Former Iron Maiden guitarist Terry Wapram will bring his band Buffalo Fish to the Cart & Horses this Friday to join Ides Of March, the Italian Iron Maiden tribute band from Milan, in what will be another truly exciting evening at the Birthplace Of Iron Maiden.
Buffalo Fish recently released their fantastic album Plastic Sky, eleven tracks that showcase the impressive, unique blend this band delivers live. Four years in the making, lockdowns and shutdowns hampered things, but finally, the new album has seen the light of day.
Things gathered pack when Terry and the boys took the album to Volume Unlimited studio in High Barnet, where Buffalo Fish bassist Dwight Wharton had recorded with his other band Sonic Gypsy. Sound engineer Tamas Rozsnyai helped build momentum back up.
“He did a brilliant job,” Terry Wapram told MetalTalk. “We had to sort everything out, and some of it wasn’t correctly labelled.” Finally, after the earlier attempts, overdubs and eventually mastering were complete.
Devil’s Dream features Jamie Carter playing a guitar solo and some rhythm, and he briefly adds a bit of background rhythm on one of the other tracks. “The rest of the album is about us [Stitch, Terry, SDwight and Pete] with all guitars covered by Terry.
“We found it was easier to go back to our original lineup,” Terry says, “because it was crowding it a little bit and it lost its groove. Jamie wanted to fill in the holes, and we like holes. We’re more of a swampy groove feel and filling everything up.
“It was great working in the High Barnet studio. They really understood us. We did extra vocals there and fixed a few things. Peter, I would like to give him a lot of credit on this, spent a long time speaking in Hungarian to the studio guy. The guy even told him that Pete was getting all the drums right. He [Tamas] was really working hard on it.
“I sat through the whole thing, Dwight came in for a few sessions, Stitch came in to do some singing and sort a few things out. But it was mainly Pete and I sitting with it.”
Pressed in Dublin, Terry is over the moon with the result. “It was really long-winded,” Terry says, looking back. “It was outrageous. It should have maybe taken a year in different studios. Some of the original playing was done a long, long time ago, but some of the solos on there were redone by me remotely.”
Listening to Plastic Sky, it seems to have been worth the wait. This is an album that sounds great and really reflects the excitement and energy of the band live. Kudos to Buffalo Fish and Volume Unlimited.
“The mastering’s so important,” Terry says, “because real Heavy Metal mastering pushes everything to the limit and there’s very little headroom for it to breathe. You need something to step back from that, so you’ve still got light and shade. But you’ve got maximum volume. When you hear unmastered tracks, they don’t play well on every single piece of equipment. They only play good on a big stereo.
“When a thing’s mastered, you can listen to it on your phone, you can listen to it on a tiny stereo, big speakers obviously bring out the best in it. So what tends to happen is it flattens it out a bit, it’s compressed. But you don’t want to overcompress it because then you lose all the dynamics.
“The type of music we play, I feel, heavily relies on dynamics. We’re not full tilt all the time. The band’s actually much heavier than most people realise. It’s a beefy band. People think we’re funky or bluesy or whatever. It’s a beefy band, but each song has its own life.
“There’s not a theme running through it anymore. Each song has its own little life and a story, and it’s treated differently.”
Pusher Man, Plastic Sky and Entrapment represent three of the newer songs. “Some of these other ones have been around for a while but were never fully realised,” Terry says.
One of the earlier tracks is Mr K, which was part of the soundtrack to Untitled (A Film). “This is a more real version,” Terry says. “We had a bit of time left in the studio. So we revisited Mr. K in a more original way, different from the mix in the film, which was on Netflix.
“The story of this revolves around Dwight working as a barista in Kings Cross, talking to a customer who needed a song for a film. The track was cut into the film with such great effect that the producers asked for another three minutes to fill the scene out.” Terry and the band were invited to the premiere, of course, where Sharon Maughan told Terry that she wished they had Buffalo Fish music playing that evening.
As for Plastic Sky, Terry says he loves the title track. “Also, Dirtier has a lot of different treatments in it. That’s almost like a country and western feel with funk. There’s a lot of reverse guitar on that and atmospheric stuff.
“On this version of Mr. K, Peter plays rhythm guitar towards the end, and the drummer has this lovely choppy rhythm that goes really freaky. This is a much more studio album. The first album was done in a nightclub. We barricaded everything up with buffalo skins, chairs and carpets to get some separation, and that was played really pretty much as we played live.
“This is a much more produced, considered album with all sorts of different stuff going on. I think the singing’s exemplary on this. Stitch has really found himself on this album, and there are some nice treatments on the vocals. You can hear Dwight really well because sometimes live, you don’t hear how nice the backing vocals are.”
Tery is spot on here. The album sounded great on a drive to Norwich, and there are many great elements that you do not get in a live environment. There are songs that I have heard live which are wonderfully enhanced in the studio. There are some cool subtleties in there.
“I think that’s why people have such a job to pigeonhole us,” Terry says. “Without trying to sound clever, we’re not one thing. We’re good at what we do. It’s not like one genre if you like. There’s a little bit of everything. There’s still funk in there.
“Plastic Sky is a much heavier album than the first album. That was probably more bluesy. But you’ve got the light side of things. Pusher Man starts off as a kind of funk tune, and the end’s almost a bit Beatles-y.
“I’ve got Mellotrons going on in it, guitar-controlled Mellotrons and things, but there’s no actual keyboards on it. The effect of keyboards is all guitar effects and things produced from my main board, which is so big I don’t take it out anymore. I just record with it.
“I’m using really pared-down stuff at the moment. I’m using a floor amp that’s got a lot of effects on, a drive, and a wah-wah pedal. I have an extensive amount of pedals that I’ve been playing all these years.
“But I think you can hear a lot more of the subtleties that you probably wouldn’t hear on a live performance. Not so much because it’s not there, it’s not always brought out well. The guitars are big live, and you can easily lose the backing vocals sometimes.”
The gig with the Ides Of March is the Buffalo Fish album launch show as well, and the band plans a 45-minute set. Terry says he is happy to talk and sign anything. Plastic Sky will be available to buy as well as merch.
It has been quiet for Buffalo Fish, but Terry is itching to get back to playing live. There was a gig at The Dev recently, their first for a while. “It reassured me after a couple of years of not really playing gigs,” Terry says. “Whenever I stand with Buffalo Fish, I’m always amazed just how good they really are, as a lump, nothing to do with me.
“Each one of them brings something. Peter’s very good. Dwight is amazing on the bass, and he sings like an angel. Stitch has tightened up on the guitar. He’s keeping up with us really well, and he’s singing so much better. It’s all good.”
As a frontman, I have enjoyed watching Stitch perform before. “He’s pretty cool the way he moves around the stage,” Terry says, “and the way he watches. He’s almost balletic, isn’t he? He’s not doing the standard hurling himself around.
“I look around sometimes when I’m playing. Obviously, I look like a dead tree a lot of the time in a nice shirt, but I’m just playing. I look around at him, and he’s dancing all over the place. I enjoy it, and that’s why I like doing this.”
You can keep up to date with all things Buffalo Fish at buffalofishmusic.com. Doors are 8 pm for Buffalo Fish and Ides Of March at the Cart & Horses. Tickets are available from here.
