Orange Goblin singer Ben Ward was off his nut on pills when he pierced a hole in his own arsecheek with a mic stand. Or it might have been LSD. For obvious reasons, he can’t quite remember. What is certain is that it happened during Orange Goblin’s set at a German festival called South Of The Mainstream in 2007. Beyond that, specific details are hazy.
Ben recalls partaking in the pills – or whatever it was – earlier that afternoon. Predictably, things started to kick in halfway through the band’s set. At some point during the gig he tripped over and fell into the crowd, nine foot of hair and gristle plunging earthwards. And that was the point when one of Ben Ward’s mudflaps met the business end of his mic stand.
“I thought someone had stabbed me,” he recalls, not a little ruefully. “I was like, ‘Stop the show! I’ve been stabbed!’ Everyone else was like, ‘No you haven’t, you’ve fallen on your arse again.’ Our bassist’s poor, unfortunate wife had to nurse this wound at the top of my bum.”
Inadvertently spearing yourself in the backside while flying on drugs and booze is the most Orange Goblin thing imaginable. For 30-plus years, these steel-plated warhorses have flown the flag for gnarly British heavy metal in its most joyously uninhibited form. Their music is as heavy as a mammoth in a fatsuit and rougher than a badger’s arse. Their shows are drunken communions. And if there’s no party to be had, Orange Goblin start the party themselves.
Except that’s not quite the full picture. For sure, the band spent years living up to their reputation as heavy metal berserkers on a cartoon pirate ride. But that overlooks the 10 mostly excellent if frequently under-appreciated albums they’ve made. And it certainly ignores the tenacity that pushed Orange Goblin onwards when it sometimes looked like the rest of the world didn’t give a shit.
But now the cartoon pirate ride is coming to an end. In December 2025, this unlikely British institution are calling time on their career with a short run of UK dates. There have been bigger farewells recently, and certainly more poignant ones. But Orange Goblin will still leave a big, lumbering hole in the metal scene.
“It’s 30 years, it’s 10 albums in, it just seems right,” says guitarist Joe Hoare. “Orange Goblin has been a big part our lives since we became adults. Though whether we ever became adults is up for debate."
Orange Goblin were still called Our Haunted Kingdom when they played their first gig. It was May 1994, and they’d only been a band for a few months when they gatecrashed an open mic blues night at The Rising Sun pub in Sudbury Hill, northwest London. The punters didn’t know what hit them.
“We did an Alice In Chains cover, a Jimi Hendrix cover and a death metal song we’d written called My Black Widow, which was terrible,” says Ben, who had been on the books at Queens Park Rangers FC as a teenager until he met fellow apprentice/future Goblin bassist Martyn Millard, at which point football went out of the window. “I didn’t even have the confidence to sing, so I just gargled. Everybody was going, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Today, Ben, Joe and drummer Chris Turner are sitting on a joint Zoom call. They all live in different towns these days – and in the case of Ben, who moved to France recently, a different country. Back in those early days, the Venn diagram of influences covered death, doom and stoner metal, plus vintage blues rock courtesy of Joe and punk via Chris, who joined Our Haunted Kingdom before 1996’s split EP with fellow travellers Electric Wizard (the line-up was completed by second guitarist Pete O’Malley).
By 1997, they’d renamed themselves Orange Goblin and released debut album Frequencies From Planet Ten, a so-so slab of hook-your-thumbs-in-your-belt-loops stoner boogie that wore its influences a little too obviously. Far better was the following year’s Time Travelling Blues, a record that rumbled and roared like a herd of furious rhinos.
As great as Orange Goblin were becoming on record, onstage was their true kingdom. Gigs were part circus, part gladiatorial arena, with Ben a hairier, sweatier Russell Crowe roaring “Orange Fucking Goblin, baby!” rather than “Are you not entertained?”
They’d often get paid in beer, resulting in some classic, alcohol-fuelled shenanigans. Such as the time Ben got so narked at a reticent crowd that he lassoed the whole lot of them with his microphone cord and dragged them in front of the stage to bully some life into them. Or the time they all went onstage in their underpants in front of an audience of one in Norwich. Or the time things went even further when the band supported stoner heroes Fu Manchu in London.
“There were incidents of nudity,” says Ben of that show. “Whose? Yeah, that was me.”
All of this was driven by a desire to have a good time, if not all the time then as much of the time as possible. Ambitions? Forget it.
“In those early days we were just naive,” says Joe. “We were never driven by the desire to earn money. Which is a good job, ’cos we never made any.”
What Orange Goblin did embody beyond the party monster ethos was the sense of community within the British metal scene at the time. It was a parade of stoners, freaks, lunatics and reprobates, caked in everything from engine grease to corpsepaint, and they were at the very centre of it.
“I miss being young and carefree and having that scene,” says Joe wistfully. “Everywhere you went, whatever pub you went to, you’d know someone from a band.”
Chris: “There was no social media, you had to go out and hang out with proper friends. We’d be out all the time. Every night we’d be at some gig or bar or club.”
Ben: “All the British bands would help each other out. It was a really healthy scene. None of us had any responsibility. There was a freedom to go out and do it and enjoy it. I’m not sure that happens anymore.”
Today, the members of Orange Goblin have slightly different views of their reputation as the drinking person’s heavy metal band.
“I think we played up to it,” says Ben. “In hindsight, it was probably a mistake, but at the time you don’t see it like that.”
“But it was really good fun,” counters Chris. “That was the whole thing about it. You can take yourself really seriously and it stops being fun. We just had a good time all the time.”
The good times continued as Orange Goblin bulldozed their way through the 2000s and 2010s. They released some monumental albums along the way: 2000’s The Big Black, 2002’s raucous Coup De Grace, 2007’s Healing Through Fire.
Those records didn’t make Orange Goblin rich, but they did generate the kind of experiences that would have caused their 15-year-old selves’ heads to explode with disbelief. Such as spending time with Ronnie James Dio when they supported Dio and Alice Cooper on tour in the early 2000s.
“We’d heard rumours that we couldn’t approach him, that he was quite difficult,” says Joe of the late singer. “We were really nervous. But he was the complete opposite. He was the loveliest guy.”
Ditto Lemmy. The first time Orange Goblin met the Motörhead frontman, they ended up doing speed and drinking whisky together in the dressing room of their mutual friends Nashville Pussy. Years later, he’d take them to a strip club in Portland when their paths crossed on tour – the equivalent of a papal blessing. It was Lemmy who gave them the best bit of career advice they ever received.
“He said, ‘Don’t take yourselves too seriously,’” says Chris.
It’s easy to say there was never any danger of Orange Goblin doing that, but rock’n’roll is a serious business beneath the shits and giggles. Reality has intruded into their world plenty of times. When Pete O’Malley left in 2004, they debated whether to carry on or not (they opted to continue, albeit as a slimmed-down four-piece). Likewise when Martyn Millard stepped back in 2020 (they recruited old friend and kindred spirit Harry Armstrong, formerly of London stoners Hangnail).
There have financial hardships too. The worst came when their then-label, Sanctuary, went bust not along after Orange Goblin released their sixth album, Healing Through Fire. They almost packed it in then, releasing a deflated statement admitting as much. It was the reaction from people telling them not to that convinced them it was worth carrying on. They tried quitting their respective day jobs in the early 2010s to give it a go as full-time musicians. That didn’t work out, though they’re proud they tried.
“We haven’t always known what’s going on, but we’ve always been really astute with our finances,” says Ben. “I’ve always been a believer that you can only do what’s within your means.”
Then there’s the physical toll years of dedicated partying can take. Ben had some alcohol-related health issues in the early 2010s. “I was starting to go yellow,” he says. “I went through a stage of drinking cider vinegar and eating this stuff made of molasses to try and help my liver.”
He didn’t stop, of course, though he did move to Cornwall at one point to try and change his lifestyle.
“It was just as bad down there,” he remembers, “but the drugs were more expensive.”
He finally realised something needed to change drastically. He’d caned his way through Covid and was in danger of fucking up his body permanently. That was when he realised it was time to call last orders on that particular lifestyle. He knocked the booze on the head and hit the gym hard.
“I was like, ‘Enough’s enough,’” he says. “I’d done it for years, I had nothing to prove. I don’t need to get drunk to go onstage anymore.”
“He’s always been this bumbling, drunken ogre at the front of the stage,” says Chris. “I wasn’t sure he could replicate that. But he can. Now it’s different but better. He’s not bumbling or drunk anymore. But he’s still an ogre.”
It’s some achievement that Orange Goblin made it this far. Not all of their friends and contemporaries did. Many of the bands they played with and partied with have fallen by the wayside – Cathedral, Anathema, Acrimony, Iron Monkey… the list gets longer and hazier as time goes on. Now it’s Orange Goblin’s turn to have their name etched onto the roll call of the fallen.
In January 2025, they announced they would be stopping at the end of the year. It’s been brewing for a while. The underwhelming public response to their last two albums, 2018’s The Wolf Bites Back and 2024’s Science, Not Fiction, was dispiriting. Travelling to overseas festivals to play mid-afternoon slots and finding equipment or luggage had gone missing was just depressing. The geographical distance between them made it difficult to write and rehearse.
Orange Goblin have spent 30 years giving their lives to rock’n’roll, but in truth, rock’n’roll hasn’t given them quite as much back. They’ll bring the curtain down on their career with a run of UK gigs in December, culminating in a gig at London’s Kentish Town Forum on December 17. They’ll part as friends not enemies. For a band who seemingly prided themselves on their lack of dignity for at least of a chunk of the last 30 years, it’s a surprisingly dignified way of ending things.
“We’ve seen a lot of bands come and go throughout, some good friends of ours, and a lot of them have split quite acrimoniously,” says Ben. “We agreed that we’d rather go out with a bit of integrity.”
These three middle-aged men admit that there may well be tears, and not from accidentally stabbing their own arsecheeks this time.
“Yeah, it’ll definitely be emotional,” says Joe. “Bittersweet.”
It surely will, as all good endings should be. But is this really the last we’ll see of Orange Goblin? When Desertfest dangle a few grand and a bag of chips under their noses in five years’ time, will they saddle up their steeds once more? It turns out that the answer is ‘maybe’.
“I’m not saying it’s the end,” concedes Ben. “It’s a break for now, that is semi-permanent. But if we do play together again for any reason after this, it’ll be because we miss it rather than for any financial reward.”
“And also if we’re needed,” adds Chris. “If there’s an Orange Goblin-shaped gap in years to come and nobody is filling it.”
Permanent or not, Orange Goblin’s farewell won’t be as grand or as poignant as Ozzy Osbourne’s emotional goodbye earlier this year. But heavy metal will miss them all the same.
“Everybody takes themselves so seriously now,” says Chris. “Where’s the band you go and shout incoherently along with and throw your pint over the guy next to you?”
“Everything we’ve done, regardless of how many mistakes we’ve made, or how naive we were, we’ve done it on our own terms,” says Ben. “We’ve never been fashionable, we’ve never been cool, but we’ve never sold out. Not every band can say that.”
Orange Goblin's farewell tour continues in Manchester tonight before concluding at Kentish Town Forum on December 17.
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