Out of the Shadows with Dark Heart

Dark Heart has released their new album Out of the Shadows on Battlegod Productions, presenting a stunning collection of hard rocking reveries. The album was produced and mixed by Pete Newdeck, who has also worked with the likes of Eden’s Curse, Grim Reaper, Midnite City and Vega! Pete also appears on drums and additional background vocals as part of the top-class rhythm section, including Josh ‘Tabbie’ Williams of Midnite City!  With their first recording Shadows of the Night released 40 years ago on Roadrunner Records, Dark Heart has returned with a solid new recording, and are primed and ready to rock your world once more!  In this interview with founding member Alan Clark, we discuss the mighty return if Dark Heart, the long wait between albums, news on his other band Change of Heart, and a whole lot more!  Read on…

It’s been 40 years since the last Dark Heart album. What made you decide it was time to do another one?
Well, probably back in 2017 to 2018, we were approached and asked if we’d be interested in reforming Dark Heart.  So, I actually spoke to the original members of the band. Unfortunately, at the time they were either playing in different bands or they just weren’t interested in playing anymore. So, it kind of stumbled a little bit, and then I was working with a guitarist who was Nick on the Dark Heart album. And we decided, why not try and write a new album. So that’s kind of how it came about.

Out of the Shadows, is there any overall story or concept behind that title? I know the first album was called ‘Shadows of the Night.
Out of the Shadows purely came on the back of that because obviously there was such a huge gap between the first album and this album. It’s kind of like forgotten about in the midst of time as it were. So, we decided to call it Out of the Shadows just to give it that sort of feel, if you like, to bring it up to date a little bit.

How many of the songs were influenced by the pandemic, if at all?
Not massively, to be honest. To be fair, the only issue that the pandemic caused was it just stopped us in our tracks because things became more important, you could see what was going on in the world. And it also obviously proved to be very difficult to get anything done. You certainly couldn’t get together, although modern technology, you can record over the Internet. It’s still reduced that sort of if you like, that sort of necessary contact that you need sometimes to be able to sit in the same room with people and discuss music. So, it had the detrimental effect from a point of view, it slowed us down. It didn’t sort of influence us to write anything. It gave us time to sit and work on material and improve stuff, but there was no direct correlation between it.

How did you wind up working with Battlegod Productions?
We were actually put in touch with Battlegod by a couple of people who I know. We were messing around with another label who had a failed attempt at trying to release the album. So we decided to move it, and we were looking for another label. A good friend of mine, Ivan Gunn, mentioned Battlegod and said, “This is a really good guy. You really want to speak to him. He’ll do a great job for you.” So we contacted him. He made the introductions, and everything just flowed from there. It was great. And Peter Battlegod is absolutely fantastic to work with. He actually does what he says he’s going to do. And I’ve been in plenty of situations where other record companies simply haven’t. So this was refreshing, and we’re really happy with him.

You mentioned Nick Catterick. Give me a little background on him and how you guys started working together. Was he in Change of Heart?
Well, he was on the peripheral edge, I guess you could say, simply because I’d known Nick for a lot of years. And what great guitar player he was. We kind of did think along the same lines. As I mentioned earlier, the project of getting back together with the original lineup failed or didn’t fail, but it just didn’t get anywhere. It was logic for me just to speak to Nick and kind of we have a very similar approach to stuff. So the logic was to speak to Nick and say, “Look, I really want to do this project. How do you want to go about it?” And that’s how Nick came on board. So, I’ve known Nick for a lot of years. He’s been in various bands around my region where I live. And we had done a few demos together. I did the Last Tiger album, and I got Nick to come in. He actually wrote one of the songs on the Last Tiger album. He wrote a song called Obsession, certainly the music for it. And he was involved in the video that we did for Rise to the Challenge. We’ve always been working together. So, the logical move was just to take that to the next stage with Dark Heart.

Pete Newdeck has been in a lot of bands I like. Midnite City, Vega. The list goes on and on. How did you wind up working with Pete with Dark Heart? And what was that like?
I did the Last Tiger album with Paul Hume, who is in the band Demon. We decided we were going to approach Paul Hume for this album. But then he decided he was shutting his studio down to concentrate on other things. So, he recommended Pete Newdeck. So again, through people that we know, he made the introductions to Pete. We hit it off straight away. Pete’s really great. He understood exactly where we come from, how we want the sound. He’s so easy to work with, and he’s very, very quick as well. His response time is amazing. So we just sent him the tracks, started to send them the stuff we’re working on, and everything progressed from there. So, there’s a lot of things in there that Pete’s from production, from a producer point of view, lifted us and changed. Because sometimes it’s always good to have a new set of ears who’s never heard the material before to make some suggestions from a production point of view. And that’s kind of how it went. So, Pete’s really good to work with. We’re working with Pete now on the next album.

And you also have another member of Midnight City in your band. Josh ‘Tabbie’ Williams. How did he become involved?
Just through Pete. At the time when myself and Nick were writing all the material, we didn’t have a real established lineup. So myself and Nick were creating the demos ourselves. So, Pete, once we sent him the tracks, he says, “Look, you guys, I’ll play drums. I know a really, really good bass player. I’ll speak to Josh and get him involved.” He came along, put some fantastic bass lines down. And obviously, Pete did the main drums to the album as well as some BVs with me. It all sounded great. And he is a great bass player and Pete’s a great drummer. It made sense to do that, so that’s kind of how that went.

Give me a little background on Geordie Clark, the new drummer in the band.
Yeah, well, Geordie’s a drummer who I’ve known for a lot of years. We’ve worked together in a couple of bands historically for the last 10, 15 years. So, what we tried to do, what we wanted to do after the album was created, we wanted to put a lineup together that can go out and play live and to move forward as a band. So we asked Geordie to get involved, and he was more than happy to do that. A really, really good technical drummer. And then we added Daniel Millward on the bass. We have a full lineup and just recently we’ve just added a guy called John Sykes, not the John Sykes, but a keyboard player John Sykes, a friend who I’ve worked with over the years. He’s coming on keyboards. So hopefully we’ve got a stable lineup that is based in our region. We’re all within a reasonably close proximity to each other. So, we can get together and rehearse or we can get together and discuss stuff. That’s kind of what we wanted. That’s what I wanted. I wanted a band because I don’t want people to think that we’re just recording an album, putting an album out. Nothing happens. We don’t do anything, and we do another album. I want to be able to record an album, play some live stuff, record another album, play some more live stuff. So that’s kind of how that theory came together.

Are you and Geordie related?
No, it’s just a coincidence. We’re not related in any way whatsoever. He lives in Newcastle and I’m from Newcastle, but we’re not actually related. I just understand why people would ask that. So, no, we’re not.

Has this lineup of Dark Heart played live yet?
Not yet, no. But we are playing live, we’ve got a gig this year. We’re playing supporting Demon on the 23rd of November. So, we’re looking forward to that. We’ll be starting rehearsals next month. And then hopefully, fingers crossed, things go according to plan. We’re on a couple of things with Battlegod. So, there could potentially be four or five dates with a few names at the moment. We’re just discussing it, but we’d like to play some festivals. We’re hoping for some of that as well. And we’ve got somebody working on that for us at the moment.

The first album, Shadows of the Night was released 40 years ago. When you look back on that album and the fact that it was released 40 years ago. What do you think of it now in retrospect?
I’m more fond of it now than I was. When we first did the album, we didn’t really like the album at all. We were really unhappy with the production. I tried to stop it after a few days because it was just crazy. After the album was released, I didn’t listen to it for at least 10 years because it just wasn’t us. It wasn’t how we should have sounded. Everybody was disappointed. That’s kind of how Dark Heart fell apart in the first place because nobody really wanted to be associated with the album to that extent. And then later on, it seemed to have this cool following for reasons beyond my comprehension. But now I kind of look back on it a bit fondly because when you’re a kid, when you’re sort of 19 and you’re doing your album, the excitement’s there. And when something like that happens, it’s kind of a bit of a gut punch. But when you look back at it now and think, “Well, it’s maybe a little bit better than what we give it credit for.” It’s there now. It’s a little bit of history. So I’ve moved on a little bit from that.

And it was released on Roadrunner Records, which was pretty cool. Did Dark Heart ever get to play here in the States in support of that album?
No, we never did. To be honest, we had a couple of lineup changes almost within months of the album being released. There was a lot of disillusionment. We tried to get different lineups together, but it just didn’t work. It just didn’t happen. So, we never got to really play it live properly. We did a few gigs, played live a few times, but nothing major and certainly nothing that would take us out of our own country, to be honest.

Has Battlegod maybe approached you about re-releasing that first album? Is that something you’d even want to do?
It’s actually under process as we speak, but not with Battlegod. Basically, a company approached me, a company based in Greece, and asked us if we wanted to do a 40th anniversary album of it. I would have gone through Battlegod, but time-wise, we couldn’t have gone through this year and it seems a bit ridiculous to release the 40th anniversary on the 41st year. So, this company’s done it. We’ve remastered the tracks as best they can. Also, we did a live recording of the album in the studio. So, some of that is going to be on there. There’s some old demo tapes that we did for the second album, they’re going to be on there. So it’s going to be like this deluxe version of it. And it should be released this year.

Looking back on the Change of Heart albums, what do you think of them now in retrospect, and will there be any more Change of Heart?
I really like them, to be honest. I’m a songwriter really. I don’t trust myself as a singer to be fair, but I enjoy doing it. I enjoy writing, I enjoy recording, and I like the Change of Heart albums. I actually still listen to some of the Change of Heart albums, the Continuum album, Last Tiger, the first album is pretty good as well. There will be a Change of Heart album during ’25. I’ve got back together. I’m working with the original keyboard player, Dave Chapman, drafted a few extra bodies in, and I’ve written, well, I think it amounts to about 30 songs at the minute, roughly, to choose from for the next album. So hopefully, it should be good.

Regarding Dark Heart, will we have to wait another 40 years until the next album is released? It’s a fair question.
Yeah, probably is based on our productivity. It’s probably a fair question, but the simple answer is no. There’ll be a new album in February of ’25. We’re in advanced stages with the writing. We’ve got a few more songs to do yet, but I think we’re up to seven or eight. And we’re also obviously there with Pete Newdeck, actually just working with Pete today sending some stuff back. So yeah, there’ll be a new album in early 25.

Any chance of Dark Heart making it over here to the States?
Absolutely. I think, from our perspective, we really want to take the opportunity to play in the States. We’d like to play in Japan. We’d like to play in Europe. I don’t see why we can’t with the right conditions and right opportunities. So, it’s something that we’ll be working hard on with the second album coming out – because it’s good for us to have another album’s worth of materials. And then we can do a really, really, really top set. So, from our perspective, I would like to say that I really would.

Do you have any messages for your fans here in the States who have been following you through Dark Heart and Change of Heart?
I’d just like to say thank you very much. It’s really appreciated. Keep the faith and there’ll be new music coming. So hopefully we’ll get the opportunity to come and see you guys and play in front of you and give you a show.

LINE-UP:
Alan Clark: Vocals
Nick Catterick: Guitars
Josh ‘Tabbie’ Williams: Bass
Pete Newdeck: Drums

NEW LINE-UP:
Alan Clark: Vocals
Nick Catterick: Guitars
Josh ‘Tabbie’ Williams: Bass
Geordie Clark: Drums

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.facebook.com/DARKHEART.ROCK