CATHERINE FEARNS – Death on the Piano

Mar 05, 2026   »   interview   »   U2603

text: Uzseka Norbert   
»   photo: Liese Barbeau Cochet, Jacques Apotheloz (SheWolves)

Catherine Fearns became famous in the metal underground by covering metal songs on piano – especially because of her extreme metal covers. But she’s also a composer, guitarist and writer of novels, and the living proof that it’s never too late to start something you’d love to try in your life. Norbert Uzseka put his questions to the English lady living in Geneva. I’m among those who first met you because of your YouTube channel where you cover metal songs on piano. Where did this idea come from? “The first one I did was Cannibal Corpse’s Scourge of Iron. I was learning to play it on guitar for my extreme metal cover band, and finding it really difficult. And I remember thinking I just wish I could play it on piano, it would be so much easier. But at that point I hadn’t really played the piano for about 20 years. I was trained the classical way, but then I decided not to continue with a piano career. I just thought it would be too risky, so in my twenties and thirties I had regular jobs, then I had kids, and didn’t really have music in my life at all, until I became a metalhead. And as you know when metal becomes your lifestyle, it takes over everything else, so everything I was doing was about metal. So yes, I was learning to play this Cannibal Corpse song on guitar, my piano was sitting there, and I just wanted to see what this song would sound like. I couldn’t decide whether it sounded stupid or not, I was just happy to be playing piano after all this time. I put the video on YouTube, just for me, as an experiment, a reminder I’d done it, but then forgot about it. But a few weeks later someone messaged me, and said, ‘you know that you’re in Metal Injection?’, and then the next day someone said, ‘you’re in Ultimate Guitar’, and so I looked back on YouTube, and I had thousands of views and comments. It seemed people were finding something interesting in this. So I thought, well, I’ll try another one. I think the next song I did was Carcass: Heartwork, and that one I perform live a lot too, it works really well live. And then I did Death: Crystal Mountain. People had quite emotional reactions to that one, because everyone misses Chuck Schuldiner, and he was such a genius. He really was a classical composer, working within the medium of death metal. So I realized that people enjoy these things, they were waiting for the next one, asking for requests, so I just kept doing them, and now I have a lot. I’m always thinking about the next piece, and it’s so much fun, I love it. It’s a technical challenge to arrange the music, and then to perform it. But mostly it’s just super-fun, and has brought me some really interesting opportunities as well. So, yeah, I’ll keep going!” How much work does it take to do a cover? “It depends on the song, but it’s quite quick, because I have a process. I always choose the song carefully, so that it’s something that I know would work. With every song that I do I’ve rejected about ten songs that I wanted to do but realized are unsuitable. It probably takes me about a working day to make the sheet music, and I do it in stages as I obviously don’t have a working day to do it. So it takes me a few hours to make the sheet music, then I have to practice, and then making the video is super-quick, because by the time I’m ready to make the video I’ve practiced enough to play. I don’t have very high production values, I just put a black sheet in my living room (laughs). I don’t wear a lot of make-up and fancy clothes, I don’t have special lighting. I know there are other pianists on YouTube who are doing it in a more glamorous way than me, and I guess I could do that, but for me it’s just about the music. So, it’s quite quick, I guess one video would take me to put together about two days. But I fit it in between other things, and I find it fun.” If I remember correctly, it was Apocalyptica who first played metal music on classical instruments. Yet your black and death metal covers reveal that even this most extreme music can be beautiful and that these composers are really brilliant. Are these your major favourites or influences, or you come from some other background? “Ah, yes, I saw Apocalyptica live once, and they were great. I come from a classical background. I grew up in Liverpool, and at that time in the nineties, Liverpool was all about dance and house music, there wasn’t really much of a metal scene. We had Carcass, and a couple of metal clubs, but if you didn’t have any metalheads in your friend group, it was difficult to discover it. I didn’t really know about fanzines and the like, there was no internet or streaming. So I didn’t have any metal in my life, but I did have a sense that I would like it. If I ever heard an Iron Maiden song or a Metallica song on the radio, I felt ‘this could be me’. But it was only later in life that I put classical and metal together, and I think there are lots of similarities. Some metal genres more than others of course. But I think what struck me most when I started to play electric guitar is: metal music is very technical and complex. It is difficult to play, and sophisticated. And it’s kind of a shame that the vast majority of the world sees it as the opposite. Maybe that’s cool in a way, because it’s music we can keep for us, it’s kind of our secret world (laughs). Yes, metal music to me is technically very sophisticated, and even though metal composers may not have gone to a conservatoire - although some of them have – a lot of them just taught themselves to play in their bedroom. But whether you spend ten thousand hours playing in your bedroom or in a conservatoire, it’s still an intense technical training. And I’m always impressed by the level of composition in metal music. Hopefully that’s one of the things I can bring out when I play these pieces on the piano. Like I mentioned, Death is amazing, because I think beauty was very important to Chuck Schuldiner. I mean metal music is mostly about heaviness and aggression, but it also has a lot of beauty, and I think in Death that was a very important aspect to bring out. I also love some of the pioneers of melodic death metal, like Carcass, they combined something very heavy with something very melodic, too. Another band that was very influential to me was Children Of Bodom, I even have my Alexi Laiho guitar. You can clearly hear the classical references in their songs. I listen to a lot of different music, I don’t really have any favourite genre of metal, I love thrash metal, death metal – I’m still discovering actually. This is such a huge world and I came to it in my thirties. So I’m still catching up, and probably will always be catching up. At the moment I’m listening to the new Coroner album, and it’s amazing. The metal scene, to the vast majority of the world, is kind of hidden, but to us it’s so vibrant, the festivals are enormous, there are brilliant new albums coming out every time, so I’m still discovering.” You also covered Def Leppard and Alice Cooper songs, so how did these come about? “Those lighter styles are much easier to do, because they have elements of hard rock and pop, and the clean singing provides obvious melodies to play. I don’t do many clean songs, as I feel people expect me to do extreme metal covers; and it’s authentic to me because that’s the music I mostly listen to and play on guitar. But I’m also in a hard rock cover band (SheWolves), and we were playing Alice Cooper: Poison, so I learned to play that on the guitar. I was going to see Alice Cooper that week when I made that cover, so I was in Alice Cooper mood. That one works really well, with its complex chord changes. And it’s accessible to a wider audience because a lot of people who don’t like metal, still like Alice Cooper, it’s such a famous song. I love Def Leppard the same. It was Hysteria that I covered, and that is actually a duet, so I had to record the two audios separately, that’s why there’s no video recording of me playing it. But that was fun, I might do some more piano duets. So I like some hard rock, but I prefer the challenge of doing extreme metal, because I have to figure out a way to incorporate blastbeats, and somehow create that effect, I have to incorporate complicated bass lines, I have to adapt the fact that I can’t reproduce the vocals - there’s no pitch, and I can’t play a scream (laughs). So I have to find songs that have interesting riffs that still work. And it’s more interesting and challenging to figure out what new elements I can highlight from extreme metal music. With hard rock, people can hear everything that’s going on, but for a Cannibal Corpse song, you bring something new to it by playing it on the piano, because you can hear the intricacies of the riffs, the solos. So yeah, I’ll mostly stick to extreme metal.”

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Have you ever got any feedback from the bands or composers of the songs you covered? “To be honest I don’t always tag the bands when I post the songs. I am of course very careful to credit them correctly (and the sheet music is sold via Hal Leonard which compensates original composers). But I get nervous that I haven’t done justice to their song – maybe they didn’t want someone playing it on the piano. Also I wouldn’t want to feel I’m trying to get a band’s attention for my own promotion. But I have had some nice feedback. Karl Sanders from Nile (one of the nicest people in metal) was very pleased with my cover of Sacrifice Unto Sebek and he reposted it. Same with Psycroptic when I did Frozen Gaze. And Alex Skolnick from Testament was very kind about my cover of ‘Return To Serenity’ in which I attempted to recreate his beautiful solo!” You started playing guitar in Chaos Rising before the piano covers. How did that come, and where are you now? “I joined Chaos Rising just before Covid. I was looking for a guitar project. I really wanted to join a band, but because I have 4 kids, and they were still quite small, going on tour was not an option for me - joining an established band, rehearsals every week, lots of live shows, that wasn’t realistic. So I came across Chaos Rising, which was just starting up. The idea came from Stéphanie Nolf, a French guitarist; she wanted to create an online project to showcase women within metal. And it came just at the right time, because suddenly we were all confined in our homes, and everybody was recording at home anyway. And a lot of musicians who might have been on tour, were suddenly free to create. So we became a big community of women making music together. Stéphanie and I were the main composers, and that helped me to grow confidence, knowing that I could create or arrange a song. I did a lot of the production, promotion and coordination between musicians. At the beginning I just played guitar, but then came a song that needed some piano. And that was before I started doing my YouTube, so I hadn’t touched the piano in many years. It was quite emotional to go back and do that, but also a revelation, that I could. Just because I didn’t take the opportunity the first time around, didn’t mean it was too late. I think it’s never too late to go back to something you might have put aside. So that gave me back my love for the piano, and helped me to connect piano with metal. So, I played keyboard on a few songs for Chaos Rising, and during those two years, 2020 and 21 we were very prolific, we brought out a song every month. It was a huge undertaking, because we were musicians from all over the world, so we really worked hard, and later we released a double album. I don’t work with them anymore, but that was an amazing project for me, very time consuming, but fantastic. I’m really proud of the work I did with Chaos Rising.” So where do you play nowadays? “I play guitar with a couple of local bands just for fun. I play live as a solo pianist as well. I sometimes do metal piano shows – there’s not a lot of demand, but there are a couple of clubs in Geneva where I played a few times. I also play classically for a company called Candlelight Concerts. Those are big concerts, it pays quite well and that allows me to do other things. For Candlelight I play a mixture of classical music, and classical versions of pop and rock. We have a Coldplay set, a Queen set, I performed Bohemian Rhapsody the last week, so that is kind of on the same spectrum as my YouTube channel - piano versions of non-classical things. But the most fun thing that I do with piano is my YouTube channel, I love it. It’s so cool to put the video up and see the comments coming. You would assume that social media is quite a dangerous, hostile place with crazy people and meanness, but I must admit that 99% of the comments I get are so generous and positive. So it feels like a really nice space. Having said that, it’s not the same as playing live. I do hope to play more live shows now that my kids are older.” There are Candlelight Concerts in Budapest, too, so is there a chance that you would come over? “It’s unlikely, because they tend to use local pianists, partly for language reasons, because we also do a lot of speaking to the crowds. So I do France and Switzerland because I speak French. I’d love to play in Hungary though, so maybe I could come to play some metal piano. I’d love to play festivals, too, but it’s difficult to figure out where I fit. What could be really cool is to play is one of those metal cruises - I almost played on one last year, but then it didn’t work out. You know, cocktail piano was one of the things I used to do when I was a student, and I think cocktail metal piano in a bar on a cruise ship, that would be my dream job (laughs).” In 2022 you released a piano solo record titled Half Life. Can you imagine that music turned into metal? “Half Life is one of my classical compositions – I write sheet music for the music publisher Universal Edition. And then Blue Spiral Records offered me to release it, so I did Half Life as an album, then a couple of EPs with them as well. I think there are some metal influences within the composing, sometimes you can hear it, but in general it’s neo-classical. I never imagined that to be played by a full band, but that could be cool. I’m just started to compose for one of my cover bands, SheWolves, as we decided to start doing our own music. So now I’m really composing hard rock, and I’m definitely gonna think about bringing in some of my classical ideas. So yes, who knows? I may not be early in my journey of life, but I’m early in my journey of metal music, I feel like I’ve just started, and I have so many ideas that I could explore.” You mentioned about Half Life, that you wrote poems to accompany each piece, but decided to let the music stand for itself. Can one read those poems somewhere? “I did put a couple online on my Substack, versions of them… The thing about poems and lyrics is that you’re very vulnerable, and even though writing is kind of my day job because I write novels, writing poems and lyrics is quite scary to me. So yeah, I really pulled back from including the poems on Half Life. I also think that on that album particularly there was a lot of strong emotions behind the music, very personal things. It came at a time in a woman’s life when you’re sort of having your female midlife crisis, so I think it was quite a personal thing, and I felt maybe if I put these poems out now, in five years’ time I might regret it. I wasn’t confident. So I decided just to let the music do the talking, and I felt much safer doing that. Lyrics and poetry are scary. I think writing a novel for me is much easier than writing a song because I can hide behind someone else’s story. I really admire people who write very personal lyrics, because it’s very brave. I’m not quite there yet.” How about singing? “I do sing in SheWolves, but I kind of ended up singing by accident, because our former singer left, and the rest of us just thought rather than looking for another singer, we have such a nice vibe between us, let’s just do the singing ourselves. So the drummer sings some songs, and I sing some, and the bassist sings a couple, and we do all the harmonies together. I didn’t train as a singer, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but it’s still fun, I love it. I’m not a particularly good singer, but it’s exciting to sing on stage. It’s something I never dreamt I would do when I was a child, because I was very shy. I did some lessons in extreme vocals a few years ago, just because I wanted to understand how to do it, and that was fascinating. But I don’t think I would be a very convincing extreme frontwoman (laughs). Also, my kids are already quite embarrassed by their mum, so I think if I start screaming, that’s going too far for them.” I actually wanted to ask what they think about your music. “In general they’re quite embarrassed by everything I do, I’m the quintessential embarrassing mom, definitely (laughs). But maybe secretly they think it’s quite cool that their mom is a youtuber, and sometimes they look and tell their friends, mommy got a million views. My sons really hate metal music, they never come to my shows, but my daughters are very loyal, and my youngest daughter, she loves metal. They come to a lot of my shows. But I don’t know what they really think. I try to set an example in terms of living my best life, having fun, trying things that are a little bit scary, like putting myself on stage, putting myself out there… It’s nice that the girls support me, and my little one is learning to play the electric guitar as well, so we might end up with another metal musician as well.” Could you please tell us about your books and writing in general? “I started writing novels about ten years ago. I actually started writing as a metal music journalist. I just suddenly got the urge to write. My youngest daughter was still a baby, going back to work full time wasn’t an option to me, and so I started writing for metal websites and magazines, just doing album and concert reviews. And that was a great training in creative writing and in self-editing. I found that my writing was getting more and more creative, and then I had an idea for my first book, which is called Reprobation. It’s actually a heavy metal-themed book, a crime thriller, but one of the protagonists is a metal guitarist. It brings in a lot of heavy metal themes - religion, gothic stuff, big questions, and there are a lot of metal bands featured in the series. For me the writing and the music have never been separate. I write about music even when I’m writing stories. So I wrote this crime fiction series, which had a lot of music in it, and then I wrote a historical fiction book called All the Parts of the Soul, which doesn’t have metal in it, but it’s about witchcraft, also very dark themes. And my new one which has just come out called The Fault Mirror, which is also historical fiction, but kind of speculative, with fantasy elements. Then I have another one coming out next year, and I’m writing my eighth book at the moment. It’s a brilliant job, making up stories. You know, if people ask me, what do you do as a job, I say I’m a writer. But it doesn’t pay a salary. There are very few writers who can do that as a day job. So I have to do lots of side-hustles as well, things like Candlelight Concerts, but yeah, writing is my main love, and I’m always thinking about what my next book would be.” What were the best moments when you were a journalist? “The best thing was unsurprisingly going to shows and having a backstage pass, and a photo pass, and getting to meet loads of metal musicians. The amazing thing about metal is that it’s quite a small, friendly scene. Compared to I don’t know, a Taylor Swift concert, where I would never get to go backstage and meet her, not that I would very interested. But I did get to go backstage and meet loads of metal musicians who would be considered very famous in our scene. And it was just such an amazing opportunity, I couldn’t believe my luck. Because I live in Geneva, which is a quite small city, and has one main metal venue, so lots of big bands pass through playing this venue, and I would get to go and interview them. And almost everybody I interviewed was so nice, so interesting, yeah, I feel very lucky I had that opportunity. I stopped doing the journalism when I started writing my books and making my own music, because I realized - when you write a review of an album, you’re really judging somebody’s hard work. When I first started writing, because I was quite naïve, sometimes I’d be quite critical, and sometimes I would review music that maybe wasn’t my thing, but as I got more experienced… I mean, I hate reading bad reviews about myself, it really hurts, and I found I couldn’t write anything negative anymore, because I felt like I was being disloyal to my scene. So it started to feel a bit pointless to me because I felt like I was just doing marketing. I would either write an amazing review, or just wouldn’t write it because it wasn’t my thing. So it didn’t feel honest to me anymore. I also found sometimes if I was critical, I got a lot of backlash online as well. Like I once wrote a review of a Steel Panther concert that I didn’t really enjoy, because there were a couple of things I found quite misogynist about it, and I really got attacked online. It was horrible some of the things people were saying. And I kind of regretted putting myself out there, because I could have said nothing, or could have just accepted that was what that show was. So I stopped doing the metal journalism when I became a creator myself. I think I wasn’t brave enough anymore. But meeting those musicians was amazing.” How about your soundtrack commissions? Are there any that you’re proud of? “I haven’t done very many. It’s not something that I’ve really looked into in great detail, because it’s time-consuming and there’s also a lot of other people doing it. It seems like everybody wants to be a film composer. So I’ve done a few, little podcasts, trailers, book trailers, things like that. I’m mainly a piano composer, although I have orchestrated a few things. If someone came to me with a project that was perfect for me, then I would certainly be looking into it. But you know scoring a whole film, there are people who know how to do that much better than me. And there are things about production music that I could get into, but I don’t know much about that. I’m kind of winging it, but right now I have a really lot of fun creating things, and see where it goes. I’m just at this point where my children are a bit more independent, so it’s only now that I can really start to think where am I gonna go with my metal music. Am I just gonna carry on youtube-ing, or go on tour, become a film composer… I don’t really know, I’m just open to the universe now and having fun with metal, but I’m not sure where it will go.” You grew up in Liverpool, but now live in Geneva, Switzerland. What are the best and worst parts of these cities? “Liverpool is the best city in the world, I love it. The people are amazing, and it’s almost like a country in itself, it has a very specific culture that doesn’t really apply to the rest of the UK. We have a very strong accent, which I’ve almost lost because I’ve been away for so long. We have a very friendly nature. If you get on a train or a bus in Liverpool, you’ll end up chatting with everybody in the carriage. And that doesn’t really happen in the rest of the UK. Everybody loves going out, whole families go out together. Liverpool is also a musical city, a football city, I love and miss it so much. The rest of my family still lives there. Does it have any bad things? I’ve got nothing bad to say about Liverpool. I must admit, when I first moved to Geneva, I hated it. I was so lonely (laughs). And that’s probably why I started doing music, because I needed something to cure me. I didn’t speak French, I didn’t know anyone, it was hard. But after about a year I realized I loved the place, and I could never live anywhere else now, apart from Liverpool. Geneva is small, it has the United Nations and the big companies and banks, but it also has this very underground scene with incredible music and art, and there’s always something interesting happening everyday in Geneva. You just have to go out and find it. So I love Geneva, too.” In Chaos Rising you played together with Barbara Teleki, who’s a Hungarian-born guitarist. Have you ever met? “No, and it’s crazy because she lives in Liverpool as well. But we never managed to get together. She’s amazingly talented, and she added two beautiful solos to two of the songs I played on. And she’s also a great artist, I follow her on Instagram, and she does some beautiful things.” And have you ever heard any Hungarian music? “Liszt and Bartók (laughs). Modern music, no. I’m sure there’s a great metal scene there, but I’ve never heard any Hungarian bands.” I see you have dogs at home. How do they react to your music? “I have two Tibetan terriers, Blade and Styx (my children named them!). I chose Tibetan terriers because I'm allergic to a lot of animals, and these dogs are 'hypoallergenic'. I also chose them because they are very gentle with children. They always sit underneath my grand piano while I am playing - I think they like the vibrations but they also feel that they are 'helping'. And when I am packing up my guitars, pedals etc for a gig, they always like to get involved as if they are helping. They seem to enjoy listening to metal music with me in the car, and love it when I sing to them, but I don't bring them to my gigs as it would be too loud for their ears!” Top 10 classical pieces for metal fans? Chopin Revolutionary Etude Liszt “Piano Concerto No.1“ Liszt “Mephisto Waltz“ Holst “'Mars' from The Planets“ Schumann “Piano Concerto in A minor Op.54“ Mozart “Requiem - Kyrie“ Bach “Harpsichord Concerto No.1 D minor“ Bach “St John's Passion Opening Chorus“ Rachmaninov “Moments Musicaux Op.16 No.4“ Verdi “Requiem Dies Irae“ https://www.catherine-fearns.com https://www.youtube.com/@catherinefearns1328

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