Interview: Drone and Mechanised From V2A

 Former Ghost: I’m here tonight in the Apocalypse with Drone and Mechanised from V2A. Thanks for taking time away from the Wasteland for us. I saw you last weekend at Corrosion Fest which is always a great event. You guys always put on an amazing show. Really, really, truly enjoy what you do.

Tell me a little bit about 2023. It sounds like you’ve got a full year of things on the horizon.

Drone: 2023 so far has been a lot of festivals here, so it’s getting very busy. At the moment, we’re finishing off our next album, which is coming in the summer. So that’s what we have been focusing on. Now we really start the festival season up. We already did CorrosionFest, so now we’re off to Malta and then Germany and then America. This year is pretty much booked out already. Even though it’s very busy for us, we’ve just announced that we’re playing Wave Gotik Treffen. So that’s a big one, so that’s really, really good. 

We’re headlining Wasteland Weekend over in the Mojave Desert again. We’re really concentrating this year on Germany and America. We’ve got, Dark Horizon in Berlin and WGT. We’ve got the Anatopia festivals, three of those. They are bonkers. It’s a cross between a Comic-Con and AMPHI. 

Imagine AMPHI with dwarves, elves, flamethrowers, Mad Max vehicles, it’s bonkers. We played it last year and we went down really well. So now we’re playing all three of them this year. There’s thousands of people. We’ve got flamethrowers and a whole post-apocalyptic area. You’ll have to come over to one of them as our guest. You’ve not seen a festival like this.

FG: I will do that because I love the extravagance of it. You guys also have your own festival now, too. That’s coming up in September, right?

Drone: Yes. We’re looking forward to that one. We’re just about to announce the bands. They will go live soon. Yeah, that’s another bonkers festival. So far we’ve got the legendary Spock from Sweden, who are amazing. We’ve got Sheep on Drugs, which are also fantastic, and we’ve got six other bands as well.

FG: Amazing!

Drone: We’re doing V2Afest is because we love Wasteland Weekend over in LA and the whole thing is there are no rules. You can take your own drinks, there’s flamethrowers, there’s the Thunderdome, nudity, and all kind of tanks and everything. We thought, we want one of those in the UK. The land is on an old motocross site, 40 acres, with indoor arenas, outdoor arenas, monster pads like lasers. The whole place is sand as well, so no mud. Bring your tank, if you’ve got a tank!

Ours is a place called Nuke City. Within Nuke City, each district has their own mayor and then from their own mayor, they can have their own scene - their own entertainment, their own look and feel, their own food places. And it just gets bigger and bigger. It’s crazy. Very much like Wasteland Weekend, but in the UK.

Mechanized: For Europe. We are affiliated with them so we are the European League for Wasteland Weekend.

Drone: We’ve got a load of people from Wasteland coming over from America for it. We’ve got a coachloads of Germans coming over from Anatolia. The first one we did in the UK - it went down strong and a lot of English people who have never been to Wasteland didn’t quite know what to expect and the reaction was, “Oh my God”.

Mechanised: But we did it.

Drone: It was just coming out of the lockdown. It was still very strict with COVID and people had to be tested. We were very strict. But as soon they entered that world, we stayed for three days, and it was mind blowing. Everyone had just the best time because it was just so surreal. We had people who had seen us over in Wasteland and they were crying. We were on stage at night. They were crying because they it was so like Wasteland.

FG: I love your experience for the two hours of your sets. So I’m truly looking forward to the three days of just sheer orgiastic exhaustion. 

Drone: That’s it. Also, because it’s fully immersive, everybody’s got their own characters. We’ve got our own radio station there. There’s a club. You can just take your own drinks. Everybody swaps drinks and food and all the all the rest of it. We’ve got full contact, armoured fighting. If you imagine guys in medieval armour with metal weapons having a go at each other, we have that. We have jugger. Yeah, we got the international full-combat armoured championships there. There are about 20 different teams. It’s just chaos. It’s everything that shouldn’t be allowed in a festival!

FG: In the Midlands.

Mechanised: In the middle of the Midlands.

Drone: And it makes it fun.

Mechanised: Where it is, the view is amazing. When you’re on the land, you know you can overlook this area. It’s just so magical.

Drone: We had Ghost Dance last time, so they were really good. We had quite a few others. I think Inertia played. We’ve got some really good UK bands this year as well. But now we’ve also got more European bands and even American bands want to come over. They can film music videos there because you know, all this stuff is already there. 

Mechanised: September is going to be super busy; we start off with at Anatopia. Then we do V2 Fest and then we go to America.

Drone: A two-week tour in America. We do East Coast. Austin, LA. And then we finish at Wasteland Weekend because that just kills your voice because you’re in the middle of the desert. So that always has to be the last one. 

Mechanised: We’ve headlined like four years already, didn’t we?

Drone: Headlined four years running. It was their ten-year anniversary three or four years ago. And being an English band, um, an English-German band. We decided for their ten-year anniversary, wouldn’t it be fun if we hired these massive snow cannons and brought the snow to the Mojave Desert?

Mechanised: We gave them real snow. But it was really funny, though, because some of these people, as you all know, never saw snow in their life. And they were like, “what is happening?” It was fantastic.

Drone: One thing with V2A is that instead of just being a band, we’re more of an art project, so we do crazy stuff that makes us laugh and appeals to us. Most bands just wouldn’t have the resources or wouldn’t even think was a good idea. But we’re out there with one life to live! We don’t want to be the next VNV Nation. We’re the first V2A and we want to do creative, cool stuff.

FG: That’s what I loved about you from the first time I saw you live. I mean, you’re both photogenic as fuck. Let’s start there. Because..

Drone: I like you, Michael. I like you. 

FG: I shot all this great content at CorrosionFest. I had almost a thousand photos that took me hours to select from because they were all so good. I don’t usually get that much great stuff.

Mechanised: Oh, thank you. We enjoy this. That’s our you know, we love it. It’s our place to shine, you know, our happiness.

Drone: There’s a little secret to that as well. We do not rehearse. So the only time we ever play together is when we play together.

Mechanised: We’ve rehearsed. Like, have rehearsed separately, just…

Drone: Separately, but never as a band. So we always meet on stage. Even when we got the drummers and guitarists abroad, they all did the same. And that’s possibly for us, the energy, we suddenly bond. We’re not 100% sure what everybody else is going to do next, which is great, it keeps it fresh for us. 

Next year we’re headlining the official Mad Max Festival in Australia on the film set. A lot of our friends are Mad Max actors, etcetera. So because of V2A, we get to do stuff for films and TV shows.

Mechanised: And then we got over to Japan as well. We do first Australia and then we go over to Japan. So that’s next.

Drone: As I said, this year we’re concentrating on Germany and America. But we’ve had we had literally about two weeks ago we had some offers for Brazil, Australia (again), and Mexico. We’d love to, but we just don’t have the time, but maybe next year. 

FG: Let’s pivot away and talk about music and the new album. You’ve got six out now and I look at your discography and the real shift happened around Machine Core.

Mechanised: Yes.

FG: And I’m assuming that you’re continuing the trajectory that you’ve been on for the last three.

Drone: Yes. Yes.

FG: Tell me about the influences and the new album.

Drone: [on influences] The Sisters are huge. I would just like to meet Andrew because he is my hero, because he turned me into a Goth from about the age of ten. So I blame him. My mum can blame him (laugh). First and Last and Always is my all-time favourite record. It is just quality. Every song is just fantastic.

Mechanised: Drone used to be a very big goth. I was more the electronica person. 

Drone: I’m English. You have to be a goth. 

Mechanised: It’s the German. We have to do dance beats.

Drone: Yeah you do. And we’re sort of pale and wishy washy so Goth. Anyway, the album is called Hellfire. It’s got ten songs. We wrote them through lockdown. But we’re very much a live band, so we’re sort of playing around with stuff and we’ll be doing work on it in Malta and Germany just to tweak them out. And then the album comes out. But they’re all done. They’re all completely polished because we’ve had two years to do it. Absolutely full on.

It’s sometimes quite easy to create electronic music, but we like hooks, like a traditional band. So it’s going to have a beat, it’s going to have a hook, it’s going to have a melody that sticks in your head. Easy, sing along lyrics. Every song means stuff to us, but not necessarily to anybody else. We’ve never, ever, published the lyrics to any of our songs anywhere. So that’s quite because they’re…

Mechanised: Sing along. Because over 20 years now V2 is on the go, so we never gave anything out. People ask us for it. We said maybe we do a book one day, so let’s see. But we never give our lyrics away. But as Drone said, a lot of songs have a lot of meanings to us personally. Deeply, because we had a lot of tragedy during all this time. Obviously, like every family has had loss and illnesses. That’s covered within our songs. And a lot of people had to deal with death, they can reflect as well. So the people who want to hear it, hear it and others just party. You know, we don’t really care.

Drone: Because V2A is very much an art project, it’s fun for us to hide stuff in the lyrics, to hide stuff in the artwork. There was a £1,000 contest in the last comic and nobody won it. There were six hidden things and the first person to get all six got the prize.

Mechanised: We haven’t covered the comic, we haven’t even covered that. But there’s a new comic coming out and it just keeps doubling up. So we do a lot of stuff for our own entertainment, whether the world just ignores it and doesn’t look that deep. But there’s we hide stuff in everything just for fun, for our own entertainment. If that makes any sense?

Drone: During the lockdown, we brought out our first comic. Which was like a little project of ours which now evolved. We’ve got now five already in the series. Netflix are interested in filming it because we have connections in the right places, let’s say. So yeah. The big book is now coming out, which is the second edition. It’s now coming out.

Mechanised: April Yeah, well.

Drone: It’s midway through this year. It’ll hit Kickstarter. Because I’m a big comic book fan as well, I like art, I see everything visually, even music, which is which is weird, but I always got a strong mental picture. Um, all our artists are 2000AD artists, a massive 2000AD. We’ve got this guy called Ryan Brown does all our covers. He is the number one Marvel guy. He’s a mad Irish guy, drinks loads of Guinness but he is the top-of-the-tree for front covers and then we’ve got all the top 2000AD artists on the inside. So again, we don’t want to just create a comic. We want to create something beautiful that looks good. That’s got depth to it. 

Some of our friends are Mad Max actors, so they’ve all got their own characters. Since I was a kid, I’ve always been possessed by Mad Max. That and The Sisters of the Mercy. But when I was about ten, I accidentally saw Mad Max 2. And when you’re about ten years old, I thought “this just changed my life”. I was the only kid in my middle school with a boomerang. 

My childhood hero was the feral kid. The little kid with the metal Boomerang. He’s Emil Minty, who’s now a personal friend. So how cool is that? Emil’s got his own character. What happened to the feral kid after Mad Max 2 when he went off in the little truck? In our comic, he’s an adult. And we’ve got all the backstory of what happened to him. 

Mechanised: We’ve got lots of Mad Max actors in it from Fury Road.

Drone: We’ve got Mark Sexton, who was the Fury Road storyboard artist. He’s in it. He’s got his own character, Dana, who was the stunt double for Furiosa? She’s got her own character in it. And so on. We’ve got a load of Mad Max people in there. It’s a creative thing. It’s not just a comic. It’s sort of a love affair of what’s going on in our minds.

FG: I think that’s what’s interesting to me about what you’ve created with V2A and leaning into all of this. One of the themes that I spend a lot of time on with the magazine is Tribe. And I think that as people that are in this scene, we tend to self-identify.

Drone: There are the people that show up as war boys in the kit and the whole thing, and that’s always just fantastic.

FG: The way you engage with the crowd – with the Chrome, walking the line, it just it sucks you in. And I think that’s truly something special.

Drone: I think also from our side, we’re very sort of anti-ego. It’s not like look at us, we’re a band. Us and the audience are creating something magic together. So most a lot of the photos are from normally from the crowd of, you know, they’re covered in Chrome and they’ve got foam on their head. They’re dressed as war boys. And it’s a group gathering where something special happens between the band and the audience. It’s that’s what we call it, the Cult of V2A. So it’s not just us. We’re ALL in a band called V2A. It’s everybody, everybody in the room. We’re out there to cause chaos.

Mechanised: Family. We just say, it’s our tribe, it’s our family, and it’s everywhere we go, you know? Even when we play like huge festivals, like in Germany. Yes. You have AMPHI, which is a scene anyway, but Anotopia - it’s not a scene festival. It has normal people from normal places, going there and they’re just hooked and they’re going mad. We have thousands in front of stage. The first gig we ever played, and we had to do like three gigs a day, they didn’t know us. But by the nighttime, literally, the whole event was rammed, it was packed. And then the next day the same. It was just “run” from that point onwards. And that’s why their management jumped onboard. And that all happened there. 

We are now on that ride. And it’s just fun. You know, people don’t need to be within the scene. And I like that because I don’t know, even in Germany it’s all very packed in and it’s all very controlled. And I don’t like that. Everybody should enjoy what they do and go out and have fun. I don’t care what they do and what their background is, you know, let’s party together. And I think that that’s what Anatopia is, it’s such a good feeling. Even with like miniatures [kids] in front of stage shouting, they were like maximum of 12. Yeah. And they went mad. But that’s the reason we love it. You go to festivals like Ligeti or something, you have all like 40 plus year old people there, you know that age group and there’s not really much young coming and people need to invest in the young ones. Otherwise the scene will die at some point.

Drone: We’re very inclusive of everybody. We’re out there to party and cause trouble and have fun. You can see from the shows. We get Goths, we get Industrial, we get Metallers, we get Preppers in America, you know, people with proper guns and flamethrowers? They all come out and they’ve got chrome all over their face just to have an awesome time. 

All of it’s for our own entertainment because this appeals to us, but we want everybody to have great fun. Each gig is a separate gathering. It’s a separate thing and anything can happen at any of the gigs. We don’t do the same stuff everywhere. It goes all over the place and even we don’t quite know what’s going to go down.

Mechanised: I think that’s the best way, isn’t it?

FG: I love it. You’ve hinted online about secret projects. Tell me what you can about those.

Drone: I’ll talk around stuff. Okay. A lot of our friends are storyboard artists for films. Big films. Marvel.

Mechanised: Mad Max.

Drone: And stuff. So because we’re good friends with them and they know us and they like us. We’re getting invited to do big stuff for big movies. Yeah, but it’s like you have a lot of non-disclosures, so we really can’t risk talking about it at all.

Mechanised: At one point we just have to stop our work because at the moment, it’s a balance. But this balance is now getting really exhausted. So, at some point we just have to park our day jobs and just have to carry on with this stuff which I look forward to because it is exhausting doing both at this rate. Other people sit on the beach, but we can’t. We’re always touring.

Drone: Because we’re very creative, we just want to do cool stuff. When we finish living and just before we explode or whatever, we want this body of work of just cool stuff. It may not be cool to somebody else, but to us it’s the coolest thing ever. So when we got opportunities to work on major films and major TV shows and doing more leftfield things with these guys - computer games and our own graphic novels, we always do it.

Mechanised: These things make it all worthwhile and it’s just fun. Later on, when we sit in our 70s and our little rocking chair, if we get there, you can look back and think, that’s crazy stuff. We don’t even know what’s tomorrow. You know, some crazy stuff will happen suddenly and it’s like just we just take the ride. It’s fun.

Drone: We’re very geared us as the art project, so we are getting involved more. We’ve got major producers who are friends, as you know, with your circle of friends as well. You’ve got somebody who’s writing the storyboard for, say, a new Marvel film, for example, or a Star Wars thing. Oh, by the way, we could do with something for that. Would you be interested? Et cetera. Et cetera. So at the moment, we really want to push the boundaries as much as we can. Everywhere. You know, we normally say yes to everything and then think afterwards “Oh, shit, How are we going to do that? What time have we got to do this?”

Our main project after the band and the computer game, which is coming out this year, and the graphic novels, is TV and film. But major TV and film. Cool stuff that appeals to us, if that makes any sense.

FG: All of it. That’s what we’re here to do - the weird, odd shit that makes life interesting. And you’ve certainly made my life interesting and brought a lot of joy to my world. And I know I know others as well. So thank you for that. I truly appreciate it. And thanks for your time tonight!

Mechanised: It’s so good to hear. Thank you.

Drone: Really appreciate your words. It’s so kind. Now you’re part of the Cult of V2A. You’ve joined a cult. Like yourself. We do it for the passion. And when you have got the means to do just cool stuff, just go for the cool stuff!

FG: We will see you out in the Wasteland.