More than 50 years since it opened, Soho jewellery store The Great Frog still bursts with heavy metal energy, literally and metaphorically. The walls of this narrow, three-storey shop are lined with glass cabinets, each full of rings and pendants shaped like skulls, eyes and fleurs-de-lis. Upstairs, more cabinets are crammed with rings shaped like Ghost’s Papa Emeritus, Iron Maiden’s Eddie and Motörhead’s Snaggletooth mascot.
This central-London institution has long been a favourite destination of passing rock stars. Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy have bought jewellery from The Great Frog. Late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton got a pair of signet rings here in the mid-80s, subsequently worn by James Hetfield.
Graphic Nature frontman Harvey Freeman has spent a lot of time here over the years. “I used to come to the store and be like, ‘Wow... what the hell is this?!’ It was a place just for people like me. It sold big, chunky jewellery that was all really dark. Back in the day, you had people outside drinking beer; they clearly did not give a fuck. I was like, ‘I wanna work here.’”
Harvey currently works for The Great Frog, albeit at their East London branch, in shipping and packaging. His wife, George, has worked right here at the original Soho store for the last decade. “We have a manager above us who’s a massive Graphic Nature fan,” Harvey says. “It really helps with getting time off.”
That will have come in useful recently. Since they formed in 2019, Graphic Nature’s mix of early, Slipknot-esque nu metal, forward-charging metalcore and pummelling EDM breaks has seen them gain a reputation as one of the UK’s most exciting new metal bands. Last year they released their debut full-length album, A Mind Waiting To Die (the follow-up to 2022’s New Skin EP), and played Download, Reading/Leeds, 2000 Trees and a year-closing run of shows supporting Skindred. “It was cool being called out every night, having Skindred go, ‘Give it up for Graphic Nature!’” Harvey says. “Skindred were the first band I ever saw live, when I was 14, so supporting them was a full-circle moment for me.”
We’re sitting in The Great Frog’s upstairs office. The 32-year-old looks the part of a larger-than- life metal singer: he’s dressed in black (including an on-brand Graphic Nature bumbag), covered in tattoos, and sporting rings, a chain-link bracelet and a necklace (from The Great Frog, obviously). At six-foot-one, he had to duck to avoid bumping his head on the low ceiling of this Tudor building as we climbed the stairs here.
But his appearance is at odds with his personality. He’s completely down-to-earth as we chat about his life, his band, and Graphic Nature’s new album, Who Are You When No One Is Watching? He also seems joyfully oblivious to the minutiae of everyday existence. He has to check with George when we ask him what her job here is (she’s the retail manager), nor is he certain what his mum did for work when he was young.
“My mum is like Chandler from Friends: I have no idea what she does,” he chuckles, referencing the sitcom’s running joke of never explaining the character’s job. “I think my mum does, like, bookkeeping.”
Harvey was born in Loughton, Essex, to his Chandler Bing of a mum and a carpenter dad. It was a happy childhood, he says, despite his parents divorcing when he was 11 years old, a result of his dad’s addiction to amphetamines (Freeman Sr has since got clean, and father and son have a healthy relationship). Harvey insists the divorce didn’t affect him as a kid, nor did he know of his dad’s drug use until his 20s.
“I only realised this when I was diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s [last year],” he says. “My process of regulating emotions is very different to other people. So, when my parents broke up, I was excited about it. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m going through something you see in films. Now I’ve got, like, a story arc where I’m going to become something else.’”
In hindsight, Harvey believes his ADHD affected his education. “I was really good at art and music,” he says, “because I was only interested in those things. When you’ve got this fucking ADHD brain, you’re only really focused on the things that interest you.”
The singer’s parents were both obsessed with jazz and soul, and pushed their young son towards music. Given the choice to learn either the recorder or the drums at school, he opted for the latter. His earliest musical loves were Nickelback and Busted, but hearing his classmates’ Slipknot, Soulfly and Static-X CDs proved to be a turning point. “It was angry and loud and I loved it,” Harvey says. “It was the teenage angst that everyone went through.”
He began drumming in bands at 14, and within a few years he was taking time off from college so that he could tour. He switched to vocals in his pre-Graphic Nature outfit, Snakes, after exhibiting what he believes were the early symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. Holding drumsticks for longer than 30 minutes was becoming harder.
“I was so frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t even do the one thing that I was good at that I began to resent playing drums,” he says, “but I still needed to be in a band. I’d always wanted to front a band. I forced myself to do it. I’m still learning with vocals, but I can’t not make music.” Harvey co-founded Graphic Nature after meeting future bandmates Charlie Smith (bass), Jack Bowdery (drums), Pete Woolven and Matas Michailovskis (both guitar) at a Snakes show. They all bonded over “being the strongest link in other bands” and feeling tired of bandmates not having the same drive as them. Graphic Nature started playing as many shows as possible as quickly as possible, and they’ve seldom stood still since.
“Touring is so ingrained in my person,” explains Harvey. “Because I started doing it at such a young age, it’s where I’m supposed to be. Music is the dream. My mum was like, ‘You gotta have a plan B.’ And I was like, ‘There is no plan B.’”
Harvey had already begun writing about his mental health in Snakes, but Graphic Nature found him digging even deeper into himself. White Noise, from A Mind Wanting To Die, deals with the subject of neurodivergence, inspired by a time the singer had to leave a social event because he was on the verge of a panic attack. As well as ADHD and Asperger’s, he’s also been diagnosed with depression.
“I had a routine: I’d work, go to Sainsbury’s, grab food and a drink, go home, play games until three in the morning, go to work at 11 the next day,” he says. “I loved it, but my mum would text me, like, ‘Are you OK? You haven’t spoken to us.’ A few years later I was like, ‘This is what depression is.’”
Who Are You When No One Is Watching? goes even deeper into his psyche. It’s driven by the PTSD Harvey suffered after being attacked on the Tube last year, when he was repeatedly punched for seemingly no reason. When his attacker got off the train at Canning Town station in East London, hoping to continue the fight on the platform, Harvey stayed inside. The doors closed, the train moved on, and Harvey never saw his assailant again. The singer, otherwise calm throughout our conversation, is furious when reflecting on what happened.
“He was wearing a beanie and a purple fucking bandana over his face – I could only see the cunt’s eyes”, he seethes. “I was like, ‘Cool, well, any time that anyone who looks like this gets on the train, fuck them. I don’t care.’ I became fucking horrible. It got to the point where George took me aside and said, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you acting this way?’”
The songs on the new album convey Harvey’s trauma in the wake of the attack. ‘Sometimes I get so scared about this and the things that are not there!’ he screams during Locked In, over the top of whirring nu metal guitar. Human finds Harvey relating how his experiences impacted his personality, with the singer howling: ‘I’m a different human when this kicks in!’ He’s making progress with his trauma, having “just the other day” made his first solo train journey into London since the attack. But it’s evident that the mental scars remain, and right now, Graphic Nature is part of his way of dealing with it.
Our conversation done, we wind our way down the low- ceilinged stairway and prepare to part ways. Before we do, he says that his goal with the band, and with the candidness of his lyrics, is to help make those with their own mental-health struggles feel less alone.
“I want it to get to the point where it’s like, ‘Fuck, I’m going through this shit, but it’s OK to go through this shit, because there’s a geezer onstage playing to thousands and thousands of people, and he’s gone through the same shit as me. And I’m just like him.’”
