If any proof was needed that the late 90s and early 2000s were a wild time for heavy music, then look no further than the curious case of hard-drinking, chaos-causing, sludge metal crew Raging Speedhorn. In what other era could a violently ugly, underground metal band persuade Charli XCX’s future manager to get them signed to a subsidiary of the Universal Music major label machine, making them label mates with Tom Jones, All Saints and Lisa Stansfield?
“David Bianchi managed All Saints at the time and was best mates with one of our mutual friends and lived in Corby,” Speedhorn drummer Gordon Morison tells us. “We met up after rehearsal one day and he said, ‘If you can fix my car window, I’ll get you on some shows.’ Frank [Regan, vocals] was a mechanic so he fixed it. Weird!”
Sure enough, David would get the band “some shows”, landing them on big bills with everyone from Kittie and Slipknot to the Slayer-topped Tattoo The Planet festival at Wembley Arena over the next few years.
“[Doing stuff like] Tattoo The Planet was amazing,” Frank says. “It was surreal to us, because we were only kids.”
“We got on some weird bills,” Gordon adds. “We did a bunch of shows with Graham Coxon from Blur. It was weird, one minute you were playing shows where you couldn’t even get a free bottle of water, the next minute you’re opening for Ministry.”
In the more immediate though, the band signed with Universal subsidiary ZTT Records, home over the years to everyone from Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Seal and Hans Zimmer.
“We were the only metal band on that label,” Gordon remembers. “They pumped a load of money into us and went, ‘Let’s see what happens.’”
By the time Raging Speedhorn released their self-titled debut album on August 14, 2000, there was a serious buzz. The album broke the Top 100 in the UK albums chart, peaking at Number 92. But rather than being delighted about their success, the members of Raging Speedhorn were worried people would label them sell-outs.
“We never wanted to be in a band that did well,” shrugs Gordon. “We wanted to be really weird, underground, sort of like [UK sludge metallers] Iron Monkey. They were our idols. We didn’t want to get into a big band. But then it just went nuts for a while, and we were just like ‘What the fuck’s going on?’”
It’s testament to just how big the buzz had grown around Speedhorn that the band went from opening main stage of the UK leg of Ozzfest on May 28, 2001, to a few weeks later having a single that landed in the top 50, coming within a whisker of getting them on Top Of The Pops.
Remarkable as it was for a sludge metal band to achieve that, even more astonishing was that The Gush was inspired – at least in part – by a comedy sketch. The name came from the TV show Jam, the bizarre follow up to the highly controversial Brass Eye, from notorious UK satirist and antagonist Chris Morris. The sketch tells of an epidemic of deaths amongst male porn stars who get “the gush”, a condition where they continue, erm, “popping the protein” until they die, sometimes weighing no more than “two or three squirrels.”
“Gareth [Smith, former guitarist] explained what the gush was, and it was like, ‘Oh we’ve got to write it about that then!’” Gordon chortles. “It fit in so well with the name Raging Speedhorn.”
“Honestly, the lyrics are kinda meaningless,” Frank concedes. “Back then, we used to just come up with a name and random words to go along with it. We didn’t have an agenda or themes, lyrically.”
Although The Gush was included as a bonus track on later reissues of their debut album, the song itself was actually recorded in late 2000. At that point, Speedhorn were on the road supporting US hardcore heroes Biohazard in Europe.
“We were in Germany and they came up like, ‘You should record that new song’,” Gordon says. “We recorded right on the [venue] floor. What you hear on the version that came out is what we recorded live.”
“They had a Pro Tools rig with them, so it was done in different venues,” Frank recalls. “I remember we recorded the drums in Utrecht and John [Loughlin, former co-vocalist] did his vocals at either the same venue or in Munich.”
The Gush added a touch of melody and added more blatant groove, but the threat, anger and visceral, viscous thrills that made their debut such a good time were still present and correct. You’d think that Speedhorn would be delighted with their new song. They weren’t.
“I remember the finished version coming back, we were in a rehearsal room and we put it on. Me and Gareth looked at each other, we were like ‘We’re fucked, we’ve fucked this!’” Gareth says. “It was so... nu metal! We were like, ‘What have we done?! Our fans are gonna hate it.’”
“We didn’t fit in [with nu metal],” Frank admits. “The only thing we had in common with bands like Linkin Park is the way we dressed and the fact we had two singers. We always had more in common with bands like Iron Monkey.”
Released in June 2001, The Gush spent two weeks in the Top 100 of the UK singles charts. While reggae pop star Shaggy topped the charts with Angel, Speedhorn lurked further down, first at Number 47, then the following week dropping to 93.
“We did want to get on Top of the Pops… that would have been funny!” Gordon says. “But to be honest, we didn’t give a flying fuck [about mainstream success]. That’s probably what fucked it up for us, our attitudes were quite bad. We were just like, ‘We don’t want to do any of this publicity stuff, just get us on tour!’”
The band did make a concession when it came to making a music video however, which saw them playing the track live in a neon-lit strip-club.
“We had just come off tour and then suddenly you’re in this room watching all of these girls stripping off in front of us,” Gordon marevels. “Every few minutes our manager kept going out of the room and going to the toilet. We were like, ‘Does he keep going off for a wank?’. It was very raunchy. But John [Loughlin, vocalist] actually started seeing one of the girls for a while. Quite sweet really!”
After the success of The Gush, big offers continued to roll in for Speedhorn for a time. Over the next 12 months, the band would play alongside the likes of Rammstein, Clutch and Slipknot. Even given their misgivings about nu metal, they quickly formed a kinship with Slipknot in particular.
“We got on like a house on fire because they came from a shitty place and we came from a shitty place,” Gordon recalls. “It all got a little chaotic, they would get us to do stupid stuff. They’d piss in a wine bottle and go, ‘Alright, who is gonna drink that for £50?’ I’d be like, ‘£50? I’ll fucking do it!’ They thought it was the funniest thing in the world. We were like their naughty little brothers.”
Speedhorn would have one more crack at the big time on ZTT, their second album We Will Be Dead Tomorrow became another cult favourite and climbed to number 63 in the UK music charts when it was released in August 2002.
But although singles like The Hate Song and Fuck The Vooodooman did better than any sludge metal band could conceivably hope, peaking at 69 and 88 respectively, it was obvious to the label that they wouldn’t be the next Slipknot. So, they were dropped.
The band released two more albums in their original run. Frank departed in 2005 and was replaced by Kevin Greenham, who sang on 2005’s How The Great Have Fallen and 2007’s Before The Sea Was Built, before they split in 2008. Lured back to life in 2014 by UK extreme metal fest Damnation with Frank back on vocals, Raging Speedhorn spent the subsequent decade reclaiming their position as one of the UK’s premiere sludge metal bands, albeit without the chart success they enjoyed in their early years. But they probably wouldn’t have it any other way. As for their ‘nu metal hit’, it still pops up in live setlists from time to time.
“A few of the lads will moan when we suggest it,” Gordon says. “But actually, when you see everyone go crazy for it and sing all the words along, it feels great.”
“We’ve moved on musically,” Frank acknowledges. “But people still love it. They want to hear it. Same as [Speedhorn staple] Thumper! It’s mental, because we wrote that as teenagers! It’s still really cool that people want to hear it all these years later.”
Raging Speedhorn’s new album Night Wolf is out now via Candelight. The band’s UK tour celebrating 25 years of their debut album starts in Bournemouth on November 21
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