It’s been a few months since I’ve posted on these pages, but I hope to make it up to you by offering you some homemade Napalm Death trading cards!
I was torn as to what lineup to select before making these. If you ask me today what my favourite Napalm Death album is, I’ll tell you From Enslavement to Obliteration. That lineup was arguably their most stable to that point in their membership carousel of an existence, and featured some major names that left their mark on the music scene in other metal bands in both vocalist Lee Dorian (Cathedral) and Bill Steer (Carcass). I also thought towards their longest-running lineup that ran through most of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, with Danny Herrera on drums and the double guitar assault of Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintado. The band’s return to a quartet once Jesse left in 2004 saw most of the same lineup continue through for another decade or so when Mitch stopped touring with the band. I decided to compromise between paying tribute to their more pioneering sound of their earliest days and their constant evolution that makes them a relevant force in extreme metal to this day.
The lineup I settled on, featuring vocalist Barney Greenway, bassist Shane Embury, drummer Mick Harris, and the aforementioned Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintado. I don’t believe that lineup lasted any more than two years, but it unites eras in that you have a representative from their debut album Scum (Mick Harris) as well as the more long-term members of the band. The funny thing about this lineup is that the one album that they released together, Harmony Corruption, was apparently controversial at the time it was released as they shifted more towards a death metal sound and had longer songs than normal. For the record, the longest track on the album is “Unfit Earth”, and its five minutes and three second length is hardly entering Iron Butterfly territory. As Greenway recalled in the September 19, 2015 edition of Kerrang! about the reaction to the album, “We did have some people leave us. And we did have a chorus of people shouting ‘sell-out’ at us. But that was ridiculous. Sell out to what? Selling out by making a different album isn’t selling out.” Garry Sharpe-Young refers to Harmony Corruption in his book Metal: The Definitive Guide as “the band’s most traditional album”, which I suppose is a fair enough assessment. No matter, it’s hardly considered a stain on their discography. On the contrary, it’s considered a classic by many fans.
I was also leaning towards making an old-school looking card set, and I had one in mind that I wanted to use as a basis for some band-themed cards. I brought up Pro Set in my Yo! MTV Raps post from a few months ago, which was also in part why I settled on wanting to use the design from one of the first sets that I ever encountered, 1990-91 Pro Set Hockey. There are certain elements of the set that you could refer to as sort of ugly, but it’s all about the nostalgia for me. Cards from this set were in the bundle I got as a rubber band-bound birthday party favour as a six-year old, along with some other cards from Score and Topps sets from the time, and these are the sort of cards that will live in my mind eternally. It was very much a rough-around-the-edges set, a new manufacturer at the time to the world of hockey in a set that (as I have previously stated) was riddled with errors and misprints. It fits the grindcore/death metal aesthetic like a glove, if you ask me! Not a beauty contest winner of a set, for sure, but it will get the message across fine to deliver word of an underground form of music.
Anyway, on to the cards, and first in my set is the big Brummie at the front of the stage, Barney Greenway.
I decided to go with his birth name of Mark on the front of the card. I can’t recall the hockey set ever opting to use any nicknames in place of names, saving those details for the bio section. Many Napalm fans can rightly guess that Barney’s shirt says “Destroy Fascists” when read as a whole. Keeping in spirit with the band’s politics, and the fact that fascism is nothing to celebrate or condone, I planned on including the whole shirt in the picture, but the source photo I used (which I believe was from a poster in a music magazine) did not allow for it. If I zoomed out too far, you would see a giant Napalm Death logo embedded in the image, which would be redundant given the existence of the logo in the top-left corner. However, you shouldn’t need to look too hard to spot some crude edits to the left of the photo where I tried to hide the evidence of that second logo.
Regarding the card design, I used a letter at the bottom-left to represent each person’s primary instrument in place of what would be a hockey player’s position as I had done on previous cards (see my Armored Saint cards from last year). I also considered sticking with one colour scheme for the cards of the entire band in the same spirit of being teammates on a sports team, but my indecisiveness led to experimenting with different colours on each card. I gave my best shot at replicating the Pro Set logo by incorporating my own logo into it, but shrank the font size so that it doesn’t take up too much space. I thought of using A.M. as initials rather than Armchair Maestro, but think this ended up working better despite it being too many characters. Though I considered putting my armchair logo on the right side, I decided to match Pro Set’s emblem, who placed the NHL logo to the left of the text.
And now for the rear.
In the interest of space, I capped the amount of items in the discography section to three. In each person’s case, I felt the need to mention at least one recording that was not a Napalm Death album. For Barney, that is Benediction’s Subconscious Terror. I’ve yet to add that album to my collection, but I do have their third album Transcend The Rubicon. That was after Barney left to join Napalm Death, but still a great example of old-school death metal, and vocalist Dave Ingram has a similar guttural delivery to Barney’s. It’s also worth mentioning that former Napalm Death guitarist Frank Healy was Benediction’s bassist for 15 years, debuting on Rubicon. As for other card content, Shane Embury mentioned that What’s That Noise? fact about Barney in his book Life…? And Napalm Death (which I proudly helped to crowd-fund), as well as apparent plans to appear in an episode of Red Dwarf (whose Craig Charles was host of What’s That Noise?) that fell through. I wouldn’t have cared if their appearance was as shoe-horned into an episode like Motörhead on The Young Ones. It would have been something to see Napalm Death on a cult BBC show, one that I’m overdue to check out in more depth. I also listed Barney as a vegetarian, though he developed more of a vegan lifestyle as he aged.
Next is Napalm Death’s current iron-man, having been with the band since 1987, bassist Shane Embury.
I went for a bit of variety on this card by choosing a photo of Shane from a From Enslavement to Obliteration era band promotional image, but it isn’t uncommon for a trading card set to include a picture that is a few years out of date. I think I’m more pleased with the colours I used on the Barney card, but like I stated, I was just trying to change things up. As I did base these ones off hockey cards, you may think that the colour scheme looks reminiscent of the Montreal Canadiens. I didn’t purposely aim for that, but if I reflect on it a bit, it’s probably closer to what is worn by the city’s Canadian Football League team (the Montreal Alouettes).
That Human Error album apparently hasn’t been re-issued since around 2001 if Discogs is to be believed, which is a shame. It’s one of the earlier items in the Earache Records catalog, but since that label is more focused on signing classic rock revival bands and more accessible pop-rock acts than they are grindcore and death metal, I have to hope that another record label obtains the rights to release it. The funny thing is that it seems to be easier to locate audio of his earlier band Warhammer, who never released a proper album. There are several links to their Abattoir of Death demo (such as this one) throughout YouTube. Shane has mentioned a variety of times that he had a window of opportunity to join Napalm earlier and play on side B of Scum, and that not doing so was one of his biggest regrets in life. In a 2017 interview with Decibel magazine, he stated that he even wrote a few songs that would later be performed by Napalm intended for use on Scum, but “they went into storage until I came in on bass”.
Now for what was their lone link to the earlier days of Napalm, drummer Mick Harris.
Here’s another From Enslavement era pic, which was actually featured on the album’s back cover. I wanted to pepper a few action shots of the guys into the mix, and this image is one of the best at capturing Mick’s fury behind the kit. I believe it was also featured in the Slave to the Grind grindcore documentary, and should rightly be included in pretty much any reference to the energetic drummer. My debate with this set was whether I should have numbered this as the first card in the set given that he was the longest-serving member of the band at the time this lineup was in operation. I didn’t really put too much thought into it as I didn’t think of the numbering as any sort of member ranking or hierarchy.
I broke my established pattern of featuring other non-Napalm projects in the discographies, but I felt I had to establish Harris’ longevity with the band. The whole claim as to who is the so-called “fastest band in the world” is one that can be (and has been) long-debated, but this was notoriously stated on the cover of a November 26th 1988 issue of New Music Express (NME). It seemed an appropriate way at the time to market a band that had several micro-sized songs and played at high velocity. I’m sure if you asked individual band members or music fans of the era, they might offer forth Siege or D.R.I. as some of the fastest-ever, but finding the true title holder would take a deeper study. Not only was the use of Harris’ two-string guitar cited in the Harmony Corruption retrospective with Decibel in 2020, it seems that wasn’t the only instance of Mick shedding strings on a musical instrument. Embury also recalled during a LouderSound.com interview the following year that Mick got a kick out of playing along to Macabre’s “Ed Gein” using a two-string bass. What do you think he did with all those leftover strings?
Next up is the first of the two guitarists to perform live with the band, Jesse Pintado.
I liked this photo enough to use it despite two knocks against it. I believe it was taken during a recording session for World Downfall from Jesse’s previous band Terrorizer. Also, it’s not a colour photo. I felt I could get away with it not only because it’s my set with my rules, but the 1990-91 Pro Set hockey set also used black and white photos, one of which I specifically remember being Hall of Famer Alex Delvecchio. A funny thing about that particular card was that, as it was with many cards my brother and I collected that featured a long-retired player, we would convince ourselves (despite all evidence to the contrary) that this Delvecchio card was actually from the 1950s. Regarding the Jesse card, I felt a black and white image also stands well in contrast with the other cards as he is no longer with us, having died due to liver failure at just 37 years old in 2006.
The tape trading method of networking has been stated multiple times, but I recalled it from a book I’ve had on my shelf for almost twenty years, Ian Christie’s Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. From page 245, we have a quote from Jesse regarding his pre-Napalm relationship with Embury, stating that “I never met Shane Embury face-to-face before I joined the band, but we were into the same trip. We were corresponding and made some phone calls to each other. When we would talk, we knew exactly what we wanted to do.” Technically, the time when Pete Sandoval and David Vincent were both in Terrorizer overlapped their membership in Morbid Angel, so I should have been more careful with how I stated this fact (chalk it up as an on-brand Pro Set error!). Sandoval was lured out of Terrorizer prior to joining them for their Altars of Madness recording, though Terrorizer would reconvene to complete work on what would be their only album until 2006’s Darker Days Ahead.
To complete the guitar tandem with Pintado, Mitch Harris rounds out the lineup.
What’s with the Cousin Itt photo? Well, I tried my best to screen-capture a live video of the band, and this was my greatest attempt at obtaining one. It’s not as if very high-resolution concerts are available from the band circa 1990 or 1991, so I took one from a performance of “If The Truth Be Known”, which had more usable shots of Mitch than I could get off their official Live Corruption concert tape. Mick’s colours on his card mirror those of the original Los Angeles Kings uniform, and his partner in surname Mitch is bordered by the black and grey that the Kings had adapted as their colours in the late-1980s, right around the time Wayne Gretzky was acquired by the team. An unintentional link I made between, as the card states below, two unrelated musicians.
The long out-of-print Defecation album Purity Dilution is apparently being reissued through Vic Records, as will Righteous Pigs’ Stress Related. I let a copy of Stress Related slip through my fingers once, and ever since had seen it dramatically rise in price. In contrast to the case of the Unseen Terror album, it’s great to see labels acquire the rights to older albums like these to help keep them alive! Mitch’s compositional output may have been limited to “Mind Snare” on his first Napalm album, but their full-length follow-up Utopia Banished saw him work his way into their sound more with writing credit on six of that album’s fifteen songs.
The 1990-91 Pro Set hockey cards had what were dubbed “Team Facts” cards for each of the twenty-one NHL franchises at the time, and I always thought these looked so spectacular! The team logos never looked better in a dark-marble print, and they were a great crash course for each team’s history. Naturally, I wanted to apply this to Napalm Death’s history.
I couldn’t quite get it to the sharp clarity that the hockey logos had, so I simply made the logo grey to help it mesh with the background. Now would be as good a time as any to mention that I did not hand-draw or trace the Napalm Death logo that I’ve used on these cards. FanArt.tv is a fantastic resource for those looking for pop culture images and logos, and they had a wide variety of Napalm Death logos available. As I don’t own the copyright on the logo or the photos I’ve used, feel free (as always) to print these cards off to add to your own collection. To get the marble pattern, I used a Clouds effect to make an image that approximates the cards as best as I could. Ask me to repeat the process, and I’d likely get far different results, but here’s the useful tutorial I followed to do so in Paint.Net software.
Flipping the card over gives the promised history lesson.
The one thing the hockey set had that I couldn’t include was that, to match the “First NHL Game” stat (listed as December 19, 1917 on my cherished Toronto Maple Leafs card), I wanted to find the date of the first Napalm Death live performance. I wish I had this detail, as my search for this yielded no exact date. However, through a series of interviews and links that DisposableUnderground.com shared about the early years of the band, I learned that comedian Stewart Lee went to school with some of their band members and attended at least one early gig. A fun piece of trivia!
I also decided to add some noteworthy bands that they shared a bill with, using ConcertArchives.org as my primary guide for show information. To be super safe, I only listed those that played with the band prior to 1991 as I don’t know the definitive cut-off where Mick Harris left the band. Unfortunately, I had to cut it off around their time of the New Titans on The Bloc tour, featuring Sepultura, Sacred Reich, and Sick of It All, which was Danny Herrera’s first tour. For reading up on some of these bigger tours, check Decibel’s “That Tour Was Awesome” series for stories from each of the Grindcrusher (with Morbid Angel, Carcass, and Bolt Thrower) and New Titans on the Bloc tours. The magazine is a consistent great source for interviews, so I shouldn’t need to ask for forgiveness in once again directing you towards them. The connection to Prong and Mind Over Four may have been a from a one-off support gig, and Amebix, Disorder, and Cerebral Fix work well as more obscure bands they played with pre-’91, with some of those shows pre-dating Scum.
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As my mini-set has drawn to a conclusion, what’s your favourite card of the lot? What other bands would fit nicely along side Napalm Death should the set expand? Would you have laid down your hard-earned allowance as a kid to get cards like this at the corner store, or would you have stuck to the rivers and lakes that you’re used to (I’ll paraphrase TLC whenever I damn-well please!) in the form of sports cards?
Armchair Maestro 