, and he's always been like:, “Yeah, they're not too bad.” But then, I think was when we played prophecy fest, He was like, “Look, I've been listening to Virgin Steele recently. And you guys are right. It's some of the best metal ever” I'm like, yeah, it is! It's in terms of composition. It is in the clouds. I'm talking about the classic, Аge Оf consent. Cry for Pompei is a masterpiece.

I was just blasting Noble Savage the other day which is one of my favorites!

Yes I like Noble Savage.But I think it was with “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. That's when the songwriting was just …turned up a notch to the point where it's like… It's rare to listen to an album, and you sort of think, how this guy has come up with some of this stuff? The songwriting is absolutely phenomenal. So yeah, I've been blasting out some Virgin Steele recently. I've not been listening to an enormous amount of extreme metas, to be perfectly honest. Maybe I'm just getting older he-he

I actually got all the Gehenna vinyl represses. So I've been listening a lot to “First Spell”, "Seen Through the Veils of Darkness”, stuff like that. Again, massively underrated band from the black metal scene. Really unique atmosphere. But particularly when we're writing, I try not to listen to too much black metal, too much contemporary black metal, because I don't want to inadvertently be influenced by that. But there have been some good new albums that have come out this year. Actually, I think the new Ulcerate was very good. The new IOTA, I really enjoyed that. But, yeah, I'll listen to all sorts of stuff. Classic shoegaze stuff, the new Slowdive album last year was really good. I also listen to lots of 70’s prog, 80’s pop - Tears for Fears, A-ha. I listen to quite a lot of ambient electronic stuff too. Bicep, Global communication, Black Dog productions, that sort of thing. So yeah, the palette is varied. But it's definitely been more classic rock. 80s rock, 80s metal over the last last few weeks

Excellent. So is it good for a person to open up his mind for different kinds of music?

Absolutely, I want to add a bit of doom actually, I've been really enjoying the new Funeral album. I went through the funeral back catalog really recently, and I think they are another massively underrated band.

You will be coming to Bulgaria for the first time in January .. From what I see there is quite an excitement. There are some people that follow you even from your first demo.

Wow! Really?

Yes, and So having 7 albums in your discography can you tell us what will the fans hear from you?

We will play music from nearly every album. Obviously, with seven albums, it gets difficult to give everything proper representation. Particularly for the gigs we've been playing this year as we've been doing some festival slots- we had to be very, very picky. When your average song length is eight minutes and you've got 35 minutes set. You don't get an opportunity to play many songs. But this will be nice. We've got a headlining set so we can play longer. We will try to balance the set. There's probably going to be quite a bit of early stuff in there. Certainly some first album songs.The Fen live experience is different from the fen recorded experience. There's just three of us. We don't use backing tracks or anything like that, because we hate them. We try to deliver a more honest, almost rock and roll experience. We want it to be live, to be real, and have absolute energy. All three of us are working hard for that. I got tired of going to see a band where most of the sound is coming out of a laptop, and there's six guys on stage just standing on a spot. What is going on here? This is supposed to be heavy metal, you know. We're definitely channeling that sort of spirit. It will be a heavy metal gig, that's the principle, and it's what I always say to people. People throw around words like “post” “gaze”, all that kind of stuff. But we're playing heavy metal, that's it! I want to play heavy metal. I like heavy metal. So, hopefully it'll be loud. Hopefully the sound man will do his job, make sure that it's loud. And hopefully people will vibe with us. People are paying money to see us. Then it means a lot to them. Then the least we can do is give it all. And that's what we will do - the three of us will be giving it everything we've got while we're on stage. And that's the “Fen promise”. Because we realize we're incredibly fortunate to be able to do this kind of thing. I've never been to Bulgaria. I've got a couple of Bulgarian friends, it's a place we've looked at playing in the past. I think we were offered a gig there many, many years ago, and it never happened. So, yeah, hugely looking forward. I love playing new places. Yeah, it's hugely exciting.

I'm sure it will be amazing. Can you leave any final words to our readers

We cannot wait to get over to Bulgaria. We are really looking forward to it. We hope we will make it worth it. So be there!

Thank you very much Frank. Let's not take much more of your time and see you in Sofia and we will continue our discussion about Heavy Metal and Virgin Steele.

Yes, Yes, Virgin Steele will definitely be in the discussion! Take care!

Author: Nikola Petras
January, 2025