Edible Heavy Metal / Co. Dublin

(From the EDIBLE website and Justin Maloney)

“Edible was formed in late 1992 by bassist Justin Maloney and drummer Marto Fitzpatrick, they were soon joined by a drummer by the name of Diamond Dave Shorten, which enabled Marto to switch to playing bass and Justin to guitar. Initially just jamming for a laugh, soon some songs started to develop so they set about the search for a singer. When they couldn’t find one they turned to a colleague by the name of Big Ken O’Neill. While sonically a big departure from most of the local Metal bands at the time, Edible’s embryonic mix of thrash and doom topped by Big Ken’s deadpan Germanic delivery (even though he’s from Kimmage) and food-based lyrical content won over a lot of the doubters and 18 years later they now call this kind of thing Arnocore, but Edible did it first. Soon enough, however, Diamond Dave had to go and he was replaced by Fionan O’Leary. With this line-up Edible gigged regularly and shared the stage with the likes of Pitchshifter, Splatterpillar, Exoterix and more and even got an early demo played on several pirate stations around Dublin.

With things looking bright Fionan was ejected replaced by Andy Norris on drums. Then Marto left to be replaced by Colm Lennon and the band recorded six tracks in the studio, three of which were selected to be a part of Edible’s only commercially released demo. Again, there was pirate radio play despite some crude language and decent reviews gained here and in the UK fanzines, even Hot Press were complimentary. The band liked to leave room in a couple of tunes for improvisation, both live and in the studio and this added a bit of room for Big Ken to really unleash his colourful tongue. They took to the stage again with the new line-up, featuring alongside the likes of Doomsgame and Synapse in some of Dublin’s less hygienic venues. Just as things were settling down the line-up imploded again, Justin leaving to play bass again and rejoin with Marto in Jazz-Metal improvisational combo Old Scratch while Colm and Andy disappeared altogether. Big Ken drafted in replacements in the shape of his brother Jon on bass, Darragh Brennan on guitar and Jay Healy on drums and the band soldiered on with a more thrash-orientated sound, gigging regularly around Dublin until finally disintegrating in 1995.

Justin is now guitarist in Acrid Nebula. Jay and Darragh are currently in Syphor. Big Ken has fronted blues act Big Blues for almost 10 years now.”

Check out his website “ http://www.justinmaloney.com/ ” for a timeline of all the bands and projects he’s been involved with. And links to info, sites and music for each of them. Not all of it’s metal! But still well worth checking out.