Always the bridesmaid, never the birde. As seemingly the eternal support band, it’s also the story of Breed 77’s career. Degenerate jobsworth, Hugh Platt, went down to the Camden Underworld to see if they can escape their rut.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was originally published on MusicTowers.com. It is re-printed here with their full permission.

There’s a low murmur of background chit chat at the Underworld tonight, but otherwise it’s oddly quiet. Then you realize the PA hasn’t been turned on for some reason, and somehow it all seems like a silent mocking commentary on Breed 77’s career. When is someone going to turn it on?

There’s probably not a single metal fan in the country who hasn’t seen Breed 77 live by now. They’ve supported everyone from Machine Head to Black Sabbath – claiming sole-support for the latter’s alleged final ever live show (before they reformed, post-The Osbournes). The Anglo-Gibraltan five-piece have a new record out – the spirited declaration of intent of In My Blood (En Mi Sangre) – and while they might not have reached the dizzying heights of Lostprophets or some of the other burn-bright-burn-fast UK metal successes, frontman Paul Isola remains philosophical with regards to Breed 77’s musical direction.

“Hopefully there’s a maturity; progressing towards a more mature style. With this album we wanted to explore where our ideas further down the line than we had on previous albums. We were able to put in a lot of interesting instrumentations, and create new sounds that make the whole record sound fresher. Every album needs to be individual to everything else out there and our own stuff. It needs to be constantly changing – if we were to stay in one place, always the same idea – it would become stale for us, it would become stale for the fans.”

Watch the video to ‘Blind’ by Breed 77

Breed 77 are somewhat stuck in limbo. During their long life, British upstarts like Bring Me The Horizon and Mendeed have slipped in to steal some of their grassroots thunder, while Lostprophets, Bullet For My Valentine and Funeral For A Friend have exploded into almighty rock behemoths. Do they feel slightly put out or overlooked?

“No, no, we get this question a lot [laughs]. We don’t feel any bad vibes towards anybody who reaches success. Everybody would like that to happen to them, but if it doesn’t, we have a really good life. We have an enormous, really loyal fanbase. We do our own thing. Fashions come and go; Breed 77 stay here. We were here way before any of these other people and we’ll be here after they’re all long gone.

“It’s been a bit of a storm so far. We’ve been playing the majority of our new album, and people have been warming to it, evidently. People are singing the songs, they have new favourites. From our point of view it’s like we’ve never been away.

“It’s been about 2 years since we did a proper headline tour. At the beginning of this year we had drips and drabs, but we were intentionally playing smaller venues, just warming up. This is pretty much our return to touring.

‘Empty Words’ reminds a bit of beefed-up Soundgarden. There’s tastes of Iron Maiden, but they’ve built their own identity from years in the wilderness, coupling the flamenco rhythms of their Mediterranean heritage with soaring riffs. Only during ‘Look At Me Now’, the band’s self-confessed “Elton John moment”, do they look a bit unsure of themselves. Were they worried about trying something new? For the crowd reaction, it was an unexpected, but warmly welcomed move.

“[If it’s unexpected] then that’s a failure of educating yourself on Breed. Breed’s about being really different, always going to be weird shit going in that would fit under another genre. We’re not about classifying ourselves – we like spreading it about and having fun. We’re really happy with the way it turned out, and it’s been one of the songs receiving the best critique from both the press and our fans. Which is a surprise to us, because it is a departure, it is much softer, but it all fits under the web of Breed I think.”

Throw in a cover of ‘Zombie’ for good measure – after all, what metal gig is complete without a metallized cover version and a bit of post-Rage political firebranding – and Breed 77 haven’t so much got the crowd eating out of their hand but gorging at their trough.

“We were getting ready for a couple of really big shows in Gibraltar and Spain, hour and half sets, and we were thinking about how we were going to build them up to that length. We didn’t want it to get too long, or too boring, and mixing it up is usually the solution to that. We couldn’t decide what to do though, but then ‘Zombie’ came up on my iTunes. Me and Danny [Felice, guitarist] were listening to it and thought it was a really good choice. The lyrics are really poignant, especially in this day and age. It was a no-brainer. It’s only four chords!”

Watch Breed 77 play ‘Alive’ live at the BBC Electric Proms in 2007

Years playing on the same bill as the great and the good, has wound Breed 77’s live sound tighter than the Pope’s jockstrap. It doesn’t seem forced, contrived or overly orchestrated. The band are clearly as delighted with the crowd response to ‘World’s On Fire’ and ‘Eyes That See’ as the crowd is to receive them at such blistering proximity.

It’s not even as if Breed 77 are doing anything wrong – if anything, their System Of A Down-esque brand of continental metal is the sort of stuff that should be shifting units across the board. This, blended with their refusal to bow and bend themselves to whatever is flavour-of-the-month makes Breed 77 amongst the most honest and distinctive sounds in the UK metal scene. There’s a reason they’ve stayed the course – no-one’s dictating that course but themselves, and from the sounds of the future plans, there’s still a long way to travel:

“Hopefully we’ll have some tentative dates in Europe, as that’s when the record gets its European release. Starting over in Holland and Germany, we want to roll over all of Europe for a month and a half, before coming back to do a little bit in England before Christmas. Then in the new year head down to Australia, maybe go via South Africa. We’ve got Japan to take care of, and then America to look at. There’s an awful lot of ground to cover, but we set our sights very high. We’re going to be pushing and playing for as long as we can.”