Wytch Hazel get on famously with Satan. A kinship forged in the club nights and all-dayers of the heavy metal underground scene, it’s just one way in which the Biblically inclined rockers subvert expectations – cheerfully pushing back against notions that faith and the devil’s music can’t be friends.
Of course, we’re talking about Satan the 80s metal stalwarts from Newcastle upon Tyne, not Beelzebub himself.
“They’re great, I love those guys!” Wytch Hazel’s singer/ guitarist and mastermind Colin Hendra enthuses. “I remember we were at Muskelrock and Satan played, and then we played, and then Antichrist played straight after us. I thought that was quite funny.”
Hendra, 33, is calmly open about his Christian faith in a thoughtful, grounded way not always seen in religious public figures. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the (by no means unfounded) assumption that the God-fearing come with a certain amount of baggage.
Hendra doesn’t actually call himself “religious”, and he certainly doesn’t call Wytch Hazel a Christian rock band. Back home near Morecambe, his ‘charismatic’ church feels more like a family, he says.
“I can see people would say if you go to church, read the Bible and pray, those are religious things,” he muses. “Whereas for me, if I say ‘I’m in a relationship with God’, that’s very different to ‘I’m going to do some Hail Marys’ or something. I feel like the experience of being in relation to God is this spiritual thing. When I think of ‘religion’ I think of rules and rituals, and it kind of rubs me up the wrong way. It works for some people and that’s fine, but I can’t get on board with organised religion.”
We’re backstage at London’s 02 Indigo, ahead of the release of the new Wytch Hazel album V: Lamentations. Painstakingly recorded with longtime producer Ed Turner (formerly of psychedelic rockers Purson), it’s a classy, absorbing listen, seamlessly marrying faith-based lyrics with riffy classic rock and heavy metal textures of yore.
In a couple of hours they’ll play stirring mid-tempo bangers Woven and Healing Power (the album’s first two singles) when they open for Michael Schenker’s My Years With UFO tour. Their stage gear of crucifixes and white spandex – gold for Hendra, with a cape to match – are shut away for now, along with ivy and chalices to adorn their amps. It’s all very Jethro Tull-meets-Iron Maiden, with a touch of Rick Wakeman.
“It’s not a safe genre or look, but at the same time it’s difficult because this is a hundred per cent me,” he says simply. “Wytch Hazel is everything I want to do musically.”
As work began on V: Lamentations, Hendra was juggling band gigs, family life and teaching (he’s a drum tutor, and also teaches guitar and ukulele in schools) with a long, exacting recording process, all mingled with the lingering anxiety of lockdown.
It took a tremendous toll on his mental and physical health. Chronic exhaustion ensued, along with vocal problems and bursitis (a kind of painful fluid build-up) in his shoulder. In 2022, he couldn’t make it through their Bloodstock set. All the while, his faith began to falter.
“Every day I was waking up in pain, and it was all over my body, my stress was at an all-time high,” he recalls. “It was really disappointing, the worst gig to not go well. But I think at some point you just hit a wall.”
It also cast doubt over his faith; the sincere heart of Wytch Hazel’s music, which lends an emotive soulfulness to their NWOBHM-honed hooks and swashbuckling Wishbone Ash-via-Thin Lizzy twin leads. He began to question everything. “I think I was slipping into nihilism, sort of like ‘maybe nothing really matters after all’.”
Having dug into introspective lyrical territory for 2023’s IV: Sacrament, he was ready to channel these experiences on V: Lamentations – always putting the music first, free of agenda beyond making people feel something, whatever their beliefs, as good art should.
“It’s not like: ‘We’re a project to save souls’, it’s art. You’re not setting up a ministry. Some people say they have a ‘ministry of music’, and that’s great, I just don’t get it at all. If you make music, it’s because you want to make the best art you possibly can, and you want to strive for excellence.”
That focus goes back to his childhood, where music and church were integral. Growing up Hendra looked forward to Sundays. He played drums in services at his local Baptist church, and began attending youth Bible camps.
“Painfully shy” in school, he struggled with all subjects except music. It became a singular obsession: “I’ve always been obsessed with music. Right through school, I was in any band possible: the wind band, Morecambe Brass Band, a trad jazz band, there was a chamber choir, and I just got involved with them all.”
In his teens he joined local metal band Lake Of Fire, having fallen hard for Iron Maiden’s Number Of The Beast as well as the likes of Black Sabbath, Dio and Wishbone Ash, plus the Scripture he was ingesting through church. It all began to cross-pollinate, planting seeds for Wytch Hazel. This didn’t sit well with some of the staunchly conservative leaders at Bible camp – and that was fine by Hendra.
“There’s a side of me that secretly enjoys upsetting people,” he says, grinning, “so I kind of enjoyed how it upset the conservative Christians around me. I’ve got a lot more time for atheists and people who are against religion, to be honest, than people who are conservative.”
Meanwhile, he and his future wife met at their university’s Christian Union. They married straight after graduating and now have two children, aged five and eight.
On stage at the Indigo, a light seems to come on. Hendra and his three late-20s/early-30s bandmates – earlier in metal T-shirts and black jeans – turn into rock stars as they put on a tight, charismatic rock show, cheerfully fearless in their angelic threads.
Overall, Hendra says, they’ve had fewer insults than expected. Across Europe they’ve topped the bills of mini-festivals and played headline shows to metal crowds who ‘get’ them, in a way that not all UK punters do.
“We were at the 02 Ritz in Manchester, and some guy said to me: ‘You guys would be an amazing band, if you wore jeans and T-shirts’,” he says, laughing incredulously. “I said: ‘Really? We’ve got this giant backdrop with a big cross, a chalice, ivy on the amps… and you want us to play in jeans and T-shirts?!’ It just doesn’t make sense.”
People tend to see friction between faith and rock’n’roll. And yet we often describe music – especially live music – as a religious experience. That sense of finding liberation in something bigger than yourself, whether that’s God, nature, movement, or hearing music. Sounds you feel, viscerally, but can’t see. A searing, powerful thing that we all interpret a little differently. Maybe it pushes us outside our comfort zone. If that’s not a religious experience, I’m not sure what is.
“I think God gives us choice and free will,” Hendra adds. “But then he also says: ‘Look, music’s in the world, it’s just a gift.’ I feel like most people would say, whether they believe in God or not, it does feel like a gift.”
V: Lamentations is out now via Bad Omen Records.
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