“Waking up and not being Ben From Orange Goblin anymore, that’s going to be alien”: Ben Ward on the end of his legendary band

So begins the final transmission. After 30 years, Orange Goblin are on their final week of gigs, ending their last UK tour with their now-traditional Christmas bash in London.

It's been three decades of big riffs, volume, drinks, tomfoolery, challenges, more volume, even more drinks and more than one trip around the globe. Even in their early days, the Goblin felt, like fellow British metal institutions Motörhead, Maiden or Saxon, as if they'd just be around forever. Every couple of years an album. Every year a gig and a laugh, as if it's all simply a basic part of how the world works. On December 17, they will, however, bring things down one last time, with their biggest-ever headline gig, at the O2 Forum Kentish Town.

The legacy they leave is impressive and enviable. Emerging from the mid-’90s stoner rock and doom underground (first as Our Haunted Kingdom in 1994, before changing the name the following year), they quickly became champions of the British scene, with 1998's unbeatable Time Travelling Blues and 2000's The Big Black still standing as two of the finest albums of their lifetime. Expanding their palette to take in punk, Southern blues, psych and straight-up rock’n’roll, by the time they reached their swansong, last year's epic Science, Not Fiction, they'd also achieved a similar admirable quality to their forebears: being able to do anything while still sounding like themselves.

It was live, though, that the Goblin truly made sense, and explains the enduring affection. With frontman Ben Ward looming over proceedings like an amped-up bear, gigs were as-standard a riot where heaviness met giddy excitement.

"I don't think people can help but enjoy watching an Orange Goblin show, going crazy, spilling beer everywhere, having a really good time," says Ben, as he looks back. "That’s something I love, and that’s what I think people are going to remember about us."

Indeed, and this week’s gigs may be the first Goblin shows where you might need a hankie for something other than wiping lager off yourself. As they tear up the stages and motorways of the UK one final time, Ben looks back on a life spent in one of this country's finest and most enduring bands…

Orange Goblin’s final line-up: Harry Armstrong, Ben Ward, Chris Turner, Joe Hoare

“Thirty years is a hell of a long time. It's over half my life. We never expected Orange Goblin to last that long. You see the amount of bands that have fallen by the wayside during that period and think, ‘What is it about us that's kept us going?’ But the fact is that we still maintain that kind of enjoyment, and we still love doing what we do. Now that we’re ending, it's good that we're going to go out as friends. A lot of bands split acrimoniously, but with Orange Goblin, we're still all on good terms. We're all still best mates.

“When we first announced that we were calling it a day, it seemed really distant and it didn't really seem real. But as we've started ticking off the shows throughout the summer, we’ve realised it's getting closer, and now it's really starting to sink in. It’s been bittersweet. Everywhere we’ve been this year, we've had great crowds, and I think everybody has appreciated that it is the last chance they'll get to see us. The other weekend we played in Finland for the last time, and when we were leaving Helsinki, I thought, ‘When am I ever going to come back here now?’ And now that the UK tour’s here and it's down to having eight shows left, it's really starting to hit home that this is going to be it.

In 2012 with Martyn Millard (far-right)

“Going back to when we first started, we had no preconceptions of it ever becoming a 30-year career. We just thought it'd be a bit of fun to maybe record a demo and play a few local pubs. We were four friends, we all used to hang out in the same pubs together, and we realised we all loved the same kind of music. You know what it's like when you're 18, 19, you're kind of sitting around on the dole all day just listening to music. One day we went, ‘Let's have a go at starting a band.’ Joe [Hoare] can play guitar, Pete [O’Malley] can play guitar. Martyn [Millard] said, ‘My dad has a bass. I'll pick it up and have a go.’ I couldn’t play an instrument, so I decided to sing, which at first was doom-death style because I didn’t have the confidence to sing, and it sort of snowballed from there.

“At the time, this sort of music was pretty underground, not like what it’s become now. Cathedral were leading the doom charge in the UK, and they were the biggest, and we became mates with bands like Acrimony, Iron Monkey, Electric Wizard, Mourn and Solstice, as well as bands like Napalm Death, Carcass, Paradise Lost, Anathema, Cradle Of Filth – it was a good scene. We were fortunate to be based in London, because at that time, any big show that we wanted to hop on in the London area, we'd approach the promoter and get ourselves on it. It wasn’t just dropping an email, you had to actually turn up at the venue prior and hand out flyers or trade tapes and that sort of thing. And when the bigger American bands at the time came through, like Monster Magnet, Fu Manchu or Queens Of The Stone Age, we’d get the support slots, and it grew from there.

“There was no real plan. We were just happy to be doing it. We were slightly naive about everything, and we saw it as an excuse for a piss-up. Our attitude was: let's go and do as much as we can and have as much fun as we can while the opportunity is there. We didn't realise how long it would go on for. I think that naivety in the early days was probably detrimental to our career slightly, because we were viewed as that sort of pissed-up bunch of oiks and hooligans. We didn't know where the money was going. We didn't know about getting paid for the shows. We were just happy to be doing them.

“I remember we started taking it more seriously when we toured with Alice Cooper and Dio. When you're walking onstage at Wembley Arena and you're having to navigate and behave yourself around the crew and management of artists like Alice Cooper, it's a wake-up call. We were still getting pissed and having as much fun as we could, but we realised we had a responsibility as well.

“It's always been fun, but there’s been challenges. After Coup De Grace [2002] we did our first U.S. tour, which was really gruelling. It was something like 38 shows in 39 days, only one day off, with immense drives, sleeping on floors or sleeping in the van when we didn't have time to stop anywhere. There were some drives when we were doing, like, Salt Lake City to Denver, and our tour manager at the time was like, ‘Okay, we come offstage at 1am, then we've got a 16-hour drive to the next show.’ You’d get there at five o'clock the next day and load in straight away. It was fun, but it was enough for Pete, who left after that. We could have split, but we rehearsed as a four-piece and it sounded great. When Martyn left [in 2020], we could have split then as well, but he insisted that we carried on. Harry [Armstrong] fit in perfectly because he's always been a mate, always been around us.

Ben in the Back From The Abyss era, 2014

“There’s been so many great moments that are why it’s all worth those tougher times, though. It's hard to pinpoint just one of them. Having Lee Dorrian [Cathedral frontman and head of Rise Above Records] come up to us after a show in London and offering us a deal was an incredible thing. So was touring with Heaven And Hell, and speaking with Dio and Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi. I remember one time at a festival with Metallica standing having a conversation with Lars Ulrich about New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, because I was wearing an Angel Witch T-shirt, just shooting the shit.

“I’ve been out drinking with Lemmy, more than once. We were at a festival in London and ended up drinking whiskey and doing speed with him. Then another time we were in America and we were with him in The Rainbow while he was playing the fruit machine. We turned up once where they were playing next door, and ended up going to a strip club with them in the middle of the afternoon! It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

“Waking up after the final gig and not being Ben From Orange Goblin anymore, that's going to be almost alien to me. For 30 years of my life I've been Ben From Orange Goblin, and then I’ll be Ben. I think the London show is going to be a particularly emotional night because of the history we have with the Christmas show, and loads of friends and family are going to be there. It's going to be tough.

“As much as we all say we're quite looking forward to not having to worry about travel nightmares and all the annoying stuff, we will all really miss it. We're making no secret of the fact that if we do desperately miss it, we will do it again. We're not saying it's the absolute end, because we all still get on, so there's no reason not to do it somewhere down the line. But it needs to be because we miss it and we want to do it, more than any kind of financial attraction. Money's not important. It's more about missing it and really wanting to do it again.

“And I will miss it. I've got to do things that were beyond my wildest dreams because of this band. I don't take any of it for granted. I've been very fortunate in not only touring the world with my friends, but I've been the frontman of a successful band for 30 years. Prior to that, I played professional football, so I've achieved most young boys’ two dreams. That's not bad going, is it?”

Orange Goblin tour the UK from December 10-17.

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