It’s been a mixed few weeks for mustachioed The Safety Fire guitarist Dez (aka Derya Nagle). His band are gearing up to release ‘Mouth Of Swords‘ – their spaghetti-fingered sophomore masterpiece – next month. On the other hand though, he recently needed surgery following a cycling accident on a main road.
Still with a broken face, he mustered up the strength to sit at his keyboard and discuss important stuff with HTF writer Solomon Radley. You know, like football, Come Dine With Me and porn.
Dez: It’s definitely a progression from ‘Grind The Ocean‘. After a couple of years of touring we have all become better musicians and definitely feel the album is a big step up. I think the songwriting is more focussed, and has a lot of energy. Can’t wait for everyone to hear it!
HTF: A lot of your videos and promo material for this release has been pretty tongue-in-cheek. How important do you think it is for a band to have a sense of humour?
D: I think it completely depends on the band. It is something which we do, as it comes from our personality and it comes naturally. I think if you were to force it, or to do something that wasn’t you, it would come across as pretty disingenuous. I suppose we are fairly lucky our fans find us funny.
HTF: How much do you think bands like Periphery influence your sound? Where else do you draw inspiration from?
D: Not at all really. We have been writing music together for a long time, and a good portion of the music from the first album was written between 2006-2009. I think the kind of bands that influence us are more engrained into us after years of listening. Bands such as Deftones, Alice In Chains, BTBAM, Sikth, Bjork, Kaki King…the list goes on.
Other than music, a lot of art and literature go into inspiring our music.
HTF: You were on popular BBC quiz show ‘Eggheads’. What was that like, and what inspired you to apply in the first place?
D: It was a lot of fun! Lori emailed everyone in the band saying he wanted to apply for a joke, so we did, and the joke continued on and on.
We were all very surprised when we kept on going through each round, and finally when it got to the video interview we couldn’t believe it was actually happening. It was a great experience and can’t wait to see it on TV. If for nothing else, seeing our glorious Hawaiian shirts on national TV.
D: Come Dine With Me – we all love food, and no doubt would be jokes.
HTF: You were recently in a bike accident – get well soon! How’re you doing, and would you tell us about what happened?
D: Thank you! Thankfully I’m healing up pretty fast. Few broken bones in my face still, but you can’t see that! Basically cycling down a main road, and someone decided to pull out in front of me at a pedestrian crossing, so I had to slam the brakes, and in doing so, unfortunately landed on my face.
Thankfully didn’t break any fingers or a wrist…which would have been annoying.
HTF: You’ll be heading out on tour in September to show off your new album. Are you looking forward to it? Are there any dates you’re especially excited to be playing?
D: We can’t wait. It’s been a while since we have played live, and playing new material is always fun. As we are headlining we get to play a longer set and choose songs which we feel our fans actually want to hear. We will be playing some songs that we have never played live from the first album, and whole bunch of new songs.
HTF: Goals are important, right? Is there anything that (as a band) you’d love to achieve together?
D: I suppose winning some kind of inter-band five-a-side football tournament would be pretty good. I would say playing on a boat, but we will be doing that in February!
Playing a submarine? Shooting a porno? Writing the music to the porno? I mean the list is endless really. Mainly porn related.
HTF: Is there anything else you’d like to add/plug?
D: Buy our album, it can get you nectar points.
‘Mouth Of Swords‘ is everything we hoped it would be and more. We thoroughly recommend you head over to The Safety Fire‘s website right now and reserve a copy. It’ll hit the shelves on Monday, Septermber 2 and you NEED to hear it. But don’t take our word for it – check out what Peter Capaldi (aka Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It) thinks of the band:
