“We're releasing three tracks that we initially did as re-recordings for a DVD project, I suppose it's really what brought us into playing again,” explains vocalist/bassist Rob 'The Baron' Miller of apocalyptic metallic punk pioneers Amebix. “We got involved with Belfast Records and he did a DVD called 'The Day The Country Died' which was a retrospective on, I suppose loosely, the anarchopunk scene, '80 to '84 or so, and at the end of that we got chatting and he said, 'Do you have any old Amebix stuff?'. I've got loads of junk upstairs and I've been collecting clips and bits and pieces off the web over the years, I started putting the stuff together with him and the initially the idea was, I suppose, to do a sort of 'unseen footage' nail in the coffin, so to speak. By the time we started to come to the end of the project it really started to look more like a definitive history of the band, becoming involved in something as an insider it was good to have a bit of perspective and distance – twenty odd years – and see the whole story of the band for what it was, which was quite interesting in a lot of ways. There were a lot of different factors that shaped who we were and what we came out with and all the rest of it.

“It started to go into the editing process and it was a really intriquing story,” he continues, “and your story has a beginning, a middle and an end, I was always really reluctant to do anything with the band – me and my brother Stig [guitars] had said that was never gonna happen, we kinda felt that we did what we did in the right time and that was it. Roy Wallace who was finishing off the DVD said, 'How do you feel about recording again, to finish off the project? So you've got three songs on the end which you've recorded using modern equipment', and I'm saying 'Well, it ain't gonna happen, because for one, Stig and I said we'd never do it, and Spider, who was the drummer, has tinnitus, he basically developed that from us practicing in a room that was about twelve square feet and with everything full on all the time, so over the years he can't a bloody thing'. I hadn't picked up a bass in 22 years so all these things seemed very unlikely.

“What did happen was I started to get onto the internet, I had a crummy MySpace site for myself at first and people got in touch, amongst them was a girl called Alicia from a band called 13, they were kind of like EyeHateGod kinda stuff, and she was friends with this fella called Roy Mayorga who'd I'd never heard of before. She kept saying, 'Roy's really into Amebix and stuff, and he's a very talented drummer' and all the rest of it. In the meantime while I was saying all this stuff to Roy Wallace, Alicia was living in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina came in and trashed all of her stuff, so she dropped off the map. After a few months when I came back from Antrim where I'd been working on this DVD, up in Northern Ireland, she left me a message on myspace saying, 'Sorry I've not been in touch, things have been really difficult – here's Roy's number'. So a door's opened and you want to see what's on the other side of it, you know? So I phoned up Roy and said, 'You don't know me, but...' sort of thing. Sometimes you just click with people and he's such a lovely guy, so I said, 'Would you come and do these tracks for us, filling in on the drum stuff?' - 'In a heartbeat dude!'. I had to come up with the fare to get him across and work out the organisation, so I said, 'Lets just try this and if it doesn't work, and it's cheesy and all the rest of it, then we'll all shake hands and it's been a good experience and we'll go back to our respective corners of the universe'. What happened was actually quite opposite. We could've been mates for years, we all share the same stupid sense of humour and we just got on really, really well together musically. We went into a room with him and got these tracks down, and unusually, the first take was wonderful we put that one down and went, 'Fuck, we can keep that!'. We were all quite amazed and we thought, 'What have we got here? What can we do with this?'. Because we could've put these three tracks on the DVD and go, 'There we go, that was Amebix', and it couldn't have been any more comprehensive than that. Everything led off from there.”

As the band's new three track EP, 'Redux', released June 29 through Profane Existence, was born out of the Amebix DVD, which in turn was a catalyst in bringing the band to their isntruments, it's difficult to talk about one of these things and bypass the others. But Rob Miller tells a good story, so why complain? What might be worth complaining about though would be Amebix popping back up to milk the golden udders of their status, and there's no doubt a few scowling punks who feel that way.

“To tell you the truth, I couldn't blame anybody if they did,” replies Rob. “We did get a little bit of that and I'm perfectly at peace with that, people have got a right to because we made some statement back in '87, and then completely reversed round onto it. So fair shout. We didn't get that much shit for it but predominantly, the people who do winge and whine about it are from the UK. Generally speaking they tend to be the people that never put that much back into things anyway. We did get a bit of shitstorm, particularly from the Profane Existence board and stuff like that. Generally speaking, the way that things work out balance the scales in the opposite direction. We've had an amazing response to what we're doing and we're really happy about that.”

Given Rob's initial reluctance, the standard of material that he must have been prepared to accept as being welcome in the Amebix canon must've been pretty high.

“As you get older you tend to want more out of what you're listening to,” he agrees. “I wouldn't haven't been prepared to get back into it without knowing that it was bulletproof really. The band as it was back then – I'm never happy with any of the stuff, admittedly it's refered to in reverential tones as being 'groundbreaking' and 'legendary' when actually it was shite, the songwriting leaved a lot to be desired and the way we used to do stuff was through necessity, we had windows of oppourtunity really where we had to save up the money and get in the studio and do as much as we could in that limited time. We didn't have time to sit down and think about structures and things like that, it was like, 'We've got this one and we've got to get it down and in the package'. It was songwriting through urgency, through necessity, it was good to step back and be afforded the delicacies that you are now, the ability to be able to look at a song and really take it to pieces and rewrite it as you're going along.”

Time has done more force a reassessment of how mere music should sound and the Rob Miller of 2010 and the Rob Miller of 1985 are very much different people. But while perspectives may have evolved and become more sophisticated over the two decades in between Amebix disbanding and the release of 'Redux', Rob still feels invested in the message.

“There was a big patch of 22/23 years, and in that time myself, my adventures have taken me so far away from where I was back then, not just physically but emotionally, spiritually and everything like that, having completely changed the way that I live. It changed some of my opinions along the way too, but some things stand true. The emphasis of the band and what Stig and I have always tried to manifest, we can still feel that at the core of things and that particular type of energy, it's supposed to be motivational and it's supposed to inspire people. That was the whole thing about 'Arise', we were growing up within a scene that was cynical and pretty drab and down about a lot of things, we wanted to really give that a kick up the arse and say, 'C'mon, stop snivelling and feeling sorry for yourselves, it's time to do something about your life'. We were never afraid to push past the accepted message of the time, I'm glad that we did because we've always done what we'd rather do than toe the party line as such. I don't know how people are going to take to the stuff that we're writing, but in a sense I don't really care because it's never been about pleasing people, it's been about the whole instinctual creative process; you given some energy which you have to work with, and you have to manifest that in a particular way. I make things that I want to do in my own way.”