Under the Influence: Mikey Kent of Private Hell
The RVA metalpunk ripper shares on his Green Day-fueled origin, finding out punk was still happening, and making extreme music as a dad...
When you think back on your childhood, what music or art were you being exposed to that you can say shaped your tastes as you grew up? Were there any musicians in your family that inspired or encouraged you?
I wouldn’t say I was raised in a particularly music oriented house. Although I did take a bit of piano lessons as a young kid, most of my earliest memories with music involve my older sister, who was something of a singing protege from a very young age. She would sing at church, sporting events, recitals, etc from a very young age. The only music I can really remember my parents playing much of when I was a kid that really stuck with me would be my mom playing her old Motown records and my dad playing his CCR and Tom Petty greatest hits CDs (all of which I still love to this day). Music like this definitely instilled in me a real appreciation for catchy songwriting and memorable hooks. I certainly remember hearing the popular Nu Metal stuff of the time as a little kid in the late 90s/early 2000s paired with Dragon Ball Z videos, but I don’t think I really grew a real passion for music until I got into classic Hip Hop in 5th/6th grade. I already enjoyed the popular artists of that moment, but I almost instantly went from Eminem to learning about Public Enemy, Notorious BIG, Boogie Down Productions, Run DMC etc. It's been a recurring trend throughout my life that whenever I get into any form of contemporary art or activity, I instinctually will go back to the beginning of the form and want to learn about its foundations. This goes from me obsessing over 1930s New York Yankees lore as a third grader, to my going from the original Spider-Man film to reading old Stan Lee/Steve Ditko trades, to the ways in which I’ve explored punk, hardcore, metal, film, and so many other facets of art and culture.
How old were you when you first started to gravitate towards the world of "rock" music or guitar based genres? What were some of the bands that you remember first finding on your own or from your peers?
Like so many other people my age, my first real passion for rock/guitar music was Green Day; a band who I still have a real fondness for. By time I heard them when American Idiot came out, I was already deeply into old school hip hop, but hearing Green Day was the first time that I heard music that truly felt like it was speaking to my life experiences and that I could more easily identify with than I could when listening to someone like Ice Cube. I remember mentioning to a dad who carpooled me to school in sixth grade that I liked Green Day, and the next day he gave me a copy of Dookie and Nirvana’s Nevermind, and it probably goes without saying that my mind was totally blown. As a depressed and angry pre-teen kid from a broken home, this was my first time hearing music that made me feel less alone. As is my tendency, I quickly started digging into Green Day’s influences, and I got copies of a The Clash compilation and Sex Pistols’ Nevermind the Bollocks and from there I started digging into the early UK punk canon of albums. By the time I was in eighth grade, I was shaving my head weekly and X-ing my hands to school because I had fallen so in love with early Boston and DC hardcore. It's worth mentioning also at this time that I had similarly picked up copies of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, which sent me down the metal journey. I was already a pretty lonely and unpopular kid at school who would act up to get attention, but this is when I stopped even trying to fit in and really thrived on this music that no one else at my school had even heard of. Suddenly, not being good at sports or having the popular kids not like me didn’t matter quite as much.
Do you remember your first show, either local or a bigger act?
Not counting a tiny show at 915 Skatepark I went to with this local band the Angry Canadiens, the first big concert I ever went to was Warped Tour in 2006. I was thirteen and got to see what in retrospect was a pretty cool grip of bands. That tour went increasingly downhill (in terms of my taste) with the following years, but I got to see AFI, The Buzzcocks, NoFX, Anti-Flag, The Casualties, Helmet, Joan Jett, etc. I didn’t have an older kid to guide me through underground culture, so a lot of this went over my head at the time, but for a kid who had recently gotten into punk music, this was a pretty cool first experience. My first “real” punk show was the following year with A Global Threat and the Casualties at Tremont Music Hall in Charlotte. I was already a fan of the entry level early 80s punk bands (Minor Threat, Black Flag, MDC, GBH etc), but I wasn’t aware yet that there were bands that were actively playing that style, so seeing those street punk bands was the closest thing that I knew of at the time. That sort of neon-mohawked street punk is pretty dead nowadays, but at the time I thought it was all pretty cool, although I never dressed the part due to my strict parents, so I just shaved my head and had homemade band shirts that I’d make with a sharpie. I have a vivid memory of an older guy I knew driving me home to Greensboro early the next morning because I had my first day of driver's ed.
We all have had experiences surrounding shows that have been formative. Is there a show that you can reflect on as being a pivotal moment in your life?
When you’re a teenager first experiencing underground art/subculture for the first time, its crazy how it feels like every other day you are encountering albums/movies/shows that completely impact your sense of self. There are countless cases of bands I saw that irrevocably impacted my life, but if I had to pick one, it was without a doubt in September of 2007 when I was a freshman in high school and went to my first legitimate hardcore show, where I saw Wasted Time, Double Negative, Life Trap, (maybe Direct Control?), and Cross Laws at what was the final Cross Laws show at Bull City Headquarters in Durham. By this point, I had a small group of friends who all loved early 80s hardcore punk music, but we were not aware of any bands that were doing that style at the time or doing anything that resembled the stuff we were passionate about. This was a little bit before everything was at the tip of your fingers online, but as obsessive and impressionable readers of the book American Hardcore, we were under the (incorrect) guidance that hardcore died in 1986 and that the only thing left in the current era was either fashionable street punk or the sort of metalcore that was popular with kids our age. When we heard about this show, we were shocked to see that not only was 80s style hardcore a thing that existed still, but it had a thriving scene in Raleigh/Durham, where Sorry State Records was starting to pick up steam. Seeing bands that looked like us and cared about the same albums as us was powerful in a way that is hard to put into words. We felt like we had found our tribe. I have gone to countless great shows over the many years that have followed and my music tastes grew quickly beyond exclusively early 80s hc punk, but that was the one where I felt like my future was laid out in front of my eyes. I feel very lucky that I got to see some of these bands at such a young age.
When did you decide to try playing music yourself for the first time? What was your first band or writing experience like?
I picked up the bass around age thirteen. I’ve always been a bit of an underachiever and playing bass seemed easier than guitar, not to mention I was a big fan of the Clash and I thought their bassist Paul Simonon looked incredibly cool and aspirational. My very first band was called ASP (American Secret Police) when I was in eighth grade. We were absolutely terrible, but aren’t all middle school bands? We played a few poorly attended gigs, but it still felt cool at the time to be fourteen and playing for “adults” (twenty year-olds, probably). I honestly don’t really even count that band because we never recorded anything.
My first “real” band was called FUSS, who I sang for through all of high school. Playing in this band was honestly an important building block of my life. We started out as a pretty bad attempt at copying the sort of over-caffeinated hyper speed punk of Gang Green and DRI, but by the end of our tenure and as our music taste expanded, we incorporated elements of powerviolence, thrash, and sludge. We were really influenced by our local heroes in Torch Runner. I’m still proud of the music we made at the end of our run, where I think we, considering our average age of eighteen, were making some pretty cool music. I met a lot of people in that band that I still see at gigs today. Of all my bands, I think you can draw a line from what that band was doing and the ways that Private Hell also plays with genre conventions across punk, hardcore, and metal.
At what point did you move to Richmond and why did you make the change?
I moved to Richmond in October of 2015. I was living in Charlotte, NC and had recently graduated from college there. Both of the bands I was playing in at the time had broken up, and I was in a real post-college malaise of trying to figure my life out. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time and I was at a real low point in my life and I knew I needed to hit the reset button and just start over. I considered moving to a few different places (Raleigh, New York) but I knew someone who I had met on tour who had a room open up in Richmond and I jumped on the opportunity. It sounds like such a cliche, but I sold most of what I owned at the time and packed up my car with my records, my cat, some clothes, and my guitars and just totally started from square one in Richmond. Naturally I was a total mess when I moved here, sleeping on an air mattress with no furniture or money, but I was able to get it all kinda figured out eventually.
Richmond has always felt like a city where the various scenes of DIY music blended together really well, which has led to many remarkable bands coming from there over the years. From your perspective, what is happening there currently that has you or your peers excited?
I’d say one of the things that I’m really loving in Richmond right now is the way that the punk, hardcore, and metal scenes are so interwoven in a way that you really didn’t see even ten years ago when I moved here. That’s not to say that everyone is friends with everyone and the scenes are totally blended into one, but I love playing in a scene where it’s not abnormal for a punk band like Public Acid to play with a heavy hardcore band such as Division of Mind. Of course it’s worth mentioning that there is an influx of younger people right now who are starting bands, zines, going to shows, etc. After being involved in punk/HC for almost twenty years, I have a pretty good eye for sussing out who is into punk for the right reasons and who isn’t, and there are a lot of younger kids around right now who I think have a great road ahead of them. Shout out to the newer bands like Lose Sight, No Victim, Yankee Bastard, Collective Action, etc.
How did Private Hell come together?
Private Hell came together in the beginning of 2021. My band at the time, Ghouli, kinda dissipated during the pandemic, and I posted online that I was looking to start another band to play guitar in. Sam Roberts, who I knew from him playing in Fried Egg and booking shows in Charlottesville responded and we quickly hit it off. We both had an interest in playing music that blended elements of punk and metal, with our initial inspirations being bands like Death Side, Poison Idea, and Integrity. We pulled in Erik Phillips on bass, who I knew from his photography at local shows, as well as Sam’s friend Nick on lead guitar. We banged out a couple of songs that mainly consisted of riffs I had been sitting on for a while that didn’t really fit what Ghouli was doing, and we recorded that summer with Greenough in Norfolk.
Private Hell has a sound that is hard to classify, with elements of hardcore and crust punk but also early metal influences are all over it. How deliberate is the band about where it draws inspiration?
There’s sort of a few different elements that play into this. The short answer is that Sam and I both come from the world of DIY hardcore punk, but we both had always wanted to play in a band that had elements of extreme metal in the mix. I think I personally just wanted to make a band that makes the sort of music that I want to hear. I’ve loved punk, thrash, hardcore, death metal, crust, etc since I was a teenager, and I’ve always felt it was so arbitrary how people (punks) will draw lines as to what is and is not acceptable for a band to sound like. I do think our sound has started to lean a bit more heavy and metal influenced over the last year or so, but I think that’s also just been a product of us being a band for a little while and really learning where our strengths lie.
I honestly think a lot of the time, I’ll try to write a song in a particular vibe, like a Slayer-type thing for instance, and I just honestly am not a great replicator of genres, so what I end up making sounds nothing like what I intended, which is often for the better. I say this not to imply that I am artistically unique, I just don’t have the skill of recreating styles the way some people do, where they can make something that sounds like a perfect recreation of like, Discharge, or whatever. Which is totally cool, it’s just not a skill I have.
I also think that the bands that I feel are truly great are often ones that exist outside of hyper-specific, niche genres and can stand on their own ground. I look to bands like Napalm Death or Neurosis as great inspirations in that they are bands that came from the world of punk/HC, but their sound is so singular and blends different genre elements to where Napalm Death makes just as much sense playing with an 80s crust punk band as they do a 90s death metal band. I really love that our band has been able to play with everyone from Brain Tourniquet to pageninetynine, Enforced to Long Knife, and even Cro Mags. Sure we may often feel a little bit out of place on bills, but we also can do more types of stuff than if we were a straight up 90s style death metal band or Youth Crew band or whatever.
Has becoming a father changed the way you approach playing music or being involved in the DIY art community?
In terms of fatherhood and being in a band, it’s certainly made me have to be very conscious of the ways I spend my time and, at least at this stage in my parenting journey, I have to be a little precise over our gig choices. That being said, I am still very pleased with all of the stuff we have gotten to do. There are a handful of people in our community who I really look up to who are parents and who still are able to contribute to the scene in very important ways. I also think that being a dad has really reinforced how vitally important I think our community and subculture is in the lives of so many people, myself included. I understand why some people feel they have to fade out of the DIY scene when they get older, and I certainly am not able to go to every show or hang out all night like I used to, but I still find great value in punk/hardcore.
I honestly could compare it to how when I was a kid, people used to tell me stuff to the general effect of: “you may be into left wing politics now, but once you’re an adult, you see how the world really works and you will become conservative”, and I just couldn’t disagree more. Being in my early 30s with a wife and kid has honestly made me a deeply more empathetic person, which transcribes to my left political leanings being even more clear and correct than they were when I was just an angry teenager. It’s not enough for just my child to live a life filled with love and opportunity, every person that draws breath should also have that. My framing for how I view the things I care about may be more fully developed but the core remains.
What’s on the horizon for Private Hell?
After spending the better part of early 2025 laying low and writing new songs, we are going to record another batch of songs with Sam D from Bracewar in June. It’s up in the air as to if we will release the material as two-2 song flexis or one 7”, but we are really excited about these songs. They are a continuation of where we went with Wake Up Screaming, with a heavy influence from Entombed, Sepultura, and His Hero is Gone. We also have plans to do a short mid west tour in the summer, which should hopefully be announced in the near future.
