An alternative rock sound tinged with punk and metal, forged with blisteringly edgy guitar. Listen to Birthrite and you’ll get head-banging choruses, thought-provoking lyrics, the odd ballad with attitude; you’ll get uplifted, you’ll want to dance. You’ll want more for sure.
Apart from their take on Bowie’s Scary Monsters, all their songs are original, with each member contributing their ideas.
Think of “Peaky Blinders meets Iron Maiden.”
Quote from the band: “Birthrite visit territory only previously visited by the crew of the Starship Enterprise on Klingon psychotropics, into the uncharted outer reaches of the sonic universe.”
Their songs cover various topics such as the horrors and stupidity of war, life– it’s joys, hopes, tribulations, regrets. The passing of time. The Devil. Loneliness, isolation, frustration. Love, happiness, death. Not necessarily in that order.
A sight and sound to behold. Remember the bit about Peaky Blinders meets Iron Maiden? A visual treat. Interesting, Surprising. Different. Shocking. That’s what they look like!
BIRTHRITE is founded by Erazamus Voss in 2002, undergoes several line-up changes and incarnations in the years up until 2024.
Summer:
Erazamus reforms Birthrite the with the line-up of:
Winter:
The band record a six track EP entitled Is There Anybody Out There.
Track titles: 1 Square Dance 2 In A Corner of My Mind 3 You Take Me Down 4 I Know The Way 5 Is There Anybody Out There 6 Scary Monsters
Winter:
Birthrite play their first gig with the current line up at Ye Olde Foundry, Dudley, West Midlands, UK. Small Venue– Huge Attitude.
Spring:
Birthrite record a 12 track CD entitled You Need Birthrite.
Track titles: 1 You Take Me Down 2 In A Corner Of My Mind 3 Square Dance 4 Falling Out Of Love 5 Heroes 6 I Know The Way 7 Evolutionary Man 8 Goodbye Happiness 9 Scary Monsters 10 Just A Kiss Away 11 One More Chance 12 Is There Anybody Out There
Doktor Diabolus leaves the band and is replaced by original guitarist Jonny Zygen.
The band release two videos for Scary Monsters and One More Chance.
Spring:
Birthrite say goodbye to bassist Barnabus Strange. Thanks for your contributions. Good luck for the future Phil Easthope!!
Birthrite welcome Montague Sheldon on Bass!
All the boys are based in the Black Country, West Midlands, UK.
Asylum–Lincoln, Victoria Inn–Derby, Roadhouse–Birmingham, The Good Ship–London, Snooty Fox–Wakefield, The Shed–Leicester, Bar 12 Club–London with Maggie Ronson guesting on vocals. Plus numerous pubs, clubs and small venues all over the country.
• Provided the theme tune to the hit YouTube series about vampires Blood And Bone China.
A brief musical biography
(As I remember, others may disagree!)
My first introduction to music– apart from Mario Lanza and the Sound of Music, was in the early 1970s, listening to Bowie, The Who, Slade, T Rex, The Sweet et al.
In 1976 I went to Stourbridge School of Art, where along with other like-minded students we discovered Punk, The Sex Pistols and The Damned among many others. At the time a friend and I took a day off and went to Birmingham to purchase God Save The Queen, whilst there we were interviewed by a local radio station, as we were the first to purchase it from the store. When asked why, I answered “My mom wouldn’t like it”. Oh, the anarchy!
From Stourbridge School of Art, I moved to Northampton School of Art for three years and was in the same group of students as Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus fame. At the time there were numerous punk bands in and around Northampton, where, by one means or another, I became the frontman of a Wellingborough-based band called The Aliens. We used to practice in the cellar of the group house where I was living in as a student. We recorded a couple of “tapes”. We began playing covers and a couple of originals, This led me to begin writing lyrics.
Eventually, The Aliens disbanded, I joined another local band that was looking for a frontman, which was soon named Zyclon B. We did a couple of recordings and played gigs in and around Northampton. Again, this band eventually broke up. During this time, I began a training course to become a Learning Disability Nurse in Northampton. There I met a guitar/violin player and began writing songs. We added members including several female-nurse backing singers, (one of which was Juliet Eavis, the daughter of Mr Glastonbury Michael Eavis). This band was to be called Benylin and the Night Nurses, no gigs were performed or recordings made. The band was short-lived and soon fizzled out.
After a few years I moved back to Tipton, where I had a few try-outs for local cover bands, but I was not really interested, preferring instead to concentrate on creating original music. Throughout this time, I continued writing lyrics.
At some point, my keyboard-playing son and I wrote some songs together which sounded quite good, so we decided to expand on this and form a new band playing original music, that was to be called The Naz – a reference to a line from Ziggy Stardust. There were many changes of line-up and in 2000 Jonny Zygen joined on guitar, he and I soon formed a very strong writing relationship that lasted some 25 years. This band was to eventually become Birthrite; we played local gigs however there was limited interest in original music at the time due to the proliferation of covers bands and tribute acts, this led to the band eventually folding in 2004.
After this I did nothing musically for a few years, however a friend had a covers band which I did join as the vocalist, however this didn’t last long so he and I formed an originals band called Van Moria. We did a recording but never played live, again this was a short-lived experience.
Roll forward to 2010 when Jon contacted me to say that there had been interest on our Myspace page in the original Birthrite, and that we had been offered gigs. The band was reformed with new members, we adopted a new Steampunk look and we began to gig again all over the country, produced a couple of CDs, one of which featured the vocals of Maggie Ronson, the sister of none other than a certain Mr Mick Ronson, legendary guitarist with The Spiders from Mars. As ever, there were changes to the line up during this period, for a short time we even had management in London, being promoted by 80s TV personality and manager of A Flock of Seagulls, Steve Blacknall.
Due to what’s commonly referred to as ‘artistic differences’, Jon and I decided to take the band on the road as a two piece. We did several gigs however, just before covid we called it a day and went our separate ways– how very Lennon and McCartney-like!
Sept 2024: Phil, our current bassist and I were in chatting on social media and discovered that we both had a past musical history, and actually attended the same infant, junior and secondary schools at roughly the same time but without knowing each other, as a result we decided to start a band and looking for members, we eventually found a drummer and guitarist.
We knew from the first time we got together that the magic was there. We still had a lot of material and previous interest in the original Birthrite, and with the blessing of past members we decided to move forward as Birthrite, however the sound is completely different and we have re-imagined some of that material and now have a completely different sound, whilst retaining the urge to provide a visual aspect to our live performances.
The future remains to be seen.
Scary Monsters
My likes and influences:
Other bands I’ve been in:
The Early Days
I started playing guitar around the age of eleven. I never planned to be a guitarist, my dad could play and I was always picking up one of his guitars and messing around on them, it just went from there really.
My dad gave me this really beat up old Martin Colletti jazz-type guitar to start with, then as I progressed he bought me a red Stratocaster copy guitar from Modern Music in Dudley for my fifteenth birthday.
As kids we did the usual a-couple-of-mates-at-school-trying-to-get-a-band-together thing that never went anywhere. The first serious band I joined aged just sixteen was called Bad Reputation– a covers band and all older than me in their 20s.
After that I joined Jensen Stream, a prog-rock band based in Stourbridge. Jensen Stream was a very ambitious project, in that Phil Dunkley the vocalist, had written a book called Simon’s Time and wanted to turn the book into a full blown Rock Opera! We recorded some demos at Loverock Studios in Brierley Hill for it and at one stage the homeless charity Shelter were interested in using one of the songs as well.
I couldn’t complete the project as I had a motorcycle accident when I was twenty two and that pretty much put me out of action for the next three years! In the end six years passed, as I’d stopped playing the guitar completely.
Then out of the blue I got a phone call from Jim Clarke the bassist from Jensen Stream– he was putting together a new prog-rock band called Blind Earth, I did say I hadn’t picked up a guitar since I last saw him six years ago, but he was pretty insistent I come over and that we catch up and have a listen to his demos.
So that started me playing again. We found a singer named Debra (can’t remember her last name) who was a classically-trained opera singer with such a powerful voice she didn’t need a PA system– talk about loud! On drums we got a guy called Wayne Simcox.
After Blind Earth finished I did some session work for the studio we used to rehearse at.
So that was the late 80s – 90s!
Into the Millennium
The year 2000 is where Birthrite comes into my guitar journey. Originally when I joined they were called The Naz and consisted of two keyboard players, a drummer and Erazamus Voss on vocals– as it progressed members came and went.
Eventually we settled on a line-up of Erazamus on vocals, Statik on bass, Lee Heath on drums and myself on guitar. We recorded an EP and what eventually became the If it ay Bost– Dow Fix it album, the title of which reflected our Black Country roots. We then called it a day in 2004
After that I did a couple of covers bands, Full Metal Racket with Ivor Robinson on vocals, Hellztone with Statik on bass, and Most Wanted with Eddie Smith on vocals formerly of Stryder.
I also joined a couple of original bands for a short while; Zenekyst, a heavy metal band, and then a black metal band called Nex Sepulchrum that almost got signed to some dodgy German record label.
Roll on 2010 and Birthrite 2.0 comes into being. THE social network of that era was Myspace, it was a great tool for bands at the time, so I put together a Myspace for Birthrite just to see what reaction it got. Within days of it being up I got offered two gigs for a band that didn’t even exist anymore! Unfortunately our drummer wasn’t available, so I bluffed the promoters saying “the drummer is away on holiday, I’ll get back to you as soon as I get hold of him”. I phoned up Erazamus and Statik– they were up for it. So with the first gig six weeks away we looked for a drummer and in the meantime rehearsed the set. A drummer was found with two weeks to go before the first gig and we were in business again.
We rebranded ourselves and opted for the Steampunk look for this Birthrite re-incarnation.
We got picked up by Stoke On Trent-based filmmaker Chris Stone for his twelve-part vampire series called Blood and Bone China, set in The Potteries, with our song Goodbye Happiness as the intro and outro music. The band members made cameo appearances in one episode, we also played at its premiere in Stoke-on-Trent.
We appeared on the news programme BBC Midlands Today where we did an interview about Steampunk.
Birthrite called it a day again in 2019.
After that I formed VampiricA with Mark Guest on drums– who is the current drummer with Birthrite! Debra Bartlett joined on vocals with Stephen Perrin on bass.
The pandemic happened and everything went, err… a bit sideways! Stephen left and Conner Byrne joined on bass– Debra left and Kate Southall joined on vocals.
Kate and I started doing some acoustic versions of VampiricA songs which then led to us forming a gothic folk duo called The Hagley Wood Vampires, we later morphed into an electronic duo.
Some of the previous bands Ive been in:
Influences, far too many to mention!
A brief musical biography
The first song I ever remember hearing and actually listening to as a small child was Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by The Beatles in my Dad’s car. That probably set me up for a taste in ‘alternative’ music straight away!
In April 1998 I went on a school trip to Germany which required a 12-hour coach journey and a further 10 hours in a service station when the coach broke down! With 22 hours of solid boredom to tackle every kid on the coach who had a portable CD or cassette player with them had soon listened to all the music they brought with them twice over, so we started to swap with each other just so we could listen to something different. It was here that a friend of mine passed me a Metallica album and I was hooked. I went completely off the mainstream, stopped watching Top of the Pops and discovered the wild world of Rock and Metal!
Fast forward a couple of years and by 2002 I was at college and Nu-Metal, Pop-Punk, Kerrang Radio, MTV2, etc. were all the rage and so called ‘alternative’ music was at the height of its popularity… and as such everyone wanted to be in a band, me included! I played bass briefly in an indie outfit called Said & Done with some college friends but we never really got anywhere other than our local open mic night!
In 2004 a friend of mine who was a drummer invited me round for some drinks after work and let me have a bash on his drumkit, commenting that I seemed to take to it pretty naturally. Later that year after being both brutally dumped by my girlfriend and having my car stolen, I thought “Fuck it! I’m gonna do something nice for me!” bought my first starter kit, hit it with sticks every night and really enjoyed it!
After about 6 months of practice and a handful of lessons/pointers from local music shop owner (and Stourbridge drummer/local legend) Dave Donovan I advertised on the internet that I was looking for a local band and in 2005 got picked up by Wolverhampton-based classic rock band Headlong. It was around this time I really got into classic rock and metal (70s & 80s mostly) discovering that the original is most often the best!
The band itself went through a couple of incarnations and was a bit ‘on again, off again’ over the next few years, at one point splitting up entirely and reforming with a new line up. I was fortunate enough to be included in both though. Although we were pretty rough round the edges we were often cited as having a great deal of potential and although it ultimately came to nothing. Headlong gave me that valuable first experience of performing live in front of audiences and some valuable contacts in the local music scene.
This paid off as one of the former members I used to play with, (the incredible guitarist Mark Broome) eventually contacted me in the summer of 2010 explaining that his current band Undue were making a name for themselves but were parting company with their drummer and needed a replacement ASAP. I jumped at the chance to work with him again and the next two years saw a vast improvement in my skill and portfolio as we started doing more and more high-profile gigs including a Kerrang Radio unsigned showcase in Birmingham and a brief spell of a few months as the most downloaded European artist on numberonemusic.com (and two of our songs getting some radio airplay on a coastal radio station in Canada for late night fishing boats apparently?? …so I was told anyway!)
Unfortunately, despite our success, by 2012 Undue had disbanded due to professional disagreements on how the band should move forward, and I was headhunted by another local band: Primer who we had shared a stage with at a charity event for the Sophie Lancaster Foundation the previous year. They were also in need of a new drummer and a female fronted band with more of a Metal sound than a Rock sound presented an exciting new challenge. A challenge that I greatly enjoyed and got many gigs with for the next three years. Including a headline set at Liverpool’s world famous Cavern Club.
The end of 2015 however posed new challenges and ‘real life’ got in the way of music. I had committed to a new, more demanding, day job, bought a house and was making plans to get married which unfortunately left little time or money to continue indulging in bands. (Especially being as we were doing it for the love of the music rather than making any profit) As such I informed Primer a band I had intended to leave by the start of 2016, but agreed to stay with them and play all gigs they had booked until such time as they found a new drummer.
This led to a very symbolic departure from the band as my last live performance with them saw me somewhat bizarrely play the first half of the set then quite literally “pass on the sticks” to my replacement to play the second half– he had only been in the band long enough to learn half the songs!
My musical career was placed on hiatus for the next few years but I kept in practice with a few appearances for Lightside a more relaxed, light, acoustic rock band that started as a one man solo-artist project by Carl Grocutt-Clark, the singer from Undue.
Carl had gone solo after Undue but wanted a full band backing for a studio album he was recording and a couple of follow up live gigs to promote it. As such he called on his former band mates to see if they could help out. (As I recall he had also recently got married and I drunkenly agreed to do it while out on his stag night, waiving any payment for my services and telling him it was a wedding present!)
After a few years with my ‘nose-to-the-grindstone’ in my day job, I was in a more comfortable place financially and was able to pick up the sticks and commit to playing regularly again. I put the word out that I was looking for a new band and gig promoter Ivor Robinson (the absolute nerve-centre of the West Midlands unsigned band scene) put me in touch with former Birthrite guitarist Jonny Zygen who was starting a new project. He was interested in a female fronted metal band and my work with Primer had caught his attention. We got along very well and Vampirica was formed in the summer of 2019.
Vampirica was a great band that I really enjoyed but it was a bumpy ride! A couple of false starts due to founding members leaving before our first practice meant the project almost never got off the ground at all. Changing line-ups and a certain global pandemic made things even harder, but we soldiered on for a couple of years until finally Jon and new singer Kate settled into a calmer 2-person outfit that were much more capable of finding gigs at shorter notice in smaller venues. Eventually, after a mutual agreement to part ways, Vampirica’s final appearance together was in November 2022.
After taking another year out I again started looking for new projects but by now I had grown more mature (or maybe more cynical?) and I wasn’t in a rush to join a band. I’d reached a point where I would rather not perform at all than perform in a band I wasn’t completely invested in. After a couple of invitations/auditions to other local acts that didn’t work out for one reason or another, Ivor came to the rescue once again and put me in touch with a certain individual named Erazamus Voss who was looking to breathe new life into a band named Birthrite.
After arranging a couple of meetings with the would-be members and a couple of practices I quickly signed on for the long-haul in Autumn 2024, as I could sense there was something very special about this band and a style of music that suited my tastes very well! Also as a former Birthrite member himself Jonny Zygen of Vampirica endorsed me and recommended me to the band which helped to seal the deal. (Cheers for that Jon! I still owe you a pint for that mate!)
In January 2025 the all new Birthrite played its first ever live performance together. I know I’m biased but in my opinion it was bloody awesome! And things are only going to get better from here…
My likes and likes and influences:
Other bands I’ve been in:
A brief musical biography
The Early Days
I first started playing bass when I was 14 in a band called Industrial Estate, named after a song by a favourite band The Fall. We were influenced by the punk and new wave scene which was perfect for a pissed off teenager!
Fast forward a good few years and I was playing in an originals band called UTC; we gigged in and around Wolverhampton, recording material at Magic Garden Studios after Gavin Monaghan picked up on a couple of our demos. There is nothing quite like the process of writing and creating songs, especially when the magic happens.
Moving on after a few years, I formed a band called Harry 7, a brilliant post punk band but unfortunately others didn’t think so!
Featherweight came next a rocky dirty blues sound, and plenty of gigs followed around the West Midlands, but Covid hit and we all know what happened to live music then.
Other bands since then include HiFidelity, The Picture and The Trojonites but nothing seemed to make sense or create the right vibes. That I know will change with Birthrite and I just can’t wait…
Influences
The Clash
Sex Pistols
Led Zeppelin
Joy Division
Gang of Four
Some of the previous bands I’ve been in:
Industry Estate
UTC
Harry 7
The Picture
Featherweight
HiFidelity