“From the start we weren’t scared to switch up” Lee Malia on how Bring Me The Horizon became metal’s most ambitious band
Like a lot of lads growing up in Sheffield in the 90s, for a young Lee Malia football was everything. He liked music well enough, but it didn’t really move him – even his rock-obsessed dad putting his rarely-used guitar in Lee’s room to try and encourage him to take an interest never had any impact. Then came Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the PlayStation, and everything changed.
“I remember hearing Papa Roach on Tony Hawk’s and being like, ‘What is this?!’” the Bring Me The Horizon guitarist exclaims, 20-plus years later. “From then on I just wanted to find more music.”
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In a cruel twist of fate, Malia had asked his dad to get rid of the never-touched guitar just weeks before, but now a 14-year-old boy, suddenly electrified by rock music, wanted nothing more than to play the guitar.
“And it was around Christmas, and my parents were like, ‘You can’t have a guitar, because we got you a BMX for Christmas!’” Malia reflects forlornly. “But I’d got some Christmas money – off my nan I think – I had £80, so I went and bought a Falcon Strat copy. I was just obsessed instantly.”
Malia’s dad was, unsurprisingly, thrilled with this development and did as much as he could to open up Lee’s guitar horizons beyond early 2000s skate game soundtracks.
“My dad taught me a couple of Shadows songs, Smoke on the Water – beginner stuff… but I just wanted more. I got into Metallica, and I got the Ride The Lightning tab book. He loved it, because he always wanted to play guitar, but never quite got it. For the next Christmas, they did get me a guitar – because by then that was it, y’know? I was a guitar player!”
Image: Press
Moore and More
As part of his dad’s guitar-centric education, he’d take Lee to watch bands and artists he loved. It would be Gary Moore, of all people, whose guitar playing would leave a lasting impression.
“He was always quite aggressive in his playing,” says Malia about what he liked about the late Skid Row and Thin Lizzy guitarist’s style. “But my dad always liked him, and was like, ‘He’s one of the best guitarists in the world!’ So I was always influenced by my dad. Even though it’s not necessarily what we sound like!”
Pulling from unexpected sources of inspiration has been a hallmark of Bring Me The Horizon’s ever-evolving, often unpredictable sonic blueprint. It’s something that was baked in from the start. When a teenage Malia met future bandmates Mat Nicholls and Oli Sykes in college, Malia introduced the pair to Swedish death metal, while they inducted him into the hardcore scene. It led to that first Bring Me record sounding, to Malia’s ears, like “mishmash of all that stuff”.
“I think we’ve always worked in that way,” he reflects. “You could always hear it, it’s just everyone trying to get their influences in and make it cohesive. Because we did it from the start though, we weren’t scared to switch up. So, now we can kind of just come out with whatever. And people are just like, ‘of course they’ve done some weird shit!’”
Such has been the ambition and scope of BMTH’s evolution over the last two decades, it’s occasionally meant that Malia’s guitar has had to take more of a back seat to the aforementioned ‘weird shit’. It’s also occasionally led to the perception outside of the band that Malia might be the primary voice in the band pulling them back towards the guitar-heavy sound of their early days – a characterisation that he bristles at somewhat.
“I don’t know, I get why people think that… but no one hates metal in the band!” he says, somewhat wearily. “They all still like it. Me and Mat are still going to watch Metallica. Everyone still appreciates metal, it’s just they also have different interests.”
Image: Press
Offset Perspectives
But we’re not sat in Fender’s nicely appointed London artist showroom to deconstruct misconceptions of Bring Me The Horizon, though. Cradled in Malia’s lap is the reason we’re here: a prototype of his brand new Jackson signature model, the LM-87.
Malia has long been one of metal’s most interesting signature artists – his series of Epiphone signature models flew in the face of the ‘all black and pointy’ convention of metal guitars with a series of walnut-finished guitars with floral inlays… there was even a lesser-spotted RD model.
“I guess that’s from being influenced by 70s artists,” he explains. “And then I bought a 1976 Gibson Artisan, and basically said to Gibson, ‘I just want to rip this off.’ So that’s the whole influence, right down to the floral inlays on the neck. So I’ve always been influenced by those 70s and early 80s guitars. They did a lot of cool stuff in that age – the Gibson Marauders and the Victory, that sort of stuff. I’ve always thought, ‘Why have they not brought this stuff back?!’”
After parting ways with Epiphone, Lee was free to play what he wanted, and that led him back to Jackson – the brand that he’d used in the early days of BMTH, and had been his first ‘serious’ guitar he ever owned.
“I bought a Rhoads, because I just like ’em,” Malia explains. “And I was playing it live because I needed a guitar to do dive bombs! Then one day Tim [Hillier-Brook] messaged me out of the blue – he used to be in Architects, and I’ve toured with Tim and known him nearly 20 years. And he said, ‘I now work for Jackson. Do you want to work with us?’”
Image: Press
Malia initially worked with Jackson on the launch of the American Series Soloist, but soon the idea for a signature model was mooted. Given Malia’s track record for pulling curios from big brand back catalogues, it was never likely that he was going to release a standard pointy metal axe. But even Jackson fanboys would be surprised to see him revive a real deep pull from the late 90s: the Surfcaster.
“I just think it’s really cool,” he enthuses of the offset design. “I remember trying to look back through their history for some shapes that you wouldn’t necessarily walk in a shop and know straight away it was a Jackson. When I saw the shape, I was ‘I feel like I can make it really cool.’”
Another very un-Jackson feature is the bridge – a tune-o-matic-style unit with built in fine-tuners that’s quite unlike anything you’ve probably seen before… unless, of course, you happen to be a fan of weird Gibsons from the 70s.
“Yeah, that’s a 70s thing,” he says, smiling. “I had an ES-Artist with the Moog circuit, and it had this bridge with fine tuners on. And I were like, ‘Oh, this is just so much easier.’ It’s the same with the locking tuners – they just make changing strings so easy. This stuff is all from touring, finding stuff that just makes life easier.”
Image: Press
Bass Face
One essential element to Lee’s BMTH guitar tone is the one thing that isn’t shipping with the production LM-87 guitar: the strings. Lee’s secret to monster metal riffs is his unconventional use of a .074 gauge bass string in place of his low E. “It’s because I’m incredibly heavy handed with my right hand,” he explains. “So anything thinner just moves too much. As soon as I found it, I knew that was my gauge.”
While we can confirm that the monster wire is present and correct on Lee’s personal guitar, most of us will be relieved to hear that the production guitar ships with a normal set.
“If you’re an older guy who’s into classic rock, and you pick it up and it’s got these silly strings on? That’s gonna put you off. So I said just put 10s on them. People can do what they want – because that’s my thing. It works for me, it might not work for anyone else.”
Headline Act
A new guitar for Malia coincides with a new era for Bring Me The Horizon. As the band embarked on the next phase without influential keyboard player Jordan Fish, who parted ways with them in 2023, they seized the moment in typically leftfield BMTH style – by putting out a well-received (even by Liam Gallagher) cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall earlier this year. They’ll follow that up by confirming their status as one of the world’s biggest heavy bands by headlining Reading & Leeds for the second time this summer, though Malia stresses they’re not counting 2022’s slot…
“We’re headlining it properly, I’d say, this time!” he exclaims. “Last time we were co-headlining with Arctic Monkeys… but they did close! So it almost felt like a fake headline. Whereas this time it is just us, so that’s a big achievement.”
Whatever comes next for Bring Me The Horizon, as the Wonderwall cover reinforced, it likely won’t be what anyone’s expecting. Despite saying in the past that the band has an uncanny knack for being ahead of the curve, Lee assures us that the band has no secret knowledge about where that knack will take them next.
“We don’t know until the last minute,” he smiles. “I remember Amen up until two days before that were finished, it were nearly a totally different song. And then stuff just happened quick, and it all changes. Then you’re like, ‘Oh, this is it. This is the next thing.’ You don’t know until you happen upon something. Oli’s good at all that stuff… he’s a visionary… he’s clued up, you know? He’s just a clever guy who comes up with crazy ideas. And at first you’re just like, ‘That sounds like it’s not gonna work.’ And then usually it turns out to be good. We’ll see, God knows!”
Find out more about the Jackson LM-87 at jacksonguitars.com
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