Malevolence: “We’re not trying to be anyone other than ourselves”

If you want to know what someone’s really like, you can learn a lot from how they treat their elders. Take Alex Taylor, for example. In music videos, the Malevolence frontman is all grimaces, gun fingers, stab-proof vests and a voice like an avalanche of boulders dislodging from a mountainside. That’s only one part of the story, though.

“My nan came to see us a few years ago and I had to give her a pre-show warning,” he recalls. “‘Nan, I’m really sorry, but I have to swear up there.’ She was like, ‘Oh, I don’t care, it’s rock’n’roll!’ But I’m quite traditional, I’ve always found it hard to swear around my parents and grandparents. I’m nearly 30 now, but it’s ingrained in me. I just want to show a bit more respect to the people that raised me.”

Alex is speaking to Kerrang! today on a video call from Prague, between festival appearances, where the band are squeezing in some writing and recording sessions, given the rare opportunity to get together as a creative unit without distractions. The Sheffield-based five-piece – completed by drummer Charlie Thorpe, bassist Wilkie Robinson, and guitarists Konan Hall and Josh Baines – have already got two songs in the can, but further details are scant at present. While everything is at a nascent stage right now, all fans need to know is that “they are sounding heavy”.

That’s a tale to be told another day, anyway. We’re more interested in the man behind the mic. Running in parallel with the band’s story of long-time struggle, resilience and eventual spoils, is a personal one mirroring a similar trajectory. On-screen, behind the vocalist’s irregular plumes of vape smoke, a wall bears a large imprint of the famous quote attributed to French composer Claude Debussy: “Music is the silence between the notes.”

Similarly, if you look past the Malevolence man’s surface presentation, you might find that who you think he is and who he actually is aren’t necessarily the same. He’s not so sure, mind. “What you see is what you get,” he insists.

What you get today is a rig-out that includes a neck chain, Nike T-shirt and the kind of short back and sides crop that tends to get metal scene gatekeepers’ knickers in a twist. Some people dismiss his band based entirely on what they see, in fact. You might have even spotted some memes about it.

There’s one featuring the Malevolence logo superimposed on an image of Kurupt FM, the satirical pirate radio gang from BBC mockumentary People Just Do Nothing. Proving that he has a sense of humour about it all, Alex recently posted one on his personal Instagram: a clip someone had made overdubbing the UK garage crew’s music over his band playing at The K! Pit in Blondies, London. In the words of the show’s own Chabuddy G, “it’s all banter”, but there’s a whiff of snobbery underpinning the LOLZ. The insinuations are a little more sinister and that’s something not lost on the Yorkshireman: Malevolence ‘don’t belong’, and they’re not ‘real metal’. All because of some haircuts and sportswear.

“I always find it funny when people call Malevolence ‘chav metal’,” he chuckles, “People make out like that’s our gimmick, but we’ve been like this ever since we were 13 years old.”

Winding back further still, one of Alex’s earliest musical memories is of sitting in his mum’s car at the age of 7, on their way to Cardiff where he was born, to visit his dad and his “Welsh family” following his parents’ separation. For entertainment on the four-hour, 200-mile journeys from Sheffield, the pair would listen to Ministry Of Sound compilations, Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish And The Hotdog Flavored Water and Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory – the latter two his mum only picked up on the strength of their cover artwork. She enjoyed the melodies, too, but wasn’t so fond of the heavy parts. Alex loved it all. Especially Fred Durst’s colourful vocabulary.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, this guy’s swearing a lot! This is so rebellious,’” he laughs. “Those were special times, for sure, even if I wasn’t allowed to say the swear words. I had to cover my mouth.”

After wrapping up his shifts playing in goal for his local youth football team every weekend, Alex would pester his mum to take him to Record Collector on Fulwood Road, in search of more music. It was here he discovered Trivium, System Of A Down, Hatebreed and Chimaira, while getting ready for school in the mornings introduced him to classics via music videos on Kerrang! and Scuzz TV. But it was his childhood pal and soon-to-be bandmate Charlie who’d blow open the alternative music floodgates.

“He had this little side hustle bootlegging and selling CDs,” Alex explains. “I remember him saying one day, ‘I’ve got this CD for you. A band you’d love called Pantera. Give me three quid and you can have it.’ So I gave him my lunch money and that was that.”

What made this newfound love of all things heavy somewhat tricky was how few of his friends shared his appreciation. Everyone else was into rap and bassline. Alex dug that stuff too, but his baggy jeans, chains and floppy fringe set him apart. Something had to give.

“I went from being a proper little emo kid to dressing differently,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘I’m hanging around with chavs. I’m going to have to start wearing a bit of Nike so I don’t get ripped on as hard.’ But I still listened to heavy music. I didn’t really care; I just liked what I liked. That’s where the whole Malevolence image came from. We’ve always been the same. From year 7, our fashion was dictated by our friends.”

Malevolence came into the picture a few years later. For months, Alex had pestered Charlie to give him a shot, having feverishly followed the band’s progress on the local gig scene.

“I eventually wore him down,” Alex says. “I turned up to that first practice, they asked what I knew the words to, and we jammed Despised Icon with me making noises which I thought were the words. And I was shit! I was absolutely terrible. After a few weeks, they were like, ‘Well, we haven’t got anyone else and this kid wants it, so we’ll take him on.’ I played my first-ever show with them at 16 supporting Hatebreed at Sheffield Corporation, and the rest is history.”

That history is now well documented. Behind the scenes, though, there were other struggles: dropping out of uni, taking on shitty jobs to make ends meet, redundancies, and crippling self-doubts about whether music was the right path or not. “I wasn’t in a great place mentally,” the frontman admits of those low points. It was only the love and support of his family that helped him through.

“I’m very fortunate they’ve always been on my side and rooting for me the whole time,” he beams, “especially throughout my musical career.”

Eventually, Alex settled in working security for Showsec, progressing through the ranks while building everything around Malevolence’s slow-but-steady rise. It’s a busman’s holiday of a job that puts him in harm’s way in order to protect others, but it’s a responsibility he loves and takes great satisfaction from. Over the years, he’s seen some sights and witnessed the worst in people, though.

“I’ve had my fair share of drama and being put on my arse!” he laughs. “I’ve also had a few awkward incidents. I was working a local metal show when a fight broke out on the dancefloor. So, I’ve gone in and dragged the guy outside, only to realise that he’s wearing a Malevolence shirt.

“We saw each other at another show, and we shook hands. He was drunk and he knew he was being a bit of a dick. At the time, he was screaming in my face, ‘I fucking believed in you, you’re my favourite band!’ But it’s all good now.”

It’s also the kind of work where no two days on the job are the same. Some days you’re on the red carpet leading the high-pressure security detail at the MTV Awards in Germany, another you’re on the opening grid of the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Rewarding as he finds it all when everything goes well, every single 14-to-16-hour shift is rife with volatility. Violence; overdoses; medical incidents; the Malevolence frontman has seen it all.

“At a festival recently, there was this 16-year-old kid who was drunk, holding a smoke grenade in his mouth when it blew up,” Alex recalls. “He was a mess. Having to go into the crowd, to find this kid, he was just… fucked, I don’t know how else to put it. Serious injuries. Some of the things I’ve dealt with over the years will stay with me forever. It scars you.”

When you consider his day job, it’s no surprise that Alex Taylor appears immune to people taking potshots at him and his band for superficial reasons. He knows who he is and what he’s in it for, ultimately. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a right of reply to call out the hypocrisy. A scene that prides itself on its inclusivity might want to reconsider its unwritten rules about the uniform required for entry.

“You know what, bro?” he begins. “The metal scene is not fucking welcoming at all. I’d say it’s quite elitist. At Brutal Assault festival recently, Watain turned up with a Peli case full of goat heads. This is why normal people think we’re all fucking weirdos. It actually quite annoyed me.

“Fans of these bands are the first to criticise someone for their skinny jeans, tracksuits and fringes,” he continues animatedly. “It’s ironic for a community that’s supposed to be so open-minded. There’s still some way to go to change mindsets from, ‘This is our thing, not yours.’”

Maybe that’s what he means when he says that what you see is what you get. Alex and the band look and dress the way they’ve always done because they’re just being honest about who they are and where they’ve come from. You can’t get much more authentic than that.

“We’re not trying to be anyone other than ourselves,” the frontman reaffirms with a steely-eyed determination.

Real metal, indeed.

Malevolence tour the UK from November 7. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2023 issue of the magazine.

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