Summer Bash 2025: Exclusive Interview: 10 years of “The Way Of Ashes” with Mercury’s Well (Part #2)!

Are their enough adjectives in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe the antics that will happen at Summer Bash? We hope so! The annual Hawaiian themed Beach Party hosted by Reading Progressive Death Metal trio Mercury’s Well is going to take place at The Facebar in Reading on Saturday 26th July and you’re all invited! There well be drinks at the bar, inflatables, flower necklaces, Hawaiian shirts and maybe even a grass skirt or two as eleven bands take to the stage and deliver their finest! So what are you waiting for? Grab a ticket for you and yours and let’s have some fun!

Here’s the line up in full:

Hidden Mothers
Masquerader
Black Skull Ritual
Buds.
Tape It Shut
Turning Point
Skin Reaper
Mercury’s Well
Gutlocker
Remnant
Killswitch Enchambers (Killswitch Engage Tribute featuring former members of Kill Chambers)

It’s time for the main event. The second half of an exclusive interview with Simon Davies who shares his memories on “The Way Of Ashes” a decade on!

How did you go about working with Peter M. Thornton for the artwork?

“Well Pete is my cousin, so there was already a connection there and he does photography. In fact he went to the same University as me to study photography. He’d done some of our very earliest photos from our earliest live gigs at Facebar, some very candid shots in that regard. He shared the photo which is now on the EP of the tree line on Facebook and I thought that’s like perfect for this album that we’ve written that I want to release about trees waging war against the sun. Very specifically they were evergreen trees which the way of ashes references very directly you know, well pine trees actually. “Soldier Pines march to war” was the lyric and I had very much in my mind those kind of pine trees from growing up in various wooded areas and time spent in Germany where there was a lot of green forestry there. It tied a lot of things together for me. The rest of the artwork I did and yeah, I think the original was in colour and I said can I have it in black and white because that felt artsy to me and I just asked him if I could use it for our album and he said yes so there you go.” 

What were the influences that you had going into that first record and how have they changed since?

“I don’t think they’ve gotten any narrower certainly, I think if anything like bands who influenced us back then, most of them have released more material since then that I’m more open to. I think that over time that my music taste has only expanded so obviously I’m drawing from a lot more influences and being in a band so long together we’re influenced more and more by each others music taste. We have shared interests, like a fairly obvious early influence would be Mastodon, “Crack The Skye”, “Leviathan” and “Blood Mountain”. Those three albums were pretty influential on us early on and that’s sort of what drew us together in the first place. But we each have our own very specific tastes and over time we’ve influenced each other more and more with the sorts of things we’re interested in and our music taste kind of like merges and bleeds together a bit more I guess. I’m happier to draw on more Hardcore and Death Metal influences than I probably was when we were a lot younger, being more into sort of Sludgy Post Metal atmospheric stuff that I really wanted to kind of emulate back then.”

Looking back on the record now, is there anything that you would change about it?

“I mean… definitely. You know I think like “Metamorphosis”, “Blood” obviously we’ve re-worked a little bit, you can hear the differences between the two, there aren’t that many changes over all, there are a couple of minor changes we’ve made over the years where we’ve gotten more comfortable with it and “Way of Ashes”, I think those three are solid enough that if we re-recorded them today they’d be a lot better. They’d just sound better. We’re better musicians. We could get them recorded at a higher quality than we did back then. I’d probably give “Where all dead things will go” a slight re-work. I think it could be a bit tighter. A bit more interesting or maybe just shorter. Maybe just cut the breakdown off the end. I don’t really know. I haven’t really thought about that one but “Skeletal Remains” I would take back to the drawing board fully. Kind of bluntly it’s an after thought we kind of tacked onto the EP to make sure we had enough to sort of had enough tracks”. 

Aside from the obvious exception that is “Blood“, a rendition of which you brought forward for your 2022 self-titled album, which songs would you resurrect to play live if there was a requirement for a longer set?

“I kind of mentioned it in the earlier question but since we’ve done our self titled album we have played “Way of Ashes” and “Metamorphosis” and at you know at a pinch we’d probably put “Where all dead things will go” in there. You know we’ve even got material going back like pre-any of our recorded stuff that we could potentially dig up I just don’t think at this point we would, especially when we’re working on new material at the moment. “Way of Ashes” and “Metamorphosis”, their both decent enough in their own right and quite fun to play”.

What are your fondest memories of the shows you played in support of “The Way Of Ashes”?

“Not that we did much in the way of like an album release tour or anything but a lot of the feedback we got at the time, especially when we premiered “Blood” was people being like oh, ok, you guys have suddenly got a lot better. Which was like a big compliment at the time. I guess a little bit back handed because its kind of like you were shit before and now you’ve got this track which means that you’re good. No, I guess its just a compliment, like you guys have got a lot better and its true. Like when we started writing like that, everything improved a lot, we were a lot better as a band. People were like each time we see you you’re getting better and better. You’re coming along in leaps and bounds were some of the terms I think we heard at the time and it’s quite nice to hear people thinking we were much better than we once had been. I think that’s my main take-away on that.”

We’re proud confirm that Metal Noise dot Net is returning for a third consecutive year as the Media Partner for Summer Bash! Mercury’s Well will be hosting the seventh incarnation of their annual Hawaiian beach party themed event on 26th July 2025 at The Facebar in Reading.

Get your tickets -> here