Edward R. Warby is a Dutch musician, best known for his work as drummer for Gorefest, Ayreon and Hail of Bullets. He is also a guitarist, bassist and singer for Demiurg and The 11th Hour, among others.
Elegy
From 1984 to 1986, Warby played in Valkyrie, with whom he would record one demo. In 1988, the then twenty-year-old Warby joined the progressive hard rock and heavy metal band Elegy as drummer. At the time, he lived in Schiedam. With Elegy, he recorded two well-received demos, which allowed him to play all over the world as a live musician. Before the recording of the debut album, he left to join the Zeeland death metal band Gorefest.
Gorefest
In Gorefest, the band about which he made no secret that he wanted to play during his period with Elegy, Warby finally established his name as a drummer. He was the last to join the band, with Jan-Chris de Koeijer on vocals and bass, guitarists Frank Harthoorn and Boudewijn Bonebakker, who had joined Gorefest shortly before Warby’s arrival. Initially, the high tempo caused Warby some adjustment problems, but in a short time he managed to make his contribution to the band. In the newspaper of music festival Wâldrock, guitarist Boudewijn Bonebakker looked back:
“When Ed played with us for the first time, we thought he couldn’t keep up, because his playing wasn’t in sync with ours. Later, however, we discovered that he was the one who played very consistently and that we weren’t able to keep up with him”.
The first recording, the demo ‘Promo 92’, made such an impression that Gorefest became one of the standard bearers of the death metal branch of the German record label Nuclear Blast. Also in 1992, he recorded the album False with Gorefest, which meant the big breakthrough for Gorefest.[1] On it, Warby combines extreme metal drumming with an open, swinging style, which was far from common in death metal at the time, but which later became known as ‘old school’. In the song ‘From Ignorance to Oblivion’, Warby gets the opportunity to profile himself as a drummer solo.[2] Gorefest played at Dynamo Open Air in 1993 at an inconvenient time, but still managed to get a large audience on stage. The concert turned out to be recorded by a local radio station and Gorefest decided to release the recording under the title The Eindhoven Insanity. Between the songs, the emotion grew audibly with singer Jan-Chris de Koeijer because of the positive reception. As a token of gratitude to the fans, this live CD ends with the track ‘Eindhoven Roar’, on which the audience sees Gorefest off.
The next album, the 1994 album Erase,[3] showed that Gorefest was moving further away from the death metal they had played up until then. Lyrically and stylistically, Gorefest seemed to want to throw off the death metal yoke. The band’s logo became tighter, the band performed completely in black and the band as a whole came across as remarkably civilized for a band from this genre. However, Gorefest’s popularity continued to grow unabated. When Soul Survivor was released in 1996, it was actually only De Koeijer’s grunt that kept the association with death metal alive. After the release of the album Chapter 13, Gorefest decided to stop in 1998.
In order to settle a legal issue regarding the rights to Gorefest’s material, all band members had to come together in 2004, to which Warby remarked: “We sound like a band like that”. This ignited the flame in the other three members and Gorefest decided to play together again for fun, after first talking out old wounds. In a short time, a number of songs were written, some of which were even harder and faster than Gorefest’s work before. This was the reason to start performing live again and to record an album.[4] The first performances were at the big festivals Graspop Metal Meeting in Dessel (Belgium) and Fields of Rock in Nijmegen.
In October 2008, Gorefest released its first album since the reunion, entitled La Muerte. The CD is supplemented with a DVD to stimulate physical sales. The band shows on it that it still has a feel for metal, but Boudewijn Bonebakker and Ed Warby in particular profile a wide range of influences, partly fueled by the various other projects that both have been part of in the intervening years. In 2007, Warby released the album Rise to Ruin’ with Gorefest, which was almost even better received than its predecessor La Muerte. After intensive touring, Gorefest decided in 2009, this time without internal quarrels, that the adventure was over.
Other bands
The ex-members of Gorefest were not particularly active in heavy metal after and outside of Gorefest. The exception was Ed Warby, who was almost continuously involved in various hard rock and metal productions. He contributed as a session musician to werk of Orphanage, Ayreon and he was the temporary live drummer of After Forever. As a singer he provided a guest contribution to the song ‘Beyond Terror’ by Thanatos, in 2004. He was also the producer of the two covers that Thanatos recorded in 2001 and released as a split under the name ‘Imperial Anthems’.
In 1998 Ed Warby joined the band Ayreon, in which Jan-Chris de Koeijer had already provided a guest performance in 1995. This band was led by Arjen Lucassen who also asked him for the project ‘Star One’, in 2002. In 2008 Warby also appeared on three songs on the live album Stars Rain Down, by Erik Norlander.
Warby’s big return as a death metal drummer came in 2007, when he started the band Hail of Bullets with members of Thanatos and Asphyx, among others. In the meantime, he was also active in other projects, including since 2006 as drummer for Demiurg with Swedish guitarists Rogga Johansson and Dan Swanö and since 2009 as drummer, drum programmer, guitarist, singer, bassist, keyboardist and lyricist for The 11th Hour, where he was also assisted by Rogga Johansson, but more notably, he brought former Gorefest guitarist Frank Harthoorn into the band. Live, Warby played guitar and clean vocals for the band and the grunt was recorded by rock journalist Pim Blankenstein.
In 2017, he played in the Ayreon live experience and joined VUUR, which was founded by Anneke van Giersbergen (Source: Wikipedia)
