Authenticity in the modern day has become somewhat of a misnomer. Able to mask technical shortcomings, abilities are enhanced with the use of the arrays of technology now readily available. Kindly sitting down with us shortly before their performance at London’s Underworld, we spoke to Ignite bassist Brett Rasmussen once again regarding not only their brand new album A War Against You but the sheer importance of being a real live band. In a day and age when it is all too easy to conceal faults with tricks, seeing a band perform live truly separates the men from the boys and for those who might have ever seen Ignite know just how crucial this can be…

Listen to the full unedited interview on our Soundcloud file below or read the full transcript!

Welcome Brett, how are you today?

I’m doing well how are you? It’s a little rainy here in Camden Town but not like that’s a big surprise!

It’s a warm welcome!

For us 55 degrees and raining is like, it’s like Seattle!

So you’ve just finished up the Persistence tour, how did that go?

That was a lot of fun, we got to go out with H20 and Terror and Wisdom In Chains, which are guys that we already know. Our buddy Sean from Hatebreed was playing in Twitching Tongues and Iron Reagan guys, awesome. It was just a fun tour! It’s kind of an easy tour because you know its going to be packed every night, you know there are going to be fans there to see that genre of music and you’ve just kind of gotta get up and just do your thing! Just bust your butt one hundred percent to beat all the other bands. The shows would start at 6pm and then I would look and think we’re not playing until 11:30pm tonight?!

That’s a lot of bands!

That’s a long time. I wouldn’t go to a concert that long! You know what I mean haha! Maybe a festival, so we knew that by the time that we were on stage at like eleven o clock, five hours seven bands with changeovers and all that stuff. So you have to really get on stage and kick the people in the teeth. They’ve been there all day and a lot of them are tired or drunk. Anyways it was a lot of fun!

Recently we spoke before online, about the new album. What were people’s reactions when you were playing the material live?

The reactions were really good, the record had just come out like four days before so we weren’t sure, one how many people had the record and two how many times people were going to be able to listen to it. The reaction has been great though, people have been shouting out songs that they want to hear which is cool! The feedback has been awesome, I think as the months go on, we come back and play, people will have more of a chance to like really dig into the album then we’re going to get people going nuts for the new stuff. You can already feel that tension that kind of singing of the choruses and stuff but I think its even going to keep getting better, at least I hope so!

Are you going to play many new songs tonight?

See that was a dilemma. How many new songs do you play? On the Persistence tour we knew there was going to be a lot of people that wouldn’t have bought the record that are just Terror fans or H20 fans so we thought how many of these new songs do we want to play? When I go see a new band how many songs do I really want them to play… We’ve been doing about four a night out of the sixteen that we’re playing so about a quarter of the set, which I think is a fair number! I think its a good amount of songs from the new record and you won’t get people sitting there like play the songs I like that you wrote in ’97, you know? They wanna hear those too!

So you’re back in London again! What is it that brings you back to this soggiest of capitals?

Just the people! I mean when you have the demand which is there to see us which we are so grateful for. Our booking agent hits us up, London’s made an offer again! They want you to come back, its always cool. We’ve been doing this band for twenty two years and when anybody wants us to come to their town again its an honour. We are actually blessed to be able to do music, like as a career and to be able to tour around the world, play to people all over the globe and have people want us to return, after they see us play. Yeah come back that was awesome, its amazing. For us its just the coolest thing that you could ever want when you set out to be a musician,years and years ago! Its something you dream about..

Playing guitar in your bedroom.

Yeah! Learning to play bass on an acoustic guitar, dreaming about playing like The Collosseum, we haven’t done that! But it’s cool haha!

In the twenty two year span you have had, you haven’t really put that many albums out. Not in a bad way! The fact that you have taken such a long time to create them and each of them are just as good as the last,

Thank you!

Its just fascinating to see that twenty two years on you’ve got such a loyal following.

Yeah I think you know we would have put this record out a little bit sooner but some things happen where guys are playing in different bands opportunities came up for us to do different things and that’s just part of life! Things come up, things happen. We were super excited, when Zoli had the opportunity to play with Pennywise, that took three years out but we got a bunch of Pennywise fans now that are into the band. He got to write with different people and we got to experience different things and tour with different people to me it was a positive.

Did that do you think shape the ideas that you had writing the new record? With the fact that you have been in different bands…

I think it added a different element absolutely. We learned to write with other people, there was different chemistries that we have all now experienced. The cool thing was that when we got back in and started writing Ignite for this new record its like theres kind of a little bit of magic that happens when us five get together and you could see that! This bands an important band for a lot of people and that was probably the biggest thing that we realised, that people love this band around the world and they really really wanted to hear a new record. You kind of forget about that, you get into your daily life routine, you need to go to the store, you’re gonna go work out you’re gonna go and do something. There’s people in Germany, there’s people in England, there’s people in Indonesia that want a new record. It’s cool! So that was the biggest motivating factor and the biggest inspiration, putting something out for our fans.

When we last spoke you said that obviously between ten years since the last record there have been a lot of advances in technology. Do you think that technology itself has been a bit of a game changer for music?

Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a lot of bands that, there’s a big difference hearing a song and then going to see a band executing a song. A lot of times, you go and see a band, you get excited about a song and they just can’t pull off what they are doing live. Then sometimes you go and you’re blown away! Like they took the recording I like and they made it one hundred times better, more energy live. Technology can make music a little tricky at times, I think there is a lot of things that people can get away with now vocal tuning, electronic drums. You basically can do a record with one person now and not even with any live instruments. It’s kind of different than the way it used to be I think.

What do you think is that sort of X factor that live shows have?

It just shows that the guys can play their songs and that the songs translate live well. It makes it organic it makes it real. When you hear a song being played live that crushes it’s pretty undeniable. I saw Royal Blood at Coachella festival and it still just left such a crazy impression on me!

That’s just two guys isn’t it?

It’s just two guys crushing! Live all live instruments…

Are you going to be going to Coachella this year with Guns ‘n’ Roses?

Yeah! Anytime I am home not touring, that weekend in April its a super fun festival.

Obviously Zoli is Hungarian and you mentioned that you did Hungarian tracks. I remember you said that the way that you say a word in Hungarian changes its meaning, do you think that that has led to Zoli having somewhat of an unorthodox delivery in the vocals?

Maybe! Here’s the interesting thing, the first time I ever met him I heard an accent at the back of his voice and I asked him where he was from. He said I was born in Los Angeles in Costa Mesa and I didn’t know that he had grown up in Hungary. Definitely the language has I think for him had an effect on him. Like I was saying sometimes he writes the songs in Hungarian first. So you get a melody, a hook line that was written in a different language and when we write the English version of the song we’re trying to find a word or something that makes that same melody sound catchy and that’s a little bit of a trick!

On the song “A Place Called Home” he wrote that song in Hungarian first and we were in love with it everything the melodies and then we said that we needed an English version and it took a long time. It was a lot of work to get that song to sound as good in the English language. It’s a lot of work, a lot of work. I think that both languages definitely have an effect on each other and how he sings.

With regards to any advice that you might have for any budding artists out there, what would you say is one of the most important elements of being in a band?

I mean I will take this straight from a Dave Grohl thing I heard online a few weeks back when he just said learn to play your guitars and learn to play the drums and if you kill it live, that’s undeniable. You have to be great, there are a ton of bands out there. There are a ton of bands that are great , that are never going to get noticed and there is just so much competition out there. When you get on stage, if you can wow people, that’s such a big thing in music. If you can impress with a live show. I think typically even like record labels, even major labels when they hear a demo of a singer song writer or any type of artist they hold a showcase they want to go and see if this person can play this live. So from the label side to the fans side everybody judges a lot of how great a band is on if they can pull the stuff off live, at least I do! When I go and see a band and they suck I usually stop listening to their CD because its pretty uninspiring, to see wow these guys can’t even play these songs. It’s kind of a bummer.

Going back to A War Against You, the song “Work”, was that kind of inspired by the ever growing idea that it’s tougher to be in a band that you need to work at the same time?

The lyrics basically tells a story about Zoli’s dad. Zoli’s dad is an awesome guy, they emigrated to America and his dad went and learnt the language, went and got a job, worked the graveyard shift every night as a machinist for one of the big companies like a rocket maker and worked his whole life to provide for his family. To provide that Zoli can become a musician to provide that his brother can become a veterinarian, his brother is a doctor. It’s a little homage to Emery.

Oh really! The way that I interpreted it was that Zoli was doing that or putting himself in someone else’s shoes that if you keep working at the end of the day things will always be brighter!

That’s a great interpretation of it too but it was specifically written about his father. When there’s a line in it “and I’ll suit up and i’ll show up again” he puts the work clothes on again, goes in does the grinding, worked all night providing for the family. The other line is “When I get home the world’s asleep”. He sleeps all day, works all night the lyrics are really cool in that song, they’re very personal.

What about you as a bassist, who would you say is one of your biggest influences?

I had to list three, I forget which website it was on and my first was the whole reason I play Bass was Peter Hook from Joy Division and that was the high bass lines, I gravitated towards that, I basically stole his style a little bit! Put it into the any of the bands that I was in from High School on was high bass chords and all that stuff. Then when I started listening to Janes Addiction, Eric Avery ridiculous bass lines. He was the principle song writer for Jane’s Addiction and they were all really oriented bass hooks in all of those songs. Dave Navarro was kind of like, the guitarist was the topping over these running bass lines.

Randy Bradbury from Pennywise was probably my biggest influence on the Punk Rock side. My first CD that I ever bought, I have always collected vinyl and then once I finally made my transition to CD’s it was Pennywise’s Unknown Road. I kind of learnt to play faster songs from Pennywise’s Unknown Road, to get the chops up on my right hand to double pick and stuff like that so probably Peter Hook, Eric Avery and Randy Bradbury arlike the direct influences and I’m a huge Duff McKagan fan too! His bass lines in Appetite For Destruction are incredible some of the best bass playing for me that just appeals to my style.

What about the album’s title A War Against You, can you fill us in on what that might entail?

That was taken from the song “This Is A War”. “this is a war, a a war against you” so basically that song talks about truth being lost in media and politics. You turn on the TV, what story are you really getting? You turn on the more right wing Fox News more political, you’re going to get a completely different account of something that happened than if you turned on CNBC or CNN. So the truth gets lost a lot of times in what the media does, they’re owned by big corporations. A war against truth, a war against truth like knowledge.

So “you” is kind of like a conglomerate of truth?

So yeah I guess it’s a war on everyone because its kind of like masking the truth.

What about you plans for 2016, you mentioned a couple of tour you may have?

We’re just working on booking some festivals and booking stuff in the US, whatever best opportunities present themselves. Hopefully we can get on some cool stuff this year! Really get out there and play this record for some people live.

What about your release show, how did that go? It was with The Iron Son I think?

Yeah! Brendan’s new band, he lives right near us he’s a good friend of ours. He came in and sang back ups on the Our Darkest Days album, did some stuff with us there. Death By Stereo, Iron Son… It was a super fun show packed, we had never actually played The Roxy. We’ve played the Whiskey and the Troubadour and a bunch of L.A. clubs but that was our first Ignite show at The Roxy it was fun, it was a fun night! It was just a party vibe, we had a ton of friends come and it was just like this just really cool party.

Thank you ever so much for speaking to us, in person this time!

Yes! Awesome!

Ignite’s brand new album is out now via Century Media.