Zed Biography

Zed have lived a little. From recording their second album in the crystal-meth infested town of Weed, Northern California to touring with Coldplay and Robbie Williams, they’re more world-weary.

You can tell too. Hell, front man Nathan King even sits on the other side of a café table - his hair a lot longer than when masses of screaming girls drowned out Zed at gigs - and admits with a smile that the band had one aborted attempt at recording an album after the triple platinum-selling Silencer from 2000.

"I think it was a good thing to go through," he says, "but yeah, quite a difficult time. I think a lot of bands struggle with that."

Well, if the Foo Fighters can do it and then come back with a killer album after a bit of a lay off, then why can’t Zed?

"I’m glad we didn’t put out the album that we recorded. I think it was too close to the first album even though it was a normal period of time [between albums]. For us, we hadn’t done enough. If anything it was a regression. We were writing songs for the sake of it at that stage, not because we wanted to. We thought, ‘This is really wrong, we can’t release this. We’ve gotta go forward.’"

The band - also made up of Adrian Palmer (drums), Ben Campbell (bass) and Andy Lynch (guitar) - took a good hard look at where they were going and what they wanted from an album.

"We wanted to be fresh, we didn’t want to be stale,” continues Nathan. "But when you put everything into a recording it’s pretty difficult to say, ‘We’re not going to use it,’ y’know. To have your music rejected is not easy, but at the same time we knew the band needed to evolve."
The majority of the album was written at Andy’s father’s studio - a one room boat shed on the North Shore. "We were just writing for nine to 12 months. It was a difficult process to ‘start again’, but the vibe was there and the bulk of the album came through in that time.

Our writing’s more about what’s going on around us -what’s important - not just about love. Let’s face it, girls are the first thing you feel inclined to write about when you’re 15, or whatever," he laughs.

"I think a lot of the naivety has gone. And that comes out in the music. The tone of the album’s a bit more serious, but still has an up vibe. We didn’t want to lose that. People who liked the Silencer album will appreciate our music’s grown up and matured with us."

"When we got to California to record there wasn’t a lot of work to do in terms of structure and set up of the songs. We were able to use a lot of what we’d learnt from recording Silencer. Technically it’s not a self produced album but in a lot of ways it is."

A lot has changed since releasing their debut album, Silencer. It sold more than 55,000 copies and spawned the classic Renegade Fighter and five other top 20 singles.

When Zed started writing for Silencer, Ben - the youngest out of the four - was 15-years-old. With growing up and coming of age there’s been a change in the Zed ranks. No more wooing Glorafilia, or Renegade Fighting. "We’ve seen bits and pieces of this planet we live on and realise we’ve got it very cushy here in New Zealand. Going to places like Bangkok and some of the poorer areas of the States really opened our eyes."

One of these poorer areas is Weed, where they recorded the new album with producer Sylvia Massey whose credits include Powerman 5000, and most notably, the first two Tool albums. She’s set up a recording studio on a 50 acre ranch near the town.

Weed is 3,500 feet above sea level with picturesque Mount Shasta as a back-drop. This little town of 3000 people marks the beginning of the Alaskan Highway.

"Weed is this tiny little town but it had a real big drug problem," says Nathan. "You can imagine what goes down there, man. It was sad seeing so many people just trapped in a cycle and not being able to get out.

"Not that we were writing a lot during the recording of the album, but those sort of experiences had a real effect on what we were doing.

Zed formed back in the mid 90s when Nathan, Adrian and Ben were students at Cashmere High in Christchurch. Around 1996 they started practicing seriously.

Soon after this the band felt there was something missing and that’s when they added second guitarist Andy Lynch. He had to be dragged back from Brazil to join the band.
On Silencer Nathan and Ben were the sole songwriters. On the new album, Andy - the Max Cavalera T-shirt wearing guitarist - is penning songs as well. In case you don’t know, Max Cavalera was the front man for Brazilian metallers Sepultura and is as much of a Brazilian hero as football player Pele. Max, like Andy, plays a mean guitar riff.

"Andy’s style is quite different to Ben and mine," says Nathan. "He introduced us to a bunch of different guitar chords and a different way of thinking when it comes to song writing."

Never fear, the classic tunes that made Zed’s Silencer album so popular haven’t been abandoned for death metal. "Our roots are firmly entrenched in a really strong melody and trying to turn a good tune into something that sticks around. But we have tried to be a bit more creative with this album," says Nathan.

"Our first single is like a straight ahead pop tune, but that’s not indicative of the whole album. It’s like a nice bridge between where we were and where we’re going." (edit)

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