The Freedom Of Expression With MARTIN JACKSON From CONFYDE

Interview by Kris Peters
One of the most beautiful things about music is the individual
expression that goes into creating a body of work.
Sure, a band is made up of several members on most occasions, but
each of those members still contributes part of their personal DNA
throughout each written and recorded piece of music.
But for those musicians adept at playing anything and everything
and who record most of the instruments and vocals themselves, then
that strand of DNA is magnified exponentially.
As is the case with UK outfit Confyde, who started life as a solo
project by Martin Jackson and have slowly evolved to the stage
where their music is enough in demand for him to start recruiting
other musicians.
Jackson also moonlights as frontman for System Of A Down tribute
act Chop Suey (which also features Sam Totman from Dragonforce and
Andre Joyzi from Breed 77) but it is with his original project
Confyde that he gets a chance to faithfully represent himself
musically.
An eclectic mixture of styles with its roots in rock, Confyde have
steadily built their career around a string of single releases,
with the latest slab of goodness being Scalper.
Jackson sat down with HEAVY to tell us more.
"It's been brilliant," he enthused about the early reception to
Scalper. "Probably the strongest reception so far. I've been
putting out singles with Confyde since 2020 when it got rebooted,
and by every measure this song has been the most successful so
far."
We ask Jackson to go deeper into Scalper musically.
"I knew, given the subject matter of what I wanted to sing about -
the housing crisis and eternal misery a lot of our generation have
to live with - there's a lot of anger and resentment around this
particular subject, so I knew it had to be angry," he explained.
"It needed to be a loud, metal song and I've not done a metal song
for quite a while and the influences that came in were big chunky
guitars with a proggy tip to them, so there's a Mastodon influence
there, and Sikth influence... I'm a huge fan of 12 Foot Ninja and
how they switch up genres inside their songs and Confyde is very
much a project where every single almost completely transforms the
sound and I really admire what 12 Foot Ninja do with that. You kind
of have this ebb and flow. Often when you're dealing with a really
broken housing system it feels like an absolute roller coaster and
nothing is ever resolved, so I like to feel like this song
represents that. There are some sections that are really heavy and
in your face, some that are more majestic and hopeful and there's
others that are sinister and in a pit. It feels like you can never
really relax while listening to it (laughs), but at the same time I
wanted to have something that... even though I love all this
musical experimentation I'm always keen for songs that have solid,
memorable hooks. Something people can sing along and shout along to
in solidarity with subject matter like this. A big influence on
that was probably Alter Bridge and Nothing More."
In the full interview, Martin talks more about the musical nature
of Scalper, keeping things cohesive while skipping all over the
place, the strong subject matter, how Scalper differs musically to
previous single Man Down, singles versus albums in the modern
climate, playing live and more.