RoomThirteen catches up with Avital Tamir, singer of Betzefer, a band coming straight from Israel, on their very first tour in the UK.
R13: Could you please first introduce yourself?
A.T: Yep. My name is Avital Tamir, I do the vocals.
R13 : Can you explain who the band is and how you got together?
A.T. : We've been around for 7 years now. It started up with a high school band.(Betzefer means school in Israel) We've been playing around for one year/ 1.5 years now and started writing out own stuff. We are evolving around the stuff we grew up on like in the 90's, like Pantera, Sepultura, hard rock, etc. We recorded our album (Down Low) that is out now and we are very glad to be here in the U.K. now.
R13 : Is it your first time here?
A.T. : Yeah as a band it's the first time.
R13: How did you get into metal ?
A.T. : I think it was 91 and Guns n' Roses came to play in Israel and Metallica also in the same year. That's when a lot of people of my generation got into like heavy music.
R13 : How would you describe the metal scene in Israel?
A.T. : Nowadays it's really cool. It has grown like 3 or 4 years ago. We have really great festivals happening every year. We have Megadeth coming over. It's more impressive than what you would imagine. I guess more people in Europe wouldn't put Israel and metal in the same context. But it's really cool.
R13 : Is there any difference between the way people in Europe and Israel respond to metal?
A.T : Tough question. The crowd at home is really...it's our crowd..it's hard for me to... the shows are really great and we have loyal fans. I guess what differentiates them is that because Israel is so isolated and you can't really get out of here, only by plane and because of the political situation in the past couple of years; no big bands from abroad came to play in Israel for actually 7 years now. So we really get good parties and good shows there. There's really a demand for good bands over there so we do have great local bands, most of them are still unsigned.
R13 : So the political issues are not getting in the way anymore
A.T. : Yeah totally. Right now you can really feel like the blood is pumping in the veins of the metal scene. Every year when you go to the festivals you see 1,500 more people than what you saw last year.
R13 : How would you describe your album?
A.T. : Pretty harsh and in your face. It's a really big tribute to rock n'roll in general and like all the stuff we grew up on : hard rock, we re-discovered like in the last three years AC/DC. I guess that's what good music is. We all grew up with Pantera. But we're also inspired nowadays by upcoming bands just the same. The Chimeira guys are one of our favourite bands. So yeah we're always at the search of new music but we're also very connected to our roots.
R13:How do you write the songs? Do you all get together?
A.T. : Usually Matan Cohen (Guitar Player) would come up with the riffs and I would come up with the lyrics. All the arrangements are kinda made up by the whole band.
R13: You also toured with Fear Factory…
A.T. : We didn't really tour with them. We only did one gig. And it happened kind of overnight because we were in the studios in Belgium recording our album. What actually happened is that they were searching for a support band like two days before the show. They found the band of this guy who is a friend of ours and he said he couldn't do it and he happened to know that we were around, so we got in contact and that really happened overnight. For us it was a f***** great surprise cause we were kind of touring at the time but doing like small gigs, like in front of 15 people each night.
R13 : And now you're touring with Chimaira
A.T. : Yeah. It's unbelievable for us. It is our first tour. You can't really tour in Israel as there are only two major cities (laughs). So yeah it's our first time touring and we like every second of it.
R13 : Your album was mixed by Tue Madsen (Illdisposed, The Haunted), how did you meet him?
A.T. : We haven't met him actually. It was made over the internet and the phone. He was one of our favourites producers in the past couple of years and some of the best albums were done by him. And we wanted him to mix our album and he said he was busy and he didn't have time to do it. We were really hoping on him mixing it as we didn't have another name in mind and we were searching for someone for a couple of weeks and then somebody got an email from him saying that he listened to our stuff on our website and that he would find the time to mix it and he would also have to record it. He was a great guy to work with although we didn't really meet him.
R13 : Are you already working on your next album?
A.T. : Erm no. We're just like promoting this one here in Europe. When we'll get back home, we'll probably start writing stuff. We are trying to keep song writing to a later point so that the songs would be more fresh on the album.
R13 : What would be the next step for the band?
A.T. :I don't know. (Laughs) That's a good question. All of us are really eager to tour as much as we can as we haven't had the chance to do that before. In Israel we are already seen as an established band whereas here no one really knows us, SO we just wanna tour as much as we can and I guess that's what's gonna happen for the next year or so and later on, working on the new stuff.
R13: Are there any band you would like to collaborate with?
A.T.:We get to fulfil so many of our wishes already. We already had a couple of shows with Lamb of God, touring now with Chimeira which is unbelievable for us. I guess the last name that needs to be crossed off the list would be Slayer.
R13 : Thank you very much for the interview and good luck for the show!
A.T. : Thank you for your time.