Last month Tim Carley, guitarist for Topshop approved, beat loving death metal troupe The Rotted, joined such luminous, dextrally impaired company as Django Reinhardt and Tony Iommi by “completely fucking up” one of the fingers on his left hand. Speaking to The Quietus earlier this month at the Bloodstock festival, Tim took the time to reveal exactly the incident occurred.
"I dropped a flight case on it that weighed 180kg, and it went straight into the tip of my finger!” He explained. “It was the metal edge of a flight case, on the metal edge of a truck – I just managed to get my hand out of the way in time. It was only an inch drop and it just completely smashed it to bits.
“It happened whilst I was doing some work for another band actually, I was just helping out, moving some stuff around as I had a day free, and it was just, like, smash! Straight to hospital.”
In an admiral move, rather than crying like a wimpy indie kid, after a brief visit to A&E, Tim joined up with the rest of the band to fulfil their European festival commitments, as he went on to explain:
“I did it Wednesday lunch time, Wednesday afternoon I went to hospital, Wednesday night I got home and the wife made a video, stuck it on YouTube, and said I was still going to play the festivals. Thursday I got up, drove to the airport and went to the Czech Republic… then played a show on Friday!
“I’ve had a fair amount of work done on it though.” He added. “They cut my fingernail off and then cut the nail bed out, stitched up what was left underneath the nail, then stitched my finger back together. The break they said they can’t do anything about; the nerve endings they said they couldn’t do anything about; I didn’t cut any tendons though, luckily. So they stitched it all back together and it looks a fucking mess.”
Rather oddly the accident has had the effect of galvanising the rest of the group, as Tim went on to explain when asked how losing the use of a finger had impacted on his playing style.
“I won’t lie, it is really hard to play – it’s a fucking mission!” he said. “Since I did it it’s made everyone else in the band go ‘do y’know what? If he can do shows with three fingers we’re going to pull out all the stops’."
“The last two or three shows have been so fucking good though – they’ve been some of the best shows in The Rotted’s history. Ever! And it’s been since I had the accident – everyone’s been like, ‘fuck, this is how fragile it is, this is how quickly it can be taken away from us’.”
In further Rotted news, the band have confirmed that the follow up to 2008’s Get Dead, Or Die Trying is to be finally be released through Candlelight Records and “will hopefully be in the shops around October/November”
“It’s been finished since February/March," said Tim, "and we’ve been talking to record labels since then – but nothing moves fast in the entertainment industry.”
And it look set to be as uncomfortable and uncompromising a ride as the group have ever subjected their fans to. When quizzed on the writing process and what we can expect from the new record, Tim simply told us: “What we’ve been coming up with is a lot better that 90% of other shit death metal that’s relying on harmonies, well trodden paths and melodic wank.
“What we won’t do is what 90% of other death metal bands do – especially modern death metal bands: shit harmonies out of their ‘big boy’s book of guitars’. The four of us have just said ‘bollocks to it, let’s just write stuff that we actually, genuinely want to hear’. This feels like The Rotted again – It’s like yet another new start! Again!”
