Interview with Tony Benjamins of Forced Entry just after the release of their second album "As Above So Below"
 

Band history

TB  We started out in 1987, that's the year I dropped out of college to pursue the band full time. That's when we changed our name to Forced Entry, before that we were known as Critical Condition. We had a lot of different singers in the band and I used to play guitar in the band, me and Brad both played guitar, so I switched to bass and lead vocals. We cut a demo it's called All Fucked Up, then we did another demo later on that year called Thrashing Helpless Down. We sent that one around and had a lot of labels take interest in us and stuff. Then we signed a deal a little later the next year, after recording one other demo calls Hate Fills Your Eyes. We never really released that one because we were signed by the time we got done finishing the demo. Then we put out our first record, Uncertain Future, in the winter of 1989 and then we did our first tour with Coroner and Atrophy, and we did the whole States with them. That was pretty cool. Then we came back home for about three weeks, and went back out for another seven weeks with Sacred Reich and Obituary. When we came back from that we took about two months off, then we went to Rhode Island to record our brand new record, As Above So Below and that came out Tuesday, and that gets everybody up to date.
 

Who are your influences?

TB  Most of my influences are really off the wall, you know. I was into a lot of oldies, like my influences anywhere from people like Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens to Four Tops. I get mass song arrangement ideas off really old songs because most of those songs they play on the oldies are all number one hits so you can pick up a lot of good hooks and just apply them to aggressive style music. As far as just coming up with rhythm guitar parts and stuff, it's just all imagination, no one's ever influenced any of that. You learn the chords learning Maiden and stuff you know, Maiden and Priest and shit when you're a little kid and you're first learning how to play guitar, or at least that's most people my age how they would learn. Now I guess you'd learn Metallica riffs, and then once you know the chords then just you use your imagination from there and just make it all up.
 

Have you heard anything recently that you like?

TB  Yeah, there's this tape called Temple of the Dog that has some of the guys from Soundgarden playing in it and a couple of the guys from the old Mother Love Bone, which are two Seattle bands. That's my favorite tape right now. Besides that I listen to the new Danzig, I love that, Lucifuge. I don't know, as far as new thrash I haven't heard too much that I really dug. I've got somebody in mind though but it's on the tip of my tongue, it's a band that I just saw but I can't remember the name of now.
 

Where do you get ideas for songs?

TB  A lot of them come from dreams and stuff. A lot of them come to me at weird times of day. I just go, fuck, I should do a song about that, or I should try writing a rhythm like this, you know a lot of rhythm musical ideas 'cause I write some of the guitar in the band too, probably around half. A lot of those ideas come to me, you know at weird places like at work. I just start thinking about a rhythm, cool I'm gonna check out that rhythm when I get home and try to play that, you know. It's that kind of thing. Otherwise I read lots of books.
 

What was it like recording As Above So Below?

TB  It was pretty strange 'cause Rhode Island's kinda weird and New England's pretty weird, eh. I keep wanting to say that now, I'm getting in the habit just from being up here for three or four days. It was pretty fun. It was really really cold, so I mean it was like freezing outside. The east coast gets really cold I think compared to here, to BC or Seattle. As far as the studio experience itself, we went about it doing it a lot different than any of the other 24 track recordings we do. This was actually like a 48 track recording, it was all automated board and stuff so a lot was done for us. We wouldn't have been able to do it, I mean we wouldn't have been able to get the sounds at all without our producer, Tom Soares. He did a really good job.
 

Are you planning on recording any more songs from your old demos?

TB  Uhm, no. No not at all. All the ones that ever want to be recorded have been recorded at this time.
 

How is your record company treating you?

TB  Pretty good. They're giving us a lot of good publicity and it already seems to be doing really well. Like we already have a cd single for our song Bone Crackin' Fever and that already charted really high in the States for airplay, like 26 on the CMJ charts and we just went from 64 to 32 or something on the Hard Report. So the single seems to be doing good so far with that one. We're making a couple videos, pretty much self produced. They're helping out with a lot of these things this time. They seem to be doing pretty good. Like see in other words the whole point of me saying about being on the charts, I don't think that would have happened with the other record because the label really wasn't behind us before. They wouldn't even take the time to cut a single or even push it on radio people to get it played on their show. Now that's happened things get the ball rolling a little faster.
 

How about interesting or embarrassing road stories

TB  Oh man too many to mention. Oh let's see, what's a good one from this weekend. I don't know a lot of cool stuff happened this weekend. I'm trying to think of a good one. I don't know, you should have recorded me earlier. I don't know we just got really fucked up.
 

And played minigolf

TB  Yeah we played minigolf. I'm trying to think of a good story, a good tour story. There's like lots of really good ones but not that many that would want to get printed, if you know what I mean.
 

You haven't been to Vancouver for a long time

TB  Yeah
 

What happened?

TB  Just sick of the bunk crowds actually, to put it bluntly. I mean that's really why I think, like you know. I've turned down a few gigs up here because it just didn't really seem like people were that into us up here. I mean I don't know, maybe things have changed, but I don't know. We played here once or twice but it was never really that good, it wasn't like people really got into it or dug us that much so it was like why go somewhere where people don't dig ya, you know. But we just figured hey some time's been passing and we've got a new record out so maybe people will like this record. So now we're up here to try to get people to take interest in us and support the new record and stuff.
 

Anything else you'd like to say?

TB  Buy our record damnit! No. Yeah, check out the new record I think people will really like it, hopefully it's gonna get released domestically up here in Canada, and shit who knows.
 

Check out Forced Entry at the BNR metal pages