GREG PUCIATO

THE HAMMER INTERVIEW

He was The Dillinger Escape Plan’s livewire frontman who took a shit onstage, attracted tabloid notoriety and burned out on band life. Since then, he’s become an unstoppable creative personality

WORDS: STEPHEN HILL • PICTURES: JIM LOUVAU

Greg: loving the solo life

In 2001, Greg Puciato became the frontman of notoriously chaotic upstarts The Dillinger Escape Plan. Not only did Dillinger’s live shows become legendary for the way that Greg and his bandmates pushed their bodies to the limit, the records they made showed incredible growth; from the mathnoise terrorism of their early days to the vast, alt-synth-jazzmetal mash-ups of their latter albums, none of it would have been possible without Greg’s pipes. As we introduce ourselves over Zoom, and joke that every question will be about his infamous bowel movement onstage at Reading Festival in 2002, he sighs and tells us, “It’s so weird, because it never gets brought up anywhere else except the UK! I’d just say the same thing I have already said.” His boredom with the topic is fair enough, because there’s so much more to the man than one dirty protest from 20 years ago.

Metal mourned when Dillinger called it quits in 2017, but it was far from the end for Greg. He’s continued to explore his creative urges in supergroup Killer Be Killed (alongside legends Max Cavalera and Troy Sanders), released ambient electro-pop albums with his band The Black Queen, and produced impossible-to-categorise solo material, including his new album, Mirrorcell. He also worked on Brighten, last year’s solo album from Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell, who calls during our conversation. Greg, ever the gentleman, will ignore it and tell us, “You’re more important.” Aww, shucks! It’s clear Greg’s the most fascinating character on this particular call, as he talks us through his life story.

“THE Y LEFT ME ALONE TO FUCK WITH ME”

What’s your first memory associated with music?

“It’s so long ago that I don’t really remember, but I do have this weird recollection of having this fake record player that played one song – it was a Smurfs song or something. I might have been about three years old. I have this memory that I knew it was coming out of this thing, and I wanted to play it over and over again. It’s really difficult to remember anything that was real music… my Dad was really into REO Speedwagon, and my parents took me to see them when I was about four or five, and I remember that, because my mother had put cotton balls in my ears and I didn’t like the way it sounded, so I took them out, and to this day I’ve never worn earplugs. After that it’s a fast-track through to Metallica and all that.”