5 Questions With Carthagods
By Chelf
Powerful and already established as classic Tunisian metal, Carthagods are taking the metal scene by storm. I asked Mahdi Khema to stop for a moment and take a break from jamming with living legends and talented artists from the international Metal scene (Paul Di ANNO (Ex-Iron Maiden)/ MAX CAVALERA /SOEN/Dark Tranquillity/ Mark Reign (Ex-Destruction, Morgoth)/ Barend COURBOIS (Blind Guardian)) and spill the tea about who does what on the tour bus and how come celebrities are proudly wearing their band-tee on the red carpet.
You guys are always working hard to have a lot of surprises for you fans…Musically, Lyrically and Visually. What’s the formula you are using to combine those three elements successfully so that one doesn’t overshadow the other?
we actually try our best to keep up the team work as band members or even take some advices from old friends and take seriously all the feedback about our work…we also follow the new tendencies in the international metal scene to define what we want to do and who we want to be.
This year you launched a new video “the Monster in Me”. Fouis Djemal and Chaima Zarrouk have done an amazing work with the creation of the concept. How was the experience of shooting the video, how long did it take and what’s one thing that you absolutely enjoyed when shooting?
Thank you, it is true that Fouis and Chaima worked on the project with a lot of love and put a lot of their selves in it…and when we started talking about the video they were really excited about it and started directly thinking about original ideas and researches, and that’s how it ended with a 5 days shooting in three different places, it was like a short movie. And what made it funnier was the idea to tell the story in reverse so that our singer had to sing the whole song in backwards…it sounded really weird in the beginning especially for the shooting team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8zZXMLBin4
Do you still have “Memories of Never Ending Pains”? How do we deal with those in real life?
Of course we do, we all do have those memories that takes part of your life, part of the way you look, the way you talk and the way you behave and that makes you different…you can see it every day in the mirror when you stop for a moment and gaze deep to your eyes.
But the most important thing is that we learn how to live with them, and move on without losing the way, and most of it all, learn how to avoid getting in the same situation again hahaha.
We have seen celebrities wearing the Carthagods t-shirt on the red carpet! That’s exciting! Do you guys wear your own merch in real day to day life?
Definitely, it is our identity and we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved, we don’t want to miss any occasion to talk about it to the people and explain the way we see things.
Tour buses reveal a lot. When you guys are together for a long period of time, what’s the dynamic between the band members? Who is the funny one and who does the ‘are we there yet’ kind of nagging?
True, even we know each other since years now, but tour life is completely different and makes us behave differently and get closer to each other, but sincerely we noticed that everybody is taking care of everybody but of course there are some moments when everyone has to do his thing LOL.
MHF Magazine/Chelf
