QUEENSRYCHE PARTY POLITICS!
NEW YORK DOLLS SYLVAIN SYLVAIN’S PIRATE LOVE
NICKELBACK OFF ROAD WITH RYAN PEAKE
COHEED & CAMBRIA TEARING DOWN THE HOUSE
STONE SOUR FEAR AND LOATHING IN PARIS
BACKYARD BABIES OUT ON THE ROAD
AEROSMITH
DOUBLE COVER SPECIAL EDITION
JUST FLIP ME OVER!
ISSUE 11 2006 £3.40
OUT OF THE CELLAR 9 771740 63 800 6
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ISSUE 11
11/8/06
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Issue 11 ✪ 2006 BURN MAGAZINE www.burnmag.co.uk t: +44 (0) 20 8133 7619 ISSN: 1740-6382
The Cartel: El Diablo ✪ Sion Smith editor@burnmag.co.uk Deputy Editor/Reviews Editor ✪ Kahn Johnson kahn@burnmag.co.uk Movies Editor ✪ Mike Shaw mike@burnmag.co.uk Live Editor/Staff Writer ✪ Andy Lye andy@burnmag.co.uk News Editor ✪ Kristian Barford kristian@burnmag.co.uk Radio/Clubs Editor ✪ JJ Haggar radio@burnmag.co.uk Games Editor ✪ John McMeiken games@burnmag.co.uk New York Editor ✪ Roger Lotring spook@prime-choice.com Staff Writer ✪ Louise Steggals louise@burnmag.co.uk Staff Writer ✪ Seb Willett seb@burnmag.co.uk Staff Writer ✪ Tom Canning tom@burnmag.co.uk Design
✪ Sion Smith/JPDS
Photography Crue: Chiaki Nozu, Wayne Herrschaft, Dijana Capan, Marianne Harris, Mick Rockster.
Contributors: Richard Edge, Sharon Edge, Chrissie Miller, Lynne Malkin, Katie Roberts, Duncan Bryceland, James Machin, David Lillywhite, Ida Langsam, Vikki Roberts, Joe Matera, Paul Acres, Julia Collins, Graham Finney, Simon Gausden, Jim Machin, Johnny Messias, Natalie Li, Nick Cullen, Nick Madeira, Chris Denham, Owen Williams, Marc Shapiro, Lucy Vachell, Bill Long, Sarah Mae Williams, Alex Cullen, Levte Lyton, Beren Neale
black
dye
whitenoise I made contact with one of my personal icons recently. I suppose I’m in a better position than most to do so, but I wasn’t expecting this one. Normally, a writer goes through a PR company but this one fell into my lap. I was standing in the kitchen - probably gluing something back together that I’d broken when the postman turned up at the window with his big stash of packages. One of these days, curiosity will get the better of him and he’ll ask just what the hell is in them. Anyway, if we were in the good old US of A, it would be termed as ‘suspicious looking item’. Man, it was thick. Certainly not CD or DVD shaped, so obviously it got ripped open first on curiosity value grounds. A book! Excellent. Double take. The item in question is called Life on Planet Loud. Still none the wiser? Probably not. It’s written by a guy called Lonn Friend - who, for those of you old enough to remember, was the one time editor of RIP magazine. At one time or another, he was the man in the eye of the hurricane with the bands who form the basis of what you now hold in your hands. From Metallica to Poison, Guns n Roses to Slayer, Alice Cooper to Nirvana.. he had a hand in building them all in the public eye. I used to think that was the coolest job in the world and it obviously had some kind of influence on me! Meanwhile, out in NYC, our ed over there, Big Roger Lotring, once entered a competition to interview Kiss, which he won (it would have been a pretty shitty comment if he hadn’t huh!), hand picked by Lonn himself I do believe. Hero worship aside, surely this is what we should all aim for in life whatever we do. To leave a legacy that others can pick up many years later. I have absolutely no idea if that’s possible anymore in this fractured world, but it has to be worth a shot! I know we’re nowhere near the level of having Axl, Seb and Ian Astbury coming round to my house for a BBQ and sitting in my car listening to a song that will one day become known around the world, but these things come in strange guises that you only pick up on in hindsight. Sitting in Starbucks with Chris Carrabba with a bunch of scrappily written bits of paper in front of us... hmm. You know what. That might make a good chapter one day. How about pouring a beer for Zakk Wylde while he’s doing an interview on the phone with a mag who sells about 10 times more copies than us and giggling like children. Yeah, there’s another one. That’s enough of that now. I have to take out the trash....
“Don’t ever let anyone know that you’re injured.” Dana White. UFC President
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Distributed by Worldwide Magazines © Burn Magazine 2006 While we take every possible care, we cannot be held responsible for the information herein. Burn Magazine may not be reproduced without the written permission of the publishers. Letters, particularly those submitted by email are welcome but we can only reply through the letters pages of the magazine. Burn Magazine recognises all copyrights and we seriously attempt to credit all material. If we have used and/or credited some of your material incorrectly, please contact us and we will do our best to rectify the error. All information contained herein is for informative/entertainment purposes only and is correct at time of going to press to the best of our knowledge. Can’t find Burn in your newsagents? Buy it somewhere else - or hassle your newsagent, or just get it online. All very simple really.
✪ Look after the place people! One life, one planet. Money where your mouth is time. Burn is printed of recycled paper wherever possible (apart from the cover which sucks when you do that). May the Goddess have mercy on your soul, but when you’ve no further need for the mag, recycle it. You know it makes sense.
B U R N M A G A Z I N E | w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k
why rock the bOaT, when you can the
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COOL FROM THE WIRE Delivering only the news that will fit on the page!
INXS: SHINING AGAIN... LIKE THEY DID! With the spectacle of the televised RockStar series having been over for some time now, INXS, recently announced their first European tour dates since 2002. The band who are currently in the midst of a sold out North American tour, will perform for the first time with their new lead singer, J.D. Fortune. Kicking off at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Thursday October 12th, this first jaunt back on European soil for 4 years will see INXS play a series of highly intimate venues as they reconnect with their ardent European fans. The tour follows hot on the heels of the UK September 2006 release of the band’s eleventh studio album SWITCH. With a career spanning an unbelievable 25 years, INXS are undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll bands. With more than 30 million records sold worldwide, countless awards from their peers and fans, platinum certification and a history documented with outstanding achievements, INXS are arguably Australia’s most successful rock export. J.D. Fortune became the new member of INXS after being chosen from among 15 finalists. For J.D. joining INXS was a dream come true and the greatest experience of his life. The 31-yearold singer originally discovered INXS as a teenager growing up in New Glasgow, Canada. After watching one of their videos on TV, he convinced his grandfather to buy him a guitar and quickly taught himself how to play ‘Devil Inside’. Years of intense highs and lows ensued, as Fortune cut his teeth working odd jobs and performing small dingy clubs at night. When INXS were holding auditions for a new lead singer, Fortune was living out of his car.
At the auditions for Rock Star: INXS, J.D. made a strong impression on guitarist Tim Farriss and guitarist/saxophonist Kirk Pengilly. “There was something about him that captured what we wanted,” recalls Tim. “He didn’t have anyone to accompany him, but said he could sing an INXS song. Kirk got up on stage and played acoustic guitar with him on ‘Never Tear Us Apart’. When he was finished, we looked at each other and said, ‘this guy has to be on the show.’” Not only was J.D. incredibly passionate about wanting the job, “says Andrew, “but he has this enigmatic charisma. You’re drawn to him. As an artist, he thinks outside the square and does things that are a little edgy. He’s also a storyteller – and you tend to recognise that in another songwriter. J.D. and drummer Jon Farriss collaborate on ‘Never Let You Go’ and Andrew and J.D. co-wrote two songs for the new album: the opener ‘Devil’s Party’ and the recent US hit single ‘Pretty Vegas’. Following electrifying television performances on the US TV shows Ellen and Late Show with Craig Ferguson, the track was released exclusively to iTunes and rocketed to #4 on their ‘Top Singles’ chart and #2 on their ‘Rock Singles’ chart. “From his first day in the band,” says Andrew, “he’s realised the pressure we’re under and came in ready to work.” J.D. adds, “…like having brothers and comrades-in-arms to fall back on.” “It’s also been fun,” Tim says, “to watch a neophyte performer adjust to the life of a rock star. You forget that it’s his first album, his first video, first photo shoot. We’ve been doing this for 30 years, but it’s all new to him. J.D. brings a mix of innocence and knowingness to the process.”
The tour dates are as follows and is selling out fast: Thursday 12 October London, UK (Shepherd’s Bush Empire) Friday 13 October Amsterdam, Netherlands (Paradiso) Saturday 14 October Koln, Germany (Live Music Hall) Monday 16 October Copenhagen, Denmark (Pumpehuset) Tuesday 17 October Oslo, Norway (Rockefeller) Wednesday 18 October Stockholm, Sweden (Berns) Friday 20 October Hamburg, Germany (Grunspan) Saturday 21 October Berlin, Germany (Postbanhoff) Sunday 22 October Warsaw, Poland (Stodola) Tuesday 24 October Stuttgart, Germany (Longhorn) Wednesday 25 October Munich, Germany (Backstage) Thursday 26 October Zurich, Switzerland (Volkshaus) Saturday 28 October Milan, Italy (Teatro Ciak) Monday 30 October Barcelona, Spain (Razzmatazz) Wednesday 1 November Paris, France (La Cigale) Thursday 2 November Gent, Belgium (Vooruit) Saturday 4th November Glasgow, Scotland (Barrowland Ballroom) Monday 6th November London, England (Shepherds Bush Empire)
J.D. Fortune (vocals) and Tim Farriss (guitar).
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COOL FROM THE WIRE SLAM OF THE YEAR! SummerSlam is coming on August 20th 2006 and it is set to be the biggest TV party of the summer - well, it will be in the office anyway. With the line-up shaping up nicely with Rey Mysterio, Triple H, Batista, John Cena and Kurt Angle on the bill as well as other Superstars from Raw, SmackDown and ECW, SummerSlam looks like it might live up to the arena destroyer that was Wrestlemania this year. Live and exclusive on Sky Box Office at 1 a.m. Sunday evening August 20th, from the TD Bankworth Garden in Boston, Massachusetts, as always you just have to pick up the phone and dial 08705 800 888 to order or do the remote thing and select ‘Sports and Events’ and follow the on-screen instructions. Included in the price of only £14.95/ 21.95 are repeats of SummerSlam, running from Monday August 21st.
ROOM 619 A therapeutic new column for those of us who are might be angry at the state of the world. First up to the Gates of Hell is Jaane from the soon to be showered with acclaim and disdain Hate Gallery. Bring it on brother...
SummerSlam is one of the ‘Big Four’, annual pay-per-view events alongside Survivor Series (this year on November 26th Philadelphia), Royal Rumble (already booked in for January 28th 2007 San Antonio Texas) and WrestleMania (miles away onApril 1st 2007 Detroit but likely to sell out in the next 10 minutes!). Just like the other three pay-per-views, SummerSlam brings together the joint rosters of RAW and SmackDown Superstars and this year they’ve thrown in the curveball of the ECW extremists joining the party. SummerSlam has hosted some great matches in its 18-year history, with the first ever SummerSlam being held in 1988 at Madison Square Garden in New York City when Hulk Hogan® teamed up with “Macho Man” Randy Savage in SummerSlam’s first ever main event defeating Andre the Giant and “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase in an all time classic. This year one of the most talked about matches is sure to be WWE legend Hogan versus ‘The Legend Killer’ Randy Orton. Hulk Hogan has not wrestled since last years SummerSlam where he defeated Shawn Michaels. An historic win for Randy Orton would enable him to add the ultimate Hulk Hogan name to the already impressive list of legends that he has defeated including Sgt. Slaughter, Shawn Michaels, Mick Foley and Ric Flair... time will tell! Trivia: It takes 14 trucks, 5 tour buses and 2 days from the previous show to travel to and transport everything to Boston. WWE have a crew of well over 100 people that handle the set up and prep of our production.
CORNELL WANTS TO WAIT BEFORE HITTING THE ROAD: AUDIOSLAVE will release its third album, "Revelations", on September 5, but don't expect to see the band on the road until 2007. Chris Cornell told Launch that unlike the group's previous releases, Audioslave plans to let fans spend some time with the album before it goes on tour. "Let the album come out for awhile," he said. "You know, the first two records we were out, actually, before they came out. We've done three records in four and a half years and toured a lot. This'll be one to just kind of let it go for a minute." This year, Cornell also plans to finish recording his second solo album, which he expects to release in 2007, following up the awesome "Euphoria Morning". Cornell has also recorded "You Know My Name" for the upcoming James Bond movie "Casino Royale", as well as a song for the independent film "Bug". Game On!
6 Things I Hate About You... and Everything Else.... Jade Goody, Chantelle, Rebecca Loos et al. Why? If you don't know the answer then I hate you even more. James Blunt. You're a cunt, it's true. Ken Livingstone. Three quid for one stop on the tube? Bumming Moslem radicals? Pushing party goers down stairs? Red Ken. Dead Ken. Fast food chicken vendors. Tenessee, Kensy, Dixie, Planet Chicken, Hen Cottage, Chicken World, Chicken Land and Dallas Fried Chicken. It doesn't matter what you call it, it all tastes like fucking toilet. Condoms. The bane of my life. The packets never open properly, I always put them on the wrong way and by the time they're on, I've lost the will to live/fuck. Oh and they split during anal. Apparently. Constipation Relief. The adverts always feature women. Everyone knows that women don't shit.
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BURNOUT
RANDY PIPER The former W.A.S.P. guitarist returns to the fray with a shit hot metal album... Oh it’s true, it’s true. The same thought went through my head as well. “Sad metal has-been”. I know you’re thinking it, but stop right there! I guess it’s a hazard of the job because you really would not believe how many discs we get from people who - to coin a phrase - used to be somebody. That’s a pretty bad way to look at artists who used to be in a big band and left, but it happens. It’s more to do with media perception and that’s a whole other subject entirely by itself. Back to the point though, I’d heard rumours about Randy Piper for years on end - including the one that he was dead - but had given no thought to him. The album turns up, and as a big W.A.S.P. fan, curiosity obviously reigns supreme. Great first track, great second track... Jesus. What a great fullfucking-on metal album! Get me this man on the phone! Are you like the world’s biggest metal secret then? “You could be right there bro! It’s been a long hard haul, but here we are - you like the album? We dissolve into a discourse on where it fits in, the whys and wherefore’s... I suggest to him that his vocalist, Rich, sounds one hell of a lot like Blackie - which is no bad thing. “If you listen closely though, there’s an awful lot more to him than that! Go listen to the album again. I see what you mean for sure, but he has a huge range. Huge!” There’s not an awful lot of point in us arguing over whether he does or doesn’t though when we both think it’s a great album, so we move on. Swiftly! What the hell have you been doing since you left W.A.S.P. all those years ago (and it is a lot of years ago!). “Well, there’s been a few incarnations of a few different bands Kings Horses mainly, but I got up one day and decided to concentrate fully on Animal. You know, I like playing blues a lot too, but I figured I can do that when I get to be an old man, so this is what I should be doing now while I can still rip it up! “I did some stuff with Alice during the Constrictor album, but that didn’t work out - nothing bad happened! Alice is cool, a great great guy, but I think after Blackie, I wanted to hold
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the reigns for a while. When you have art inside of you wanting to come out, it’s hard to go in somebody else’s direction all the time. “Oh hey! I gotta tell you - you’ll probably ask soon anyway! Wait until you see my new guitar!” He’s right. I was going to ask. His original guitar in W.A.S.P. was - as legend would have it - customised with the exhaust of a ‘59 Caddy that blew fumes out of it. (Apparently it was all that was left of Randy’s car after Chris Holmes had driven it!). Come full circle and Randy has new toy in store: “Maybe I have too many car parts lying around but I have this new one on the burner that has fully working headlamps sunk into it - along with a few other bits and pieces as well. It’ s pretty damn mean!” You think this album stands a
more Rich and I talked to him, the more we liked him. He is a multiplatinum songwriter. His name is Chris Laney. He’s also in Zan Clan who just got signed to Sony/Universal. He also worked for them writing songs for other bands. This guy really got his shit together. So we started working back and forth sending wav files over the internet and that’s pretty much how we wrote this new album.” Chris, now a fully fledged member of the band has brought in some vital new blood to the project. I would go so far to say that he’s really lit a fire under Randy - one that he’s been able to harness and ride for the length of the production of this record. Word on the street has it that when they do play, their stage show is really buzzing - not in the chainsaws and rack way, but in a real bombastic fashion. What are the odds on you
“Maybe I have too many car parts lying around but I have this new one on the burner that has fully working headlamps sunk into it... - Randy on his new custom built guitar chance out there. We’re into a different world now don’t you think? “Honestly, yes I do. I think there are at least six tracks that radio should pick up on. The others are great too, but maybe more aimed at the metal fraternity who appreciate ripping it up a bit more. “There’s nothing old school about it y’know. We’re not trading on past glories here - which is why we don’t have Chris or Tony Richards in the band. The intention is to start from scratch, build a new fan base and see where it takes us.” Indeed, the first album from Animal - 900lb steam - was little more than a bunch of demo’s that got released to test the water: “There were some good songs on there, but it’s nothing like this album. Nowhere near. “We eventually met this guy from Sweden on the internet. He kept on emailing us and his credits were just unbelievable. The guy was in a WASP tribute band, a Kiss Tribute band and is real talented. He contacts us and said ‘I would like to produce your next record’. The
getting your ass over here then? There’s probably enough people who give a damn because of the strength of the new album and also enough curiosity value to bring the W.A.S.P fans out of the woodwork - who you would then blow away of course! “That would be a dream! Y’know because of Laney, we have some strong European connections now, so it’s certainly not out of the question, but we have to see how the album goes first. Let me tell you this though - if it doesn’t happen, it’s not because we’re not working hard!” I wish I had more time to get into the guts of this with Randy. To be frank, he’s thrown me plenty of curveballs here. There’s more to this band than meets the eye, but first time around after being so long away from the public eye, those are the questions you gotta ask! Animal are a real band - not a sub W.A.S.P. spin off. Randy is firing on all six cylinders with this one and there’s more than just me at the mag who have heard it and have said nothing less than ‘wow’. That doesn’t happen very often. Bring it!
FACE OFF THE BIG QUESTION. A W.A.S.P. RESURRECTION ON THE CARDS THEN? With the success of Motley Crue's reunion, one would think more bands from the L. A. metal scene would try their hand at reuniting. Randy says, "I see what you're saying. And, the thought has crossed my mind. But, I don't think Blackie would ever even consider a reunion. And, I think Blackie and Chris have too much bad blood between them. Plus, I'm happy doing what I'm doing right now." IS THE ANIMAL ALBUM REALLY THAT GOOD OR ARE YOU JUST PAYING LIP SERVICE? NO! It really is that good. If you’re still listening to albums by LA Guns and Faster Pussycat and really dug the early W.A.S.P.albums, then it’s for you without a doubt. Full on riffs, great, great songs that last right to the end of the album. Seriously - you can’t go wrong!
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Issue 9
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backyard babies www.backyardbabies.com Words: Mr Smith
Pix: Ms Nozu
ROAD DOGS
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There’s something I really love about Backyard Babies and I can put my finger on it right away. They’re real in every sense of the word. What you see is exactly what you’re going to get - usually whether you like it or not! They’re the consummate road band. The first time I ever saw the band was so long ago, it’s probably embarrassing. It was just after the release of Diesel & Power in something like 1996 in the Buckley Tivoli - a pretty small club in Wales. If memory serves me correctly, the t-shirts had “6666 - Extra Evil” printed on them and it was far from a packed house. We did a spectacularly drunken interview in the toilet for some reason during which we talked about Ace Frehley, where the band was going and their homeland. To be honest, by the time I catch up with Nicke again, not that much has changed. A few more albums under the belt, a few thousand more miles on the tour bus and a few too many at the aftershow parties - and that’s the way it should be. Sometimes, that’s all you need - after the demise of the deal with BMG, which could have really pushed the envelope for them, they found themselves at Century Media, not a label particularly well known for it’s rock n roll base, but they’ve certainly found a good home there - at least they know what to do with them. Did you ever think it would be so much easier just to put out your own material? “It’s funny you should say that because the subject came up again a few days ago”, Nicke tells me in his far better English than most English people have a mastery of. “It’s a subject that comes up every now and then and we always come up with the same answer! Yes it would
be great to have control of your own destiny, but the sacrifice is too great. None of us wants to spend our days figuring out the accounts or dealing with the distribution companies - that would defeat the object. There would be no time to write any songs or sleep even. We always come back to the fact that so long as the record company is behind us and putting the product out, that’s good enough for us.” “With this new album, the distribution is good, it’s going to get to a lot of places. With the last album (Tinnitus), it was more of a taster, a kind of compilation for the American market where we have never really had any proper product out before. “In fact. America is absolutely the worst country in the world for us! To make some decent money and really be able to start things moving, you have to master America! “That’s an important place to be right now. Our fanbase in Europe is pretty solid, but if we could master the American market, we could use it to move on in a big way, so hopefully, Tinnitus did its job and the new album will start moving us in the right direction over there.” Ah, the new album: People Like People Like People Like Us. A step in the right direction? Well, for long term fans who were more than familiar with most of the material on Tinnitus, it’s certainly more than welcome and it’s a shot in the arm too. A man can get too far away from his roots if he’s not careful, and nothing reminds this man more of that fact than listening to this. Essentially, it’s a collection of great songs - which is all you should ever ask for anyway. What you have to love about the Babies is that they’re never going to change and they’re one of the few bands in the world who can actually get away with that. So long as the production is good and the band are coming to a place near you soon, the job is done. The Wildhearts tried it and imploded somewhat, the Darkness tried it and overkilled it, what’s the secret to Backyard Babies still being here? “Who knows! Ha, if we stopped to ask ourselves that question, maybe it would end! It’s kind of like... well, if we stopped playing, I really don’t know what I would do with my life, it would be over! I think the other guys feel the same too - I know they do. This is what we do and we’ve reached a level now where we’ve been doing it so long, all we want now is to start playing to more people. We know they’re out there!” Presumably back home, (Sweden), things are pretty hot for you. “Yes, things have always been good back home, but you know I think
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backyard babies www.backyardbabies.com
people, especially the media puts far too much emphasis on where a band comes from. Take a look at that Seattle scene that happened. There were three or four bands that were great and a lot of other acts got signed on the coat tails. Which is sad because if they had looked around they would have found the same number of great bands anywhere in the world. There are some in Stockholm, there are some in Sydney, New York and London, but people should look past the geography of a band and look instead at what’s going on inside the band. That way we’d end up with a healthier scene all round.” Nicke could well be right there, but then that’s probably the A&R equivalent of taking away all the little black plastic tabs from the racks in HMV. (How would you find anything I hear you ask. Well, when I was in fucking school, there was this thing called an alphabet - but now isn’t the time or place for that). What can we look forward to now then... more road dogging in support of the album? “Yes, I think we come back to the UK in May.” It’s about time you hooked up with a big band to get you in front of more people again isn’t it. That would surely be good for the reputation? I just remembered something! It wasn’t that long ago that you went out with AC/DC was it? “Yes, again, it’s something we’ve talked about. We thought it might have happened when we were with BMG but we weren’t there long enough for that to happen. Now we are just starting out again with Century, I think it will happen eventually, until then we are quite happy doing our own thing. The important thing is to just keep going though still being able to play. “Looking back the AC/DC shows were great for us. We’re very similar bands even though we’re miles apart. Malcolm once said to me that ‘it’s a two guitar, three chord rock band’. That sums us up completely there’s not much more to say than that - if you like that sort of thing, it’s the music that moves you. It’s pretty cool that Malcolm actually asked to us to go out on that tour too, we didn’t have to chase it down too much. That comes under the heading of ‘career highlight’! “We were actually supposed to go out with Kiss as well but Buckcherry beat us to it that time - I still think the AC/DC tour was a better one to
end up on though.” Seems to me that there’s plenty of life left in you guys yet even though you’ve been around the block a few times. Like, and I hate to use this comparison on you, you could kind of see when Hanoi were on their way out - and I use them because they were the only other band in a similar vain rather than because they’re Scandinavian. Everyone points at Two Steps as being a great album, but it was nowhere near as close to brilliant as Mystery City.. There doesn’t seem to have been a point where you’ve started to run out of ideas and the new album is great. Far better than Tinnitus even if you take it as a new album. It’s really compact and whole. “Thanks - we’re pleased with it. It’s a good indication of where we’re at right now and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a pure rock n roll album, but like you said yourself, that’s what we do. Here are delivering it! “You know, the other good thing at the moment is that while we’re out on the road, we’re moving some good quantities of merchandise and CDs - sometimes I think that’s the way it should be done all the time!” When it comes to dealing a full on rock n roll album, you can’t go far wrong with Backyard Babies.
People Like People Like People Like Us is out now... go get ‘em!
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I think the main problem is that the US is so huge. You can go on tour for two years and sell 50,000 copies. I don’t say that we are short on time but I don’t want to have my break through when I’m 90, you know.
Burn Issue 8 Final
5/2/08
21:36
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BENEDICTUM Always a pleasure to present new bands from across the Atlantic...
American
BadAss
“Bro - I got this hot new band. I think you’re gonna like ‘em.” So went the PR directive. “OK, send some music over we’ll take a listen”. So imagine my surprise when instead of a couple of sample mp3 files, I get these pictures you see here in my inbox.
Obviously it was the right thing to do because a) it’s a good way to get my attention and b) when the music finally did arrive about a half hour later, I had to listen to it to see what was going on. These PR people can be too clever for their own good. Having established that Benedictum are a proper band with real songs and guitars that riff so heavily that thunder needn’t bother rolling, I get a number out of said canny PR guy and end up speaking to Veronica about five minutes later.. and she’s just like you’d expect her to be!
“Sorry if I sound a bit tense! I’ve just been talking to this journalist whose question was ‘how could I have a song named Misogyny when I dress like I do in the pictures. What does what I wear have to do with the meaning of misogyny. The deep hatred of women is not even similar to a song about a victim of violence and how her spirit can be destroyed. It just has nothing to do with someone’s image! It just pissed me off - as if a woman can’t express herself and be sexy. I hate it when people miss the point. it’s frustrating!” Have you finished now? “I think so.”
I guess that’s what happens when you get into this business, some people pick up on the music and others pick up on how you present yourself. If you get lucky, you’ll get somebody who will see what you’re trying to accomplish as a whole. Welcome to the world - it can be hard for a
female fronted band at the best of times, but right now seems like as good a time as any with Lacuna Coil and Within Temptation frankly, breaking down doors all over the place, it’s not looked upon as it was in the days of Vixen.
You’ve been around for a while? “Yes! I won’t lie to you, it’s been hard sometimes, but you keep on going because it’s what you love doing. I’ve done loads of different things and sometimes you wonder why you bother when you can’t pay the rent or eat, but it was all worth it to get this far. Going back a few years, I don’t think I was ready for it, but I am now. My voice is in good shape and we’re pleased with the album - we want the whole world to hear it. Yeah... the album. It’s hard to walk away from the Dio-esque ring that it has. Not that Veronica sound anything like Ronnie, but hooking up with Craig Goldie has certainly rubbed off. “I think that was one of the best things that ever happened to us. Craig has been so
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supportive both in and out of the studio, he knows so many people who have also come in to help us and he’s really helped us to navigate our way through making this album. “People quite often say that we’re a little like Dio - I can see what they mean and it’s quite flattering but really, we’re nothing like them! It’s flattering and everything but we’re completely different in our approach.
If old school metal with a gun full of bullets aimed squarely at the future gets your rocks off, Uncreation is available now, so why are you still here?
It’s tempting to look at Veronica and think about her as being the whole of the band - it’s obviously tempting but far from the truth. A band is a band after all and there’s a talented bunch of guys working relentlessly at this to make it work... “Hell yeah... I’m just the gal up front! There’s a whole machine pumping away under the hood y’know. Blackie is definitely the taskmaster of the band. His intensity brings that more modern edge to the music as he actually studies the riffs over and over and actually plots out his territory! He adds thunder and excitement to the music too - and he’s also a graphic artist and is responsible for the bands logos - so he’s going to be busy as hell soon as we get our merchandise lined up! Then we also have Jesse.. the youngest member and he’s a Dimebag fan beyond measure! He came up from the depths of the underground metal scene in San Diego to join forces with us. He has played in numerous local bands including a Slayer tribute band and a short stint as a stand in with Cage. Chris adds textures and layers that give Benedictum that added atmosphere that you hear. He also works on Hammond Organs and any other type of keyboard for that matter at Fish Organs in San Diego… as his other profession and finally Pete Wells. Pete is the riff master (don’t tell him I called him that!)... those driving and inspiring riffs which we build upon. He was a member of Malady with me for several years and is the clown of the band there’s always one isn’t there! Essentially, that’s us!” They’re not afraid of wearing their influences on their sleeve either. Waiting in the wings is a great cover of Sabbaths 'Heaven and Hell' and also the Dio-era barnstormer, 'The Mob Rules' (set for inclusion on the limited edition digi-pak version only). You know, sometimes, you just click with people and I like Veronica a lot. I like her band too. Unashamedly metal, they do it the right way by writing songs that fist throwing motherfuckers can get down to. It’s a given fact that Veronica will have to suffer the slings and arrows of the press treating her as a sex symbol but that’s cool... she can handle it. At the heart of the matter is the fact that Benedictum are a great band who can more than handle it. It it takes a few T&A shots to shove along the pipeline a bit faster, so be it, that’s the business! One thing is for sure though, by the time they get their collective asses over here for a few shows later in the year, there should be a big enough following to start something special.
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Queensryche Chemical Rebellion
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Queensryche Chemical Rebellion
Chemical Rebellion Queensryche. The band name alone means a hundred different things to as many people. Chances are though, mere mention of the name and your mind transcends space and time straight to either Empire or Operation Mindcrime. The former, an album known for its faultless production values and sweeping landscape songs, the latter a barbarous political concept album that was first delivered almost 20 years ago. Which brings us to why Geoff Tate is in town: to promote Operation Mindcrime 2. An album that not many expected to ever happen, but as Tate points out himself, the political climate in the States is not that much different now than it was back then, it has to be done! The key I think, being the name Bush, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. I guess if you were a casual Queensryche fan or just plain not paying attention for the last 20 years, you might expect somebody with a Matrix coat to come sweeping into the room, but Tate is quite frankly, cool as a cucumber… In my head, I’d often wondered if there was ever a time when they thought, can we really do this? Can we pull it off? The level of expectation amongst the fan base will be quite high. Over to you Mr Tate: I never thought of it in those terms.. hmm. I don’t know how to answer that question! I never think in terms of charts or numbers or meeting peoples expectations. I don’t write records for other people, I don’t make records for anyone else but me. That might sound like arrogance and I apologise but that’s what’s always worked for me. I got into the story and into creating this world and this musical excitement and just tried to wrap my head around the psychology of the characters and make an interesting story. That’s my focus. I wasn’t interested in how long the record was or do we have a ballad or any of that stuff. Tell you a funny thing – this is kind of weird. The band never figures out how long the songs are until we’re finished. In mastering, where you put all the sequences together, at that point
they always list the songs and put the indexing in, and that’s when you find out how long the songs are. What’s odd is that Mindcrime was 59 minutes 5 seconds long. This album… exactly the same length. Isn’t that weird! Slightly! As a fan and someone that comes from ‘back then’, I was subconsciously waiting for something familiar to happen and those moments really exist. There are some really cool nods to the past. We tried to take recurring musical themes and weave them throughout the record. We took some of the musical themes of the first album, like some of the half step melody variations we do, and we brought them in and it gives it that similarity and a sense of cohesion. We thought a lot about how we were going to make them musically fit together. I mean we’re planning on playing them back to back, so we wanted them to be somewhat of a similar realm. If you put them back to back, you’ll be surprised at how much bigger and better technically it all is. The first one sounds ‘small’ by comparison. You know the first time I listened to the album, I didn’t know where to start. I figured the best way to listen to it was to throw everything away, the notes from the record company, your notes, the sleeve and the tracklisting, otherwise you get unwanted input and it really disturbs what the whole point of the exercise is about, and it makes you concentrate. There are some awesome things happening on there – that duet with Ronnie Dio and yourself is a real high point for me. That’s a good way to listen to it though. It was actually an amazing experience working with Ronnie. I’d worked with him before on the Hear n Aid song, but this time we were recording each other. I had high expectations of him because of who he is and he exceeded all of them. He’s a hell of a musician as well, so nobody had to explain anything. I just gave him the song and said: “This is what I’m trying to do – I want to weave these two voices together…” I wrote both the parts and he came back a week later and just took all the ideas and pushed them into his own realm. Thinking from a producers standpoint, it all
worked well, but when somebody brings in another idea based on what you’ve given them and they take it one step up, you have to see where it goes, you cant just squash it. He took it and he made it so much better. That’s why its so great to work in a collaborative situation because as one person you can only push an idea as far as you can take it. It’s always good to get a few other people involved – it takes the idea to a whole new dimension.
Touring is a whole different mindset, but you’re playing somewhere like Germany and everybody smokes... singing is an athletic endeavour. It requires your whole body to do aerobic activity. Sometimes you’re in a smoky fucking room and there’s a guy in the back room going “Hey, that Geoff Tate, he cant hit those high notes anymore.” You try and set an athletic record in a smoky room.
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Queensryche Chemical Rebellion So you’re taking it on the road – that’s very exciting news! I haven’t figured it all out yet. There’s places were we might flash back and flash forward in the sequencing but I just want to do this. No songs from any other records. Just Mindcrime. This is where my head is at. There won’t be another Mindcrime record because in my mind the story is done now. If my battered memory is any good, wasn’t there a lot of talk years ago about making the concept into a movie? Ha! They’re still talking. There’s a screenplay at the moment that being shopped to different movie houses. I wrote it with a guy called Mark Shepherd. It’s a really cool screenplay; I’ve tried not to make any casting decisions though. Once you hand a movie over to a studio, you sign away a lot of creative control. We’re protected to a certain point with contracts and so on, but nobody is going to put the brakes on because the studio want to use somebody you hadn’t thought of. We’ve had interest from many different directors over the years but never felt comfortable with their idea of what they wanted to do with it, which is why we did it ourselves, so that we had the story in a really solid format so that it was understood properly and they got it in a format that they were used to – not being open to interpretation and all that. So how’s things in the Q camp right now.? Good! You know Mindcrime has been building for a few years in our minds. With the last election in the States it was really a signal to put the record out again! I couldn’t back away from it.
You know what, I got that from it! I was really pleased with myself! I just couldn’t stay away from it. When the first one came out George Bush was in office and now 20 years later, Nicky gets out of prison and there’s a Bush in office again! That’s irony for you. Hell, I was 20 the first time round, it was all “politics, who cares who the President is… let’s listen to Poison!” Geoff descends into much laughter No. Stop laughing! It really was like that, but now, I think we’re in a much more politically aware generation. We all view Mindcrime as being this very successful classic record, but when it came out, it was not looked upon that way. Poison and Motley Crue defined what metal was and what we were doing was very left field. What was weird though was that all of us Poison and Crue fans, we all owned a copy of Mindcrime – we never ventured over the other way into Anthrax and Megadeth, but we all had that album. Looking back it was pretty strange. But 20 years goes by and it’s a different kind of erm… well, the critics didn’t dig it and it was made fun of, but MTV got a hold of the single and it became a huge thing. The power of TV! There was a huge demand for the DVD too when it came out too, yeah? Geoff turns the tables on me… You know this is what’s always confused me. Why do we need a TV station or a magazine to tell us what’s good? Why do we need that? Is it because we don’t have a clue and cant make up our own minds?
It think there are people out there who actively hunt things down. But they’re very small pockets… really small numbers. I feel compelled to answer… Back then, you would buy Kerrang because it was all there was and they would take a chance now and then y’know – and hint at good alternative stuff, and take a shot at putting a band like Kings X on the cover, but it would be hit n run and you either discovered it or not. We were fed then too but it just wasn’t so force fed and saturated with information. We spend huge amounts of money on designer labels that are so disposable - 6 months later and its not worth anything? From a music point of view though, I think people like to find things – or at least I do. That doesn’t happen any more. The record companies - they did this thing in the nineties where they fired all the music people and brought in the bean counters who were just in it for the money. They looked at everything from a sports mentality level rather than the music and they started signing up bands that were similar, rather than taking the unique ones. They spattered a whole bunch of people against the wall and made music disposable to the marketplace and in 6 months it would be a new band that came out. Around the same time, rap came out and you didn’t need huge amounts of money to record anymore. You could record an for a thousand dollars and sell millions, so why bother. At the same time a whole shift happened in the publics mind of what was good and what was
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Essential ‘rÿche The Queensrÿche albums you can’t afford to be without.
Queensrÿche The EP that began it all with a complete concert as bonus tracks! Featuring the original studio versions of classics Queen of The Reich and The Lady Wore Black (still one of the band’s best songs) and live versions of the same tracks plus several tracks from the band’s next album Warning, there’s no better introduction to the beginnings of Queensrÿche.
Rage For Order (1987) Queensrÿche’s “coming of age” album. This is where their technical and progressive style started to come to the fore. Includes some of Queensrÿche’s best songs: Walk In The Shadows, I Dream In Infrared and London.
Operation: Mindcrime (1988) The quintessential metal concept record. No metal collection is complete without this album. Everything about it is as close to perfection as possible, from song craft to storyline to performance. The live CD and DVD companions Operation: LIVEcrime is just are essential to experience the live show Queensrÿche created to tell the story of the album. Includes the classics The Needle Lies, Breaking The Silence, Revolution Calling and I Don’t Believe In Love.
There’s a lot of stupid people in America and you can quote me on that. You can gauge it by the election. Look at all the stupid people who voted for Bush! bad and now mediocrity is what sells. It’s everywhere. You’re right. Music is disposable, but the bigger question now is long before Mindcrime 2 appears on the net? From a money point of view, it’s a bad thing for you, but creatively it’s a winner because people are hearing your material that otherwise may not be exposed to it. The record companies needed to control it but they blew it. There’s no fishing line attached to it. It’s gone way beyond their control - they can’t catch up. There are so many different arguments. You know the labels were cool to a point back then, and then they fired everybody. It’s a completely different world out there. There are no venues for a band to filter up through anymore, not from scratch anyway. They just passed that law where they say that a band cant play in a pub anymore. That’s the beginning point of a bands career isn’t it over here? That’s awful but it’s happening everywhere. Its like they’re trying to force it out of the culture. There’s no breeding ground any more. Could you do it again? What from scratch? I quite often say that I’m done, but my wife just laughs at me and she’s right. I can’t walk away. Well, in my opinion its been a strange ride for Queensryche. You seem to have been up and then down over the years, but I guess if a band stays around long enough, that’s bound to happen
Some people liken life in a band to ocean waves. I can see that definitely as a nice way of describing it. Lives do go up and down. The up and down lets you have a perspective. You know we’re better off now than we ever have been. What I’m saying is, that the perception is that Queensryche went away sometimes when they came back, they made some average albums which is just not what anybody expects of you, but I guess that’s the media talking. That’s the media alright – it’s all about how much page space they choose to give you. It doesn’t always cover everything you do. People come up to me and say “I can’t believe you’re putting a new album out. It’s been sop long since Empire!” Conceivably, you can get your album reviewed in Rolling Stone and Kerrang! – that's the two biggest rock magazines in the world who might pan it - and that’s pretty much your career in the hands of two people who have decided your next moves on both sides of the Atlantic. I don’t read my press anymore. You wouldn’t come out of the house if you did! I don’t even read our website. I’m, glad they’re on there but I don’t read it. Thus is the gospel according to Geoff Tate. Whatever the media spin that gets put on Mindcrime 2, as always, whether you like it or not is up to you. Maybe Mindcrime is more about the music industry than it is about George Bush, but damn me if I didn’t think of that analogy until after Tate had gone to lunch...
Empire (1990) A slightly more commercial turn for Queensrÿche, and frowned upon a little for “selling out” and all the other usual fickle clichés, but a good album is a good album. It yielded the singles Jet City Woman, Empire and the immortal ballad Silent Lucidity but also includes another two of the band’s best songs: Another Rainy Night (Without You) and The Thin Line
Q2K (1999) The album everyone loves to hate. Disliked when it was released as a knee-jerk reaction to the departure of lead guitarist and principle song-writer Chris DeGarmo, this is probably the most underrated Queensrÿche album. Some people question the various direction changes on albums like Promised Land (1995), Hear In The Now Frontier (1997) and Tribe (2003) but Q2K is solid hard rock, Queensrÿche style.
The Rest: In a perfect World Tribe would be included here. It’s a thoughtful album and much more emotional and passionate than the last five albums. For the first time since the eighties the band sounded like they were playing songs about things they believed in. But it’s not for everyone. The same accusation could, and has, been levelled at Q2K there’s no real reason why that album shouldn’t appeal to all Queensrÿche fans, and for that reason it’s included here instead of Tribe. For the band’s other albums, Warning is just a continuation of the first EP. A good album and well worth adding to your collection once you’ve got the essentials. Promised Land is good for the most part, but too much weirdness precludes it from this list. Hear In The Now Frontier is just a weird album. It should be the last album a Queensrÿche fan should buy. For every good track (Sign of The Times, Hit The Black) there’s something completely bizarre (spOOl). The b-side Chasing Blue Sky, now included as a bonus track, is superb though. There’s also a double live album Live Evolution, another live record The Art of Live and corresponding DVDs (beware of the Art of Live DVD though, it’s entirely filmed in sepia!) plus two compilations: Greatest Hits and Classic Masters, both of which are good introductions if you’re not sure where to start. AL
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ill nino www.illnino.com
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS... Words JJ Haggar
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Ill Nino are one of ‘those’ bands. Like Sevendust, Mudvayne etc; tipped to be massive every year, ‘ones to watch’, then just as suddenly condemned to being ‘over’. The media loves to build it up, then when it doesn’t explode, to dismiss it completely. I have always fuckin hated that. Never liked anything because it was new or old, en vogue or out of fashion. I like stuff because it’s good, I dislike stuff because it’s shit. Simple! I like Ill Nino. They push buttons. I don’t like everything they do, but I like enough.
“This time round it’s really the first time we wrote as a band, all of us together at one time, all the personalities and identities coming out at one stop, in each and every song. On our first record I did most of the writing by myself, most of the music. The second record was quite fragmented. I wrote five or six, others also wrote alone, so it was a little disjointed. [This time] we all got to sit in the rehearsal studio, and really just mess around with each others ideas, instead of just bringing an almost finished version from an individual that was not good enough. We got to experiment with each others vision and ideas, this time we brought it all to the table, lets not split it up, lets just record it or put it in the trash” Sonically this time around the band have certainly delivered! “It’s funny but a lot of people seem to get the same perception from it, but there is a case of less is more on this record than any previous release, while bringing more culture, experiment, percussion, but not five guitar parts, or rhythm tracks, three vocal tracks, we tried to keep things simple and expand on the feeling, the vibe. Everything is pretty raw, almost played and recorded live.” This would explain why the new songs sound so good in concert, “Definitely, recording as a unit enabled us to play live better as a unit, the performance on the record had to be intact and perfect, the new songs just crush the old songs, it’s not even comparable. Don’t get me wrong, the old songs are still great and we love to play them, but it feels like a re-birth right now. The fans from day one are still with us and we are picking up new ones all the time, we seem to have survived the negative drama that has evolved the music scene over the last few years. It seemed like elements of the media wanted to rid the world of certain types of rock and metal. We are very lucky right now to have a strong and dedicated fan base, and to also be bringing in new fans that can join them and accept originality in metal, having your own identity, being able to say that no one else really does this like we do.” It’s a bold statement but one that Christian can justify, “Being a musician first and foremost it’s important to be able to walk away and say I was a leader not a follower, I left my mark. We will be able to say that. We have stepped out and stepped up to leave that mark, it’s a cultural Latino and jazzy style metal! Little by little we are just going to keep taking it to the next level, we are not in a clump of bands doing something, we now stand alone, since the beginning we always had our own identity, and I never really considered us a nu-metal act, bands like Limp Bizkit fronted that genre, we are the furthest from that imaginable. I always call it what it was and what it is, we play a
mixture of progressive aggro music that is extremely cultural and yes, we are a metal band, a Latin metal band, but we are not afraid to experiment with things. Most other metal acts would find that unacceptable, that is not a wrong thing, it’s just not us. The whole metal scene and genre can be a little restrictive to expression, and at the end of the day to say it’s not acceptable because it’s not your typical style or trend is selling yourself short just to try and fit a business model created by money men. It’s the purist definition of not being true to who you are.” The media world is starting to have to deal with this band on it’s own terms, “Culture and music is starting to become a lot more accepted outside of the normal channels, even in HipHop, as much as you may love or hate it, there is Punjabi MC, different cultures come into many genres and bring a whole new taste to the music, crossing over from one genre to another. The metal community is starting to re-discover the different identities, like it was in the 70’s when rock covered everything from Zeppelin to Bowie, just taking what they like, not what they should like. For example my lyrics have always been bi-lingual, after all I speak both Spanish and English, I try to incorporate both cultures into the music, I could not just do it for one song and be that specific, it’s part of the whole concept with what we do, I can’t just choose one or the other, I do what feels right at the time. Bands like System Of A Down have brought their culture to the forefront, Sepultura did the same with their Roots record, Santana even did that 30 years ago. It just becomes fluid and accepted, it’s a vibe, the melody carries you along, the language should not be a musical barrier. Rammstein are a band that you would not expect to be big outside of Germany, but they are massive worldwide singing in German. Prejudice against cultures and language will always exist, but I hope we as a band are adjusting the balance.” They certainly are doing just that, and it seems will be for some time, “Tomorrow night we leave the UK and go to Australia, then we go home, a U.S. headlining tour beckons after that, with a bunch of other great acts, hopefully we will be back for some festivals, then think about another album. This is what we love to do, and we are blessed to be able to do it.” Blessed indeed, and if ever there was a band deserving of breaking the mould in metal, these guys are it. They have constantly delivered great albums and they can certainly also deliver in a live arena. You get the feeling that free of those ‘nu-metal’ tags the band is ready to take their place at the top table with the metal greats of both the past and present. From a caterpillar to a butterfly, Ill Nino are ready to fly.
ILL NINO
Front man Christian Machado seems quite happy with everything, “I’m having a great time, I feel good, playing the shows, being back in Europe, shows have been great, just tearing it up every night.” So it would seem that the band have stepped up a league, ‘Hell yes, I’ve seen an improvement, in all of Europe we have played to the biggest crowds we have ever played to, even bigger than the Roadrage tour we did here last time around. It’s just been amazing doing these shows mainly on our own, no major support act, we have Breed 77 with us here in the UK, who are a great band and we love them, also we have a local support act from each town which has been great, but this tour is selling on our merit.’ The band have taken this moment in time to stand alone, “Yes, for sure, we are going for it, but I have to say that to get this kind of reaction is definitely an honour for us.” But it’s not only on the live front that the band has stepped up. Their latest album shows a maturity and a band coming into its own. Christian expands, “We had complete control over the recording process this time around, which engineer, where we should record, from step one to step 100 we had full control. That made such a huge difference to the outcome. We did not have an overbearing producer or label person looking over our shoulder all the time, we had no pressure to record a certain style of song, or to have a single. It seemed that everyone outside the band had the confidence in us to deliver a great record, this then gave us the confidence to do just that.” There were some personnel changes along the way as well, and it’s often the case that when acts lose some members it makes them stand or fall, “The guys that came in gave us such a boost, they brought new ideas, fresh blood, an attitude that perhaps we had been missing, they wanted ‘it’ so bad that it made the rest of us want it also. It certainly influenced where One Nation Underground was going to stand at the end of the day.”
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john corabi www.john-corabi.net
Do Your Own thing... Union and E.S.P. front-man John Corabi has previously had the rather irritating (for fans, anyway) habit of disappearing from view in between releases. The lack of a personal website has never helped matters and many times over recent years his fans, even if John wasn’t aware he had any, have been crying out to know what John’s up to. Well, John exclusively lets Burn know. Past, present and future. Words: Andy Lye/Pics: Phil Ryan Union and E.S.P. front-man John Corabi has previously had the rather irritating (for fans, anyway) habit of disappearing from view in between releases. The lack of a personal website has never helped matters and many times over recent years his fans, even if John wasn’t aware he had any, have been crying out to know what John’s up to. Well, John exclusively let’s Burn know. Past, present and future. “I’ve been doing a lot of everything. Obviously playing guitar with Ratt, doing their thing, when I can. I just got a gig writing. As it’s duly noted most of the country artists that are very popular at the moment don’t write their own material. So this publisher contacted me about going down to Nashville, and I go down there a lot and write songs and give them to him, and he gets artists to cover them. Otherwise, I’m just trying to put a new band together. It’s taking forever because I just want to make sure that
things. I can write for my solo band and I can also go to Nashville and write there. Songs that maybe my band wouldn’t use, they’ll use. So I’m just kinda of getting hip to a lot of different things. A little late in life, but… I’m still not really the kind of person that’s going to stand in a room and talk about myself, I don’t feel comfortable with it. Hence me kind of disappearing. It’s not like I give up, I just go away and get on with my life. Hopefully with this manager now, he’s going to keep more on top of it. He’s making notes about everything that I do and he’s plugging away. I’m on MySpace now too. I just got hip to this thing with all the friends and I thought “hey, if I did do something, just record one song or something and I wanted to hit everybody I could just do it through MySpace. My son’s on there as well, and his band go on there and something like 60,000 people have heard their song. I thought “that’s pretty cool, I’ve gotta try
“I don’t have any problems standing on a stage in front of 20,000 people… But I’m not going to fuck somebody over to get it.” it’s people I get along with and that are willing to go out and work hard and struggle, just like I’m gonna struggle. So it’s been a little bit of a chore, but it’s coming together. I just kinda have my hands in a bunch of different shit! “It’s weird, even with having someone like Bruce (Kulick) in my camp, I’ve never been one to do that whole KISS mentality thing, where you saturate the websites and you’re always going “hey, buy this and buy that”. I’ve never been that kind of guy. Even with writing, like if I was in a band, I just concentrated on writing music for that band and nothing else at all. And it’s just recently that I’ve realised I can do other
this”. So yeah, email me! Be my friend!” Hopefully this will all mean things involving John will get a little more publicity as well. As an example, a couple of years ago Bobby Blotzer of Ratt made an album with John under the name Twenty4Seven. The album pretty much got made, came, and went again without even registering on most peoples’ radar. “Well, to be honest with you, that was Bobby’s trip. Originally I was only supposed to sing a song or two but I wound up doing the whole record. It was alright, it was fun when I did it. It’s not necessarily the kind of record I would have done, but I helped him out. I did
him a favour. I kind of went in to that thinking “OK, this is Bobby Blotzer’s deal, it’s his record, it’s his name”, I only wrote one song, the rest was his shit, so I was like “when this comes out, no press” because he wanted me to be on the cover and do all this press and I said “no. I said I’d sing on it and that’s it. I’m not going to do any shows, it’s not my cup of tea. If you want to put a band together, go do it. “Like I said, I don’t really feel comfortable hyping myself. I’ve never been comfortable with it. So now I’ve got somebody who believes in me, so he’ll do it for me. I’m comfortable with that. I’ve just never been that guy. I apologise to any fans I have out there. And that’s the other thing too, I don’t know what it is, but everybody goes “oh, wow, you’re a rock star” and I’ve never really considered myself that. So I’ve never really had any grasp on when someone goes “all your fans” and I go “well, how many fans do I have? Who are you talking about?” So I’ve never really had much of a grasp on that whole concept of people wanting to know what I’m doing. It’s kinda weird. I just make my music and sing and do my thing and everything else is just icing.” Now, this is the guy who stepped into the front-man roll with Mötley Crüe in the mid-‘90s and made the best album of their career. One of the biggest, most flamboyant bands in the World. How could someone who doesn’t like hyping themselves survive in Mötley Crüe? “I wasn’t comfortable with it then either! I don’t want to say I didn’t like it. Of course everybody likes flying first class! I was never really comfortable… just for example, when we would rehearse, I would just hang out with the Crüe guys. Just like “hey man, how you been? How’re you’re kids?”, and go have a beer at the pub and whatever. And then, when they would be loading our gear out, if I was standing there having a cigarette and I saw a guy was trying to
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john corabi www.john-corabi.net lift my amps or lift anything I’d go “here man, let me give you a hand” and the guys would go “Dude! We pay people for that! Stop!” And I don’t really have any of that separation anxiety where I’m all “you work for me, and I’m up here, and you’re down there.” I’ve never been that guy. I don’t have any problems standing on a stage in front of 20,000 people, I like flying first class, I like eating a good steak every now and then, you know what I mean? But I’m not going to fuck somebody over to get it, or totally prostitute myself either, with being on a website and selling a John Corabi t-shirt, or a pack of cigarettes that John Corabi touched, you know? That’s kind of weird to me. It goes really far, I mean I’ve just heard there was this guitar that got totally destroyed on an airline and people are now buying chunks of my guitar. That kind of stuff just freaks me out.” Dude’s got a point. People spending many thousands on stuff on eBay and the like because it’s got some reported tenuous connection to a celebrity is a far cry from getting on stage and performing and making records. And artists can go too far with marketing and the Internet and the like. John is finally striking that balance between informing his fans, getting his music out there and keeping this under control. And when you’re doing as many different things as John, that balance is essential. As well as the solo album and the touring commitments with Union, E.S.P. and Ratt, John’s also got a book on the way. “Because of the success of The Dirt (Mötley Crüe autobiography) and Tommy’s (Lee, Mötley Crüe drummer) book (Tommyland), I was talking with this guy, a book writer in America, and he said “I would love to do something on you”. He said he found my chapters in The Dirt to be really interesting and forthcoming and straight forward. I loved The Dirt, I thought it was a great read, but I got a little disappointed because I wanted to know more about Tommy as a person, or Nikki as a person, or Vince, and it doesn’t really dive too much into their life. There’s like this big gap! It’s kind of vague, which I understand, but mine starts off with my Dad talking about my Dad, and my being born and all these silly things I did when I was a kid, like I burnt my kitchen down and I stole a car and I did this and I did that, so it’s all these little things along the way right up to right now. We’re still adding as I go. Then we’ll edit it down. It’s gonna be cool!” It certainly sounds it. This is going to be a huge year for John Corabi, one of the most underrated talents in rock. Burn are huge supporters of John, and you should be too! Check out the albums Mötley Crüe by Mötley Crüe, Union and The Blue Room by Union, Give Me Air by Voodooland, Lost And Spaced by E.S.P. and Let It Scream by The Scream, as well as John’s limited edition CDs Uncovered and Scremin’ Live ’92, then come back next month for more including exclsuive extracts from his book!
“I’ve never been one to do that whole KISS mentality thing.”
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THE MANY FACES OF JOHN CORABI As well as John’s known activities like Mötley Crüe, The Scream, Ratt, Union, E.S.P. and his brief involvement with Brides of Destruction (his backing vocals and rhythm guitar can be heard on their debut album, not that he’s credited) John’s surfaced in one or two other guises as well. John elaborates on two of those here:
Angel City Outlaws & Cardboard Vampyres: “Just a cover band. Just fun. Actually there’s the two things I’ve done, Angel City Outlaws and Cardboard Vampyres. Just a bunch of mates getting together and saying like “wow man, I fuckin’ dug that Bowie record, Ziggy Stardust”, and we’ll learn some songs and just do it, you know? The thing with Jerry and Billy Duffy is they’re a little heavier, so we do some heavy, heavy shit like Sabbath and Metallica and stuff like that. Angel City Outlaws is more classic... Stones, Beatles, Bowie. And it’s just for fun. It’s just a fun thing that allows us to keep playing and go out and have a couple of pints with your friends.”
talking about.” When I saw him I was like “Dude, don’t put the shit on the fucking computer yet, it’s not done!” It was really in a rough form. So that was just Stevo and I, and Jimmy D’Anda (drums). Some of those songs I’m going to carry over into my solo thing and try ‘em. I just keep hearing more things, so I feel like it’s never good enough or it’s not right.” John can also currently be heard singing several tracks on the new Karl Cochran (original E.S.P. bassist) album under the name Voodooland. The album is called Give Me Air and also features Joe Lynn Turner. Check out the review in the reviews section of this very issue.
Zen Lunatic: “That is actually part of the solo thing. Stevo (Bruno, bass), who recorded a couple of the tracks that I wrote, had a song called Angel, and I loved it and thought it was a great song. So we talked about putting a band together, and then I went off and did Ratt, and he did some Motley demos, then we hooked up again briefly with the Brides of Destruction thing, and then Zen Lunatic, to be honest with you, I was a bit miffed at him about. I went away on tour, and he mixed my songs and put them on a website and called it Zen Lunatic. I was gone, I didn’t even know, and everybody coming up to me and going “man, I really love that Zen Lunatic stuff” and I’d go “what the fuck are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re
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bret michaels www.bretmichaels.com
It’s been 20 years since Poison (otherwise known as frontman Bret Michaels, guitarist CC DeVille, bassist Bobby Dall and drummer/animal rights campaigner Rikki Rocket) first exploded on the scene. Since then, they’ve defied every ‘scene’ going, sold albums when they really shouldn’t have and packed out arenas left, right and centre. Kahn Johnson caught up with Bret Michaels to chew the fat.
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Swallow
This!
You know, this job is a whole lot easier when you immediately get on with the person you’re interviewing. With some people, you’re lucky if you spend even half the allotted time with them. Bret, on the other hand, was still chatting away long after we should have gone our separate ways. Some days, I have the best job in the world. Of course, starting an interview like this can be a problem. So much has happened over the past 20 years, which point do you jump in at? I took the easy option, and asked why they fuck they haven’t been over here since 1993. Bret laughs. “I’ve been saying this is the year. And if Poison don’t, I will! The Poison shows are fantastic, but my solo shows are really great as well, and I’ll bring a kick-ass band! “We’ve tried a few times since we were last over, first with Alice (Cooper) and then Def Leppard, but something always seemed to go south, promoters always wanted to bring us over as part of a package I think. “I’ll definitely be over this year – it’s been way too long. No more excuses!” While they may not have graced us with their presence since the Seven Days Over Europe tour in 1993, since getting back together the band have again become a staple of the summer circuit Stateside. “The shows are bigger and better than ever,” enthuses Bret, his excitement clearly audible. “Everyone’s in good shape and health. There’s been a few rehab’s for CC…” his voice trails off into a chuckle, something that will become a regular feature of this conversation. His enthusiasm for his job is refreshing. 20 years on, and he’s as excited about Poison’s next song/album/tour as he undoubtedly was about their first. “I still feel like a kid,” he laughs. “I still get excited thinking about what we’re gonna do, where we’re gonna play – it hasn’t become jaded at all. “I still love making music. It still feels like the first time.” To me, it seems pretty unbelievable that he can feel that way. We are, after all, talking about the band that every critic seems to love to hate. They can’t play live, their albums always
have something wrong with them… The list goes on. Bret laughs again. “But we’ve outlived them all! A lot of bands would have packed up, with all the flack we got! “But we’ve never given in, and the fans saw us and loved what we did.” Which helped when the world of rock music got turned on its head in 1992 by the onslaught of grunge, which claimed many a good band. “I was true to myself,” reflects Bret. “I had integrity. I couldn’t chase what everyone told me to. Fuck, I even had a guy tell me Poison should do a grunge album! Can you
imagine?” Instead, after three increasingly successful albums, Poison did what they wanted and recorded Native Tongue. It wasn’t a critical success (big shock there), but it still sold. It also provided the soundtrack to one of the band’s ‘soap opera’ periods. “The thing with Native Tongue,” begins Bret, “is you deal with the cards you are dealt. “I’d had a huge fight with CC, and we’d parted ways, and we had to find a melodic guitarist at that time.” That guitarist was Richie Kotzen, who – it was reported at the time – beat Blues Saraceno to
“I still get excited thinking about what we’re gonna do, where we’re gonna play – it hasn’t become jaded at all.
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bret michaels www.bretmichaels.com
“I used to watch shows and you’d have people going ‘corporations suck’ – and these were the same people who fought to get their band on MTV!” the gig. At the time, Bret described Richie as having “a fire up his ass”. He’d end up with more than that up there, but I digress. Back to Native Tongue… “Musically it’s one of our strongest albums,” insists Bret (not that I’m disagreeing). “We worked hard on that record. Who knew there was about to be a whole new era of music?!” That ‘era’ not only saw tastes change almost overnight, but the new bands seemed to have a different attitude, something Bret found hard to understand. “I used to watch shows and you’d have people going ‘corporations suck’ – and these were the same people who fought to get their band on MTV! “If I make my music for real, then why do I care who plays it?” As melodic rock bands became as hip as piles, Poison went out on the road – taking with them bands (such as Alice In Chains) who would go on to help drive the nail into commercial rock as we knew it. It was while out supporting Native Tongue that the Poison soap opera developed a new plot
twist. Kotzen got the boot. Bret sighs. “Richie got together with Rikki’s girlfriend – and that’s something you don’t do. You don’t fuck friends over like that.” With Kotzen sacked (or, as he’s claiming on his own website, he’d finished his “obligations”), Poison needed a new axe-man and who should get the gig, but the man who auditioned the last time around… “They are both incredible guitar players,” says Bret, “but while Native Tongue is musically a better record, we had more fun recording Crack (A Smile). “We’d been forced to write on the road, and Blues kind got thrown in and just did it off the cuff. “Songs from Crack will be in the set when we come over!” He won’t let that drop you know… While you wait for either him or them to land on these shores (for the record, the US tour already runs into August), there’s the 20 Years of Rock album to keep your ears warm. It’s got all the hits (although Fire and Ice is
conspicuous by its absence), a Kiss cover and a new song (well, new to Poison). We’re An American Band was recorded in a couple of days with Don Was at the helm. “I love him as a producer,” declares Bret. “He’s a really cool guy – the real deal. “I thought we were going to do a couple of songs, but he had to get back to the Rolling Stones! “We did a good job, and really busted our balls – but I wanted to do an original. We voted on it and I lost. “Man, I hate to admit that…” He laughs again. “We’re going to work together again though. He admitted he didn’t know what to expect with us, but he came down to see us rehearse the song and was blown away! He just stood there and said we’d nailed it!” He wasn’t wrong. Like Bret, as an example of what the band are doing now, an original song would have been fantastic, but it does the job while the fans wait for a tour. “Write this down,” insists Bret. “We WILL be over this year!”
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this istruth! our Words: Andy Lye Pictures: Chiaki Nozu
“It’s probably the heaviest album we’ve ever done. I think in the past we tried something like that but due to the fact that we didn’t have enough time to work on the sounds because the budget was more limited than we can do now. And the fact that the American influences, the sounds of the American bands are very powerful.”
Cristina, totally dwarfed by the expansive sofa she’s curled up in the corner of, happily explains the new elements that have gone into the band’s latest opus, and how excited they all were to get back to doing something new. “I think the main motivations were the fact that we were so excited to write the new stuff after four years, and we had a really different point of view because after being on the road for so long, especially in America, we incorporated new elements that weren’t present before. That means that the Lacuna Coil style has not
changed if we’re talking about the roots, but the sound is changed. Now it’s much more groovy, much bigger. Now every instrument is much more important by himself compared to before. We even had more time and more budget to record the album, so the production is definitely much better.” One of the best exponents of the male/female dual vocal approach, Lacuna Coil really do have a style unique to themselves, amalgamating many different influences and styles.
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Andrea Ferro, who’s incredibly versatile voice can balance against, or harmonize with, Cristina’s at all times, adds a more technical description of the different way the band approached the album. “We worked in two separate sections. We did maybe four or five songs and sent the demos of those songs out to some producers to find out who was going to mix the album. Then after a few months we did some shows in between, and tested some of the songs, at Download in the UK and all around Europe, and then we went back to the studio to complete the record. So we had lots of time to think if the direction B
we were going was still right and we still liked it. When you approach a new record if you’re honest and you see some evolution in your music you need to see if you still like the new influences you’ve absorbed or if it was just something about the moment. So it’s important to test it and to play them around and let the people tell you their opinion.” As many people have mentioned before, one of the American influences that’s clear to me when listening to some songs is that of those thunderous pioneers, Korn. Something that Andrea confirms: “I think the bass can give that impression
because the bass sound from Korn is a sound we really like. But we didn’t want to turn the band into just a nu-metal band. We just want to incorporate some of the things from the American metal that we really like, like the big size of the sound, and the groove from the drums and the bass. That’s something unusual for a European band. On the other hand we kept a lot of our European roots by using the strings. For the first time we used a real string four-piece orchestra which did all the violins and cellos. We also used some really symphonic arrangements on the slow songs. And then we worked a lot on the use of the voices. I think
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“If you want to be a complete artist I don’t think you should have barriers in anything” she’s doing something a little different from the past tracks, like more rhythmical singing and some more Arabian kind of vocals which are coming from our Mediterranean roots. “I’ve also done different things like I sing some parts clean with a more deep voice, some part with a very high voice. I also do some powerful vocals. We work a lot on the harmonies together, so it’s been a big process of incorporating all these elements both from Europe and from America, which is really what we’re like as persons from spending so much
time over there we’ve also absorbed a little bit of the lifestyle and culture in a way, but we still have our roots, we still feel Italians. “In the end this album can have a similar sound in some ways to some American bands, but has been totally made in Europe, by Europeans, I think the girl that did the mastering was the only American.” “It’s basically got the best of both sides,” adds Cristina, “and we’re the missing link in between because we’re doing something different from other bands, something fresh, which is incorporating the best things from both
cultures.” Last time around the band scored what could be considered their first real ‘hits’ with Heaven’s A Lie and Swamped. The first single from the new album, the sharp, tribal Our Truth, entered the Italian, Spanish and English charts at 23, 19 and 40 respectively. For a metal single from anyone other than Metallica and Iron Maiden to get even close to the English charts is a remarkably rare occurrence in recent years, and while Karmacode boasts an abundance of songs that have single potential, the band don’t really ever set out to write songs for the charts. Andrea again opts for the technical explanation: “I think on this album we have a lot of songs that can kind of be singles. A lot of songs that can be easily listened to because we did a lot of work on the structure. We paid a lot of attention to making it fluent, but not in a stupid way. Like working a lot with the arrangement and not to overload the song with a lot of instrumental parts, just try to have a progression in every song which flows very well.” ‘Arrangement’ may well be a foreign word to most metal fans. Surely it’s just intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus, outro. But Lacuna Coil fans, if you’ve ever seen any, aren’t the mullet-sporting, beer-can-on-the-foreheadcrushing, denim-and-leather types that think the AC/DC mould is the only way. Lacuna Coil fans are either too young to understand song structure at all, or the more educated kind of metal fans that appreciates intricacy, subtlety and melody (i.e. not metalcore fans). It’s not necessarily about tuning a seven-string as low as it will go and pummelling the listener at the expense of genuine song-craft. Something Lacuna Coil understand completely, as Andrea explains: “We like to work with the arrangement. You know like how an orchestra works. They can change the mood of a song just by adding some kind of instrument that can put some different keys or some different notes in there. We love lead guitar, but only when it adds to the song. We’ve got nothing against it, and if it fits we’ll put it in, but otherwise we’ll avoid it. So we like to work in that way with the guitars, with little melodies and little secondary guitar that maybe you don’t hear straight in the beginning, but if you listen to it with headphones you can really recognise all these parts.” Even on the album’s closing cover song, Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence, the band concentrated on making the song their own by altering the arrangements of the parts, while staying true to the original feel of the track, something I think they’ve achieved rather well. Often the pressures of a bigger budget, more time and the expectation to produce a successful record can make the writing and recording process that bit harder. Cristina however feels that overall the excitement and enthusiasm of making something new after so long made the whole process easier than normal: “We didn’t feel any pressure at all. So the song writing was really relaxed and really enthusiastic just because of the fact that we really wanted to have new songs, even to play live because after a while it becomes a little bit boring to play the same songs over and over even if you still love them. So there was a renewed energy in the band, there was a lot of stuff going on, a lot of ideas, a lot more
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influences and a lot of creativity. So it’s probably been… easier, compared to before, because when you have new ideas it’s easier to write new songs. We weren’t stuck in the past or like are we going to do another album full of Heaven’s A Lie II and Swamped Part II. We didn’t want to do that, we wanted to do something completely different.” As you’d expect, there’s plenty more to come from the Italians, with more touring on the US touring circus Ozzfest throughout the summer, then back to Europe for a headlining, or possibly co-headlining tour. Along with the support slot with Rob Zombie and the big European festivals this year will feature the complete touring package for the band, and every form of touring has its merits for them: “Festivals are more about the exchange of energy in a very quick time with the people,” explains Andrea, “quality is never going to be excellent because you never get sound check, so in the first song you always arrange the levels, and then it’s more about the big impact. The shows in the clubs are more intimate and you can have some control over what you are doing, with monitors. It’s more personal and better for true fans of the band who really know the songs and want to sing along and want to share something special with the band. Even if the tours are really tiring, especially the headliners because we’re singing every night for a long time, so sometimes you get sick. Especially very long tours in winter time, it’s very bad for the voice. We did a tour at Christmas two, three years ago with Moonspell, through Europe. That was like only three weeks, but it seemed like never-ending. We were all sick and very cold, and never really had time to sleep properly. So that was very bad conditions for us, to sing when you know you’re not giving 100%.” “We like the support tour, because you have maybe 40 minutes, 45, and you can really give 100%. It’s the right amount of time for the quality, you don’t lose quality and you can move a lot and people get into it. If they’re not so familiar with your songs it’s not such a long show that they get bored, they just catch a good part. So it’s a very comfortable situation to do a support tour. Of course, if it’s a big artist it’s better because you get the chance to play for a lot of people.” Into next year when we may finally see the band’s first live DVD emerge, something fans have been crying out for for years but that the band, as Cristina explains, have been putting off until the perfect opportunity presents itself: “We just need time. It would be easy to say “OK let’s film this particular concert”, it would be interesting but we believe that the fans would love to have more, backstage shots, or how we prepare the show or what we do after, more interesting stuff like a little movie, like Pantera’s one, for example.” Personally, I’d think again if you think the fans value that kind of stuff over a complete and uninterrupted concert recording. Too many bands make that mistake, most recently The Black Crowes and Type O Negative, who destroyed otherwise awesome recordings by interrupting it with backstage footage. Hopefully however the band will confine such material to the bonus features section when they, potentially, stage a very special concert next year. (Ed’s note: or, like Alice Coopers Good To See You Again, giving the choice of both!).
“I said no fucking way you’re gonna put me in a transparent skirt and a mini bikini!”
“I think it would make sense next year when the band is going to be ten years old, officially in 2007. We were doing the demo tape in ’96 but that was under the name Ethereal. We changed the name in ’97 and we signed the deal in ’97, so we consider 2007 to be our tenth anniversary.” On the subject of special things the conversation moves on to our rather striking (if I do say so myself) and exclusive front cover. It turns out; unbeknownst to us at the time, the whole band are huge Star Wars fans.
“Marco, our bass player, has one of the original lightsabres. Obviously not one that’s been used in the movie, but he paid a lot of money for one of the Jedi replica limited edition of maybe 1000 copies in the World. Do I have to do the Leia hair?z” While Cristina plays with her hair Andrea explains why the band like to do different kinds of photo shoots where possible: “I think it’s interesting to do different kinds of photos for the band. When everybody stands there it’s just all the same picture. We did one for Rock Sound Italy where all the males in the
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band were fighting each other. I liked it very much. Even if you don’t see my face very well, but it’s a picture that gives you a nice point of view of the band.” At this point Cristina and Andrea break into a conversation in Italian, the upshot of which seemed to be that one of them, though they knew not which, had a picture from this photo shoot on their mobile phone that Cristina took. Cristina continues while Andrea searches his phone: “It was really interesting. We had theatrical makeup like bruises and scars and a ripped lip. At least it was something original. We think it’s an artistic representation. It’s important to be open. If you want to be a complete artist I don’t think you should have barriers in anything. I mean, some limits, not to sell yourself out, but I think you definitely should experiment with image. I gave him the picture from my cell phone and deleted mine. I don’t even know how to download them. This is my boyfriend’s phone (you heard her guys, boyfriend. Sorry!), mine
just died in the US.” Eventually Andrea succeeds and the photo is as funny as promised. Different kinds of photos are very important to keep a band interesting and relevant. There are only so many shots of the same people standing in the same positions with the same backdrops we can look at before we start ignoring them, and being ignored is the worst possible thing for a band trying to become successful. “It’s a choice,” Cristina continues, “some bands like to be stuck forever in the same image, but I don’t think it’s really artistic. And I think that sometimes it’s probably because they think that they don’t want to risk it. But in a way if you want to get more and more recognition and popularity, you have to risk.” “You know what, sometimes, especially being a female, sometimes they want you to be… not sexy, I agree with the sexy part, I feel myself sexy being a female, but there is a limit. That is part of the limitations I mentioned before. I don’t want to do anything which is vulgar. It’s
fine with me being sexy, being feminine. There was this one, they took this wonderful picture of me, which is amazing, but at the end I just decided to wear a skirt and a little top, but in the beginning the stylists from the magazine were used to having a lot of models, and of course a model isn’t afraid to show her body, the more you see the better for them because they’re gonna get more exposure, so it took some time for them to realise that I’m a singer, not a model and I said “no fucking way you’re gonna put me in a transparent skirt and a mini bikini!” Sometimes they try because they don’t really know what you’re doing, but you just have to say no.” I’ve just realised how disappointing reading this is going to be for a certain group of Lacuna Coil fans. Absolutely no scantily clad lads-mag type photos and a boyfriend. Sorry guys. So, ten years gone and they’re just getting started. Already Italy’s most successful band and aiming to continue their rise, Lacuna Coil are becoming a true international force.
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w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k | B U R N M A G A Z I N E
Burn Issue 8 Final
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The
Portrait of Claudio Sanchez
Words: Sion Smith All pictures: Chiaki Nozu
Seemingly from out of nowhere, Coheed & Cambria are on the brink of taking over the world. No doubt they will soon be hailed as overnight successes by those outside of the circle but it’s been a long journey. Some have watched it from its inception, others have chosen to join the crazy train along the way but it has to be said that it’s probably only a matter of time before the rest of the world follows. Sitting down with Claudio on the eve of their UK tour, and at various points in between, it’s hard to imagine this extremely likeable guy can be so intense on stage. Others may have done big stories on them before us, but damn it... I was here first and now I want my pound of flesh...
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Coheed & Cambria The Portrait of Claudio Sanchez It’s probably not natural to have heroes at my age but in this instance, it can’t be helped. There’s something about Coheed & Cambria that raises the game on the competition well, if there was any they would. Right now though, I have worse things to worry about than looking dumb because I have a new hero. My mini disc player appears to have drop-outs all over the place throughout our recorded interview. Maybe it’s the magnetic field that surrounds Claudio? Maybe some joker at the hotel has got some heavyweight toys from ACME. Whatever the cause I’m not happy because this was a long story. You see in my book, C&C are the most original band to come out of anywhere in a very long time - it’s a good job most of it is still on the disc otherwise we’d just be looking at a stack of great pictures instead! Claudio and I find a quiet corner of the hotel lobby to chat, and for somebody who rips up the boards every night with all the passion of a man possessed with the desire to go home spent, he’s a pretty amenable and friendly guy and perhaps, a little shy too. The purpose of this squirreling away is that I was curious as hell to find out what made such a man tick, so I guess the first question should be, has Coheed and Cambria rescued you from a life of normality? What did the future hold if this hadn’t happened?
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“Ha. I worked in a pet store for a time before the band took off properly. It wasn’t a shitty job at all. Not really. They were really good to me, letting me have time off and everything - when you’re trying to make a band work, you still have to pay the bills and the pet store was OK, because it was mindless enough to let your mind wander. “When my mind wanders it gets creative,so good things came of it! I think I probably thought up a hell of a lot of song ideas while moving sacks of dog food around!” See.. not your normal start to an interview is it? Strikes me that there may be other gems lurking under the surface, so I probe a little into Claudio’s childhood - after all, the story of Coheed and Cambria has to be at least semiautobiographical... isn’t it? “I guess it is on some level, it has to be, but everything is dressed up to the extreme. I can’t sit here and say that I had an unhappy childhood, because I didn’t really. Knowing what I know now about other peoples family lives as well, it was probably pretty normal.” Was it a religious environment? There’s obviously a lot of searching going on in the overall theme of the concept. “Well, I don’t believe in God as such. To be honest, I don’t know what I believe in, if anything, at the moment, but the ideas behind religion and spirituality are fascinating. I think what I do, is take these questioning ideas and then dress them up with science fiction.
You know, I like the way that you guys aren’t afraid to take it away from the power socket you play acoustic sets really quite often don’t you. “Well, that’s how the songs are written. I have the germ of an idea and I’ll take it to the band and maybe Travis will have some ideas that he will add to it or Mic will take it and roll somewhere. “It’s a very organic process for us but you know what amazes me most about the process. The way the collective consciousness works. Just after I had written IRO-Bots for instance, I saw there was a film in production called I-Robot. “Coincidences like that happen a lot, but it’s not until you sit down and think about how many there really are that it ever becomes strange. “Sorry, you asked me about the acoustic shows. Yeah, we do lots. I really like doing them because the songs shine through in a different dimension and it’s always good when people can take home something a little bit extra when they’ve come to see you.” Later in the day, we all whip across to the venue to check out what’s going on. It’s a bizarre set up when you see things in the cold light of day. There’s the guillotine standing like it could never in a million years fit into the show with any panache at all! What is getting me excited though is the new light strobes they have set up - they look really cool!
w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k | B U R N M A G A Z I N E
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What The Hell Is Going On, Apollo? Part 1
The Coheed And Cambria albums are entirely open to interpretation. Which apparently is exactly what the band wanted. Here’s my attempt at the upshot of it all. There’s no way it’s completely correct, because no one’s version of events is, so no one is allowed to reprimand me for getting any or all of it wrong. Understood? Apparently it all starts with God (don’t all good stories?), who created The Fence (a ring of star-transformers called The Stars of Sirius) and The Keywork (seventy-eight planets divided into twelve sectors). There are three races throughout the Keywork. Man is one, and the others are the Mage, who rule over Man, and the Prise who protect the Keywork. Each sector has a head Mage. With me so far? The Mage get corrupted by power and start having wars and manipulating Man, the Prise try to intervene, and the Mage all join forces and defeat them. Ultimately, one Mage, Wilhelm Ryan, takes control of the entire Keywork and becomes The Supreme TriMage. God, who buggered off after creating everything, left a prophecy saying he would return. The Prise decide the return of God is their only hope of defeating the Mage, so they set about trying prepare for his arrival. Man are told to keep an eye on the Mage. To do this they create a super-human species called Interceptive Recon Operative Bots. IRO Bots. Get it?
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“Do you have names for all of your household objects?” Claudio cracks under the pressure of the line of questioning...
What The Hell Is Going On, Apollo? Part 1 (continued)
The first three of these IRO Bots are Coheed (The Beast), Cambria (The Knowledge) and Jesse (The Inferno). To keep their true purpose from the Mage, the IRO Bots are passed off as an anti-terrorist squad. In secret their inventor also created the Monstar virus, carried by Coheed, which is capable of destroying the Stars of Sirius. A Mage called Mariah, who is nice to Man, starts to challenge Ryan’s reign. The Mage find out about the Monstar, so Coheed and Cambria have their memories erased and are mingled into society, while Jesse goes into hiding to continue the plan. Coheed and Cambria have four children, called Claudio, Josephine, Matthew and Maria. An android called Mayo, who is a general in Ryan’s army, finds Coheed and tells him about the Monstar he carries, and that it’s curable, but the mutated strain his children carry, called the Sinstar, is not. He says Coheed must kill his children or someone else will see to it. Cambria, being The Knowledge, “overhears” this. They poison Maria and Matthew and Coheed whacks Josephine over the head with a hammer. Nice. Claudio survives, while Coheed and Cambria are sedated and delivered to a space station, where the virus is activated in Coheed and Earth is separated from the Keywork. Coheed and Cambria are killed towards the end of the first album. Someone (possibly Claudio) falls asleep at the end of the album, and dreams the first few songs of the second album. Claudio becomes a Messiah called The Crowing and, together with a young female robot called Chase (created by Jesse), he sets about trying to save Earth. A Prise called Ambellina is sent to help Claudio. There’s also a psycho-killer called Al involved, but it’s unclear where he fits in. It all goes a bit weird from here on. At the start of Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume 1, there’s some guy called The Writer, Claudio is having dreams of the souls trapped in the Keywork begging for freedom and of his parents dying (he doesn’t know what happened). There’s a talking bicycle called Ten Speed living in the mind of The Writer, there’s a girl called Erica who may well be Ambellina, Jesse gets killed by Mayo, The Writer kills Ambellina, and Apollo is a dog. See? Weird. The graphic novel version of Good Apollo… may well help to shed some light on the events of the third album, then again, maybe not.
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Coheed & Cambria The Portrait of Claudio Sanchez Presumably, when you get some money behind you, you’ll kick the shit out of this stage show thing and really go to town on it? “I would love to! When I first saw Floyds Division Bell tour, I just knew that doing something on such a scale - and to be able to do it well - was utterly possible. So much larger than life and that appeals to me massively you know, to be able to combine that sort of things with these vast Dune type landscapes that go on in my head would be a dream come true! “I know I’ve said it to you before, but I really miss that sort of thing - to have the power to take people completely out of their environment for a couple of hours is a great gift. Recently Claudio has started to nurture a rather fetching double neck guitar. It reminds me of Page at the peak of Led Zeps fame - if you’ve never seen the band live, you should be ashamed because you should marvel that it’s just not right for a man to be able to play like that and sing at the same time. Claudio started playing guitar around twelve or thirteen. His father, a blues guitarist, taught him his trade. And he always sung with his mom. I ask if he has to push his voice into a falsetto.
The band members all have family musical pedigrees. In fact drummer Josh Eppert’s father has played off and on with The Band. No, I don’t mean Coheed. For the uninitiated, The Band is a group from Woodstock days led by Robbie Robertson. (I think they still hold the record for the largest concert ever, at Watkins Glen in New York, with Allman Brothers and the Dead sharing the bill). Is Page the icon to follow? “No. Hendrix. It has to be Hendrix I think. He was the man.” And when you step back, you can see it in the performance. A riot of colour seemingly drips from his hands as the band go into overdrive that night. The crowd is lapping it up. Never again will you see Coheed and Cambria on a stage as small as this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to start setting it on fire soon. We wrapped up the interview with some spicy hot questions, that was originally going to be part of our Shooting Shit column, but due to the timing we never got round to doing all them, so for you delight and delectation, here are the edited highlights:
“Nope, this is just what comes out.” Who cuts your hair? “Nobody”
schizophrenic chrysanthemums, then two Macintoshes auctioned off the progressive televisions, and one subway cleverly tickled five irascible Klingons, because wart hogs easily sacrificed umpteen trailers. Two obese wart hogs grew up, but the bureau noisily auctioned off one purple Jabberwocky, because five chrysanthemums untangles Jupiter, but sheep easily kisses two quite quixotic dwarves. Bureaux gossips. One aardvark tickled the Macintoshes, however
If Apollo is a dog and Ten Speed is a bicycle, do you have names for all your other household objects? “Er... no!” Martial arts or Martial law? “Shit. Martial law sounds quite heavy so I’m going to with Martial arts!” So there you have it. What was going to be a huge monster of a story, turned out to be just a few scraps in the end. Serves me right for not typing it out as soon as I got home! At the end of the day though, it’s not about what comes out of his mouth in a hotel lobby while we’re drinking coffee that anybody cares about. It’s mostly about this huge album called Good Apollo that has won the hearts and minds of anybody who cared to listen for long enough, and Claudio can reel it off week after week in mag after mag and interview after interview but it will never measure up to his soundscapes. If I was their manager, I’d stop them doing any more interviews... now if ever there was a band that could actually pull that off, well... they just left the country. Stars. Each and every one of them.
schizophrenic chrysanthemums, then two Macintoshes auctioned off the progressive televisions, and one subway cleverly tickled five irascible Klingons, because wart hogs easily sacrificed umpteen trailers. Two obese wart hogs grew up, but the bureau noisily auctioned off one purple Jabberwocky, because five chrysanthemums untangles Jupiter, but sheep easily kisses two quite quixotic dwarves. Bureaux gossips. One aardvark tickled the Macintoshes, however Coheed & Cambria are well reknowned for performing acoustic shows in record stores. In some places, these intimate little gatherings are more widely anticipated than the show itself. Tonight at the Virgin Megastore in London’s Tottenham Court Road, they proved once again that it’s not just their albums that make people move and neither is their show. The bottom line is great songs and it’s obviously a treat for everybody as the joint throngs with mouths hitting the floor every step of the way. These exclusive pictures show a very different Claudio than we’re used to - a man who is more than proud to deliver his songs in this fashion. If you ever, ever, get the chance to check the band out in this way, jsut be there okay. Trust me. This is one of those events that people will be claiming they were at even when they weren’t.
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metal: a headbangers journey
HEAVY FUCKIN METAL Forget Morgan Spurlock, the hottest new documentary maker is an unassuming Canadian named Sam Dunn. Along with Scot McFadyen, he has produced the year’s most exhilarating doc – and it’s all about metal. Following the genre from its very beginnings, and with interviews from all of the movement’s major players, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey is an absolute necessity for anyone with even a passing interest in heavy guitars and the vigorous banging of heads, and if not – what the hell are you doing reading this mag?! Beginning with an argument over who can truly claim to be the first metal band, and taking in pretty much everything, from metal’s
relationship to opera, the use of the devil’s tritone, the infamous court cases of the 80s, and more than a little hero worship, it’s an epic production. But did it feel that way while making it? “It was a long, long road,” says Sam Dunn. “It was about five and a half years, from the point of conception of the idea. It took us about three years to raise the funding because we were firsttime filmmakers taking on a pretty ambitious subject matter, so it took a while to wrangle the funds together. Once we had the funds, it was about two years for the research, writing, shooting and the editing of the film.” And you drew the short straw and ended up presenting it? “Yeah – I ended up being ‘the dude in the film’,” he laughs. “The interesting thing in this collaboration between Scot McFadyen (codirector) and I, is that I grew up listening to this
sort of music, but Scot is not a metalhead. I mean, he’s a fan of music, and has worked as a music supervisor for a long time, so I think that between us we were able to have the insider and the outsider perspective. Which is something we tried to balance in the film.” Was it hard not going too far down the fanboy route? “Yes and no. That was the balance we were trying to strike,” he explains. “The film was a personal journey that was obviously fuelled with passion and all of those good things, and on the other hand I had to bring in the anthropological angle. I think that it really speaks of the collaborative process that Scot was always there to keep me in check if we were heading down the nerd path too hard, and steer us back on, and remind me that we don’t need to obsess about the British grindcore movement for 20 minutes. It was by virtue of that kind of collaboration that enabled us to maintain some kind of objectivity. Scott acted as the other side of my psyche.” When watching Metal, it doesn’t feel like your standard documentary. It’s bigger in scope and bigger in feel than many other films of its type – certainly rock docs. Was there a moment when the production suddenly felt bigger than planned? “It happened fairly early on in the writing process,” Dunn says, “but it took us a while to figure out that it had the potential. Originally it was going to be a much more conventional, historical documentary about heavy metal, and we were thinking of getting Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden to narrate, and it would be more of a look back. “As we threw the idea around and talked about it, we realised we needed something that would bring people in from the outside, because we didn’t just want to make a film for metal fans.” He continues: “If we’d done that, it would have turned into a TV project. The combination of a personal journey and the anthropological angle was something we felt would bring in more people, and we felt we had more of a story on our hands, rather than just a history.
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metal: a headbangers journey “Our intention with the film is to convert as many as possible,” he says, tongue-in-cheek… I think. It’s clear from the outset of the film that Dunn is a massive Iron Maiden fan, and that getting to meet Bruce Dickinson in the process of shooting was a major thing for him - which is cool, I think we can all relate to that - but was there anyone else who made an impression? “Well meeting Bruce Dickinson was obviously massive for me because Maiden are my all-time favourite band,” he reiterates, “but Tony Iommi was amazing. That was for a few reasons – the obvious reason is, he pretty much singlehandedly created this guitar sound that became defined as the ‘heavy metal sound’ and played such a huge role. Secondly, he was just great with us – gave us plenty of his time and he was really gracious and friendly with us, which made it easy. Thirdly, that interview with Tony came quite late in our production, right at the end, and there were a few key interviews we felt we still needed. One was Lemmy, and one was Tony Iommi, and they both came together towards the end, and once we had Tony and were driving away from that country manor where we interviewed him, we felt like: ‘Yes. We’ve got it now. We can make a film about metal, that covers all our bases.’ It speaks volumes for the film, that the makers chose to go after the likes of true metal heroes like Iommi, rather than taking the easy option of just grabbing Ozzy and letting him ramble on. “Yeah. Tony has a bit more to say,” Dunn agrees. “Our intention and motivation was to create a film that was smart and that gave the music the respect we felt it has always deserved. It was really just a matter of asking the right people the right questions. “Growing up it felt like most of my metal friends were pretty articulate people, it wasn’t like they were always walking round smashing beer cans on their foreheads, which is the standard portrayal. Interviewing Tony instead of Ozzy is a sign of how we wanted to approach the film.” This articulacy is something that is evident throughout the piece. Interviewees like Rob
Zombie, Ronnie James Dio and Dee Snider bring up very valid and pertinent points, which is not something the average fan necessarily expects. “Yeah, I agree. I honestly feel it was about framing it all in the right way. Most musicians,
particularly in the metal world, are just used to answering pretty superficial and mundane questions like, ‘how’s the new album coming along’, ‘how’s the tour’, ‘tell me about your craziest moment on stage dude.’ Those are the kinds of questions they’re used to fielding, and we were coming at them from an angle of the history of the music and the themes of the music, and what it means to people and why it is obsessed with all these bizarre things. Once we got going with the interviews, most of the artists began to open up and it was an opportunity to talk about things that they don’t usually get to talk about.” In a world with such rabid fans, there was bound to be some complaining along the lines of ‘Boo hoo, Manowar weren’t featured enough,’ and the internet is certainly testament to that, with a variety of forums praising and decrying the film in equal measures for its choice of
subjects. Has Dunn personally encountered any of these complaints? “Oooooohhhh yes,” he says with a chuckle. “The great thing about making the film is that we’ve had the chance to travel to dozens of film festivals around the world, and wherever you go, the fans that love this music and are passionate about it always have their opinions about which bands were omitted, and who we didn’t spend enough time on – but that’s what makes metal music so important special, people care so much. It’s part of how they grow up and become their own person, so it has a lot of personal resonance.” How have you answered those more critical fans? “Our intention with creating the heavy metal family tree (check the film out, or go to www.metalhistory.com) was hopefully a way for us to at least touch on all of the different movements and the different bands. We knew we weren’t going to have interviews with everyone, but the tree was kind of a way to go ‘okay, we can tick Megadeth off the list’.” As the film progresses, proceedings take a darker turn as Dunn investigates the world of black metal and the more questionable exercises that some exponents practice – church burning for example. One section sees the director travel to Norway to chat face to face with some of the guys involved. It’s slightly uneasy viewing in places, was Dunn intimidated at all? “Well, to start with, I’m a huge fan of a lot of the black metal bands,” he explains, “and because I owned a lot of the music, and the bands and I communicated by email, there was a sense of camaraderie, and of trust, and that we could talk about these issues. So, it wasn’t so much a matter of being intimidated by them at all, because they’re really nice guys. It was more about being surprised, because when we wrote the treatment we expected the bands to distance themselves from those events – that’s what we were expecting to get, but we were surprised in one or two situations to find that some of the artists actually support the church
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metal: a headbangers journey
burning, or, if they don’t necessarily support it there is an underlying sense of resentment towards Christianity that stretches back a long, long time. That is something that is very real in their culture, and that was often the case with some of the bands we interviewed there. “When we came back and started editing, we were like ‘Wow. Religion is really important to these people, and has had a huge influence on their society,’ so we wanted to reflect that in the movie” Another of the more notorious scenes in the movie takes place at the Wacken festival, when the filmmakers catch up with Norwegian metallers Mayhem. It’s not an overexaggeration to say that they were dicks. Were they really that obnoxious, or did they just turn it on when the cameras started rolling? “They were actually pretty obnoxious,” says Dunn. “But I will say, I’ve met them in Norway and I’ve talked with other band members on
different occasions, and they’re actually pretty nice guys – it’s not like they’re out to control the world. In the context of that interview, they’d just got off stage after playing to 40,000 people and they’d obviously been drinking most of the day, so I don’t think they were particularly interested in doing an interview. All of those factors combined with the fact that there were 30-40 people standing behind me watching the interview, so it was like they were still performing. As an interviewer your goal is to establish some kind of intimacy, but clearly… we failed. What about current, more populist bands – are there any that grab Dunn’s attention? “I’m not a huge fan of metal-core, emo-core, eyeliner-core, whatever,” he explains. “Metal is not supposed to be cute, and when it becomes cute, it becomes wrong. These bands begin to tread that fine line between being too commercial and staying underground.”
Dunn continues: “If people are discovering Coheed and Cambria or Slipknot or Avenged Sevenfold, and are then discovering the Black Sabbaths and Iron Maidens and Slayers, then I think that’s good. Who am I to judge that? That’s how I got into the music. It’s like we say in the movie, with Van Halen and Motley Crue, before it was Morbid Angel and Creator, I mean, c’mon, you don’t start at step five. As long as that more populist music is providing a gateway into the core of metal, then that’s a good thing.” So the more traditional idea of metal is still alive and thriving? “Yeah, I think now’s a really exciting time for metal,” he says. “A lot of people think metal is just about nostalgia and that it died in the 80s, and that was another myth we were trying to debunk in the film. Metal is underground, that’s where it comes from, and it’s always gonna survive. Right now what’s great is that loads of bands that have been toiling away in the underground for a long time are now starting to get some recognition. Bands like Arch Enemy, Mastadon, Lamb of God, Children of Bodom, so many of these bands are really starting to make their way, and it’s really positive for metal because it’s not like Linkin Park where you can handpick your heavy metal boyband. These bands are the real thing, and that’s what metal fans really appreciate and they deserve it. It feels like 20 years ago, and I see parallels between what was happening then and what’s happening now.” The exuberance with which Sam Dunn talks about his film, his band at home and his next movie idea is a reflection of his love of the music. Metal: A Headbanger’ Journey isn’t a plea to the wider world for understanding, it’s just an attempt to shine a light on a greatly misunderstood medium, and if the haters still don’t get it, then that’s fine. As Dunn himself says at the film’s close: “We’re doing just fine without you.” If you’re interested, you can check out Dunn’s own band, Burn to Black at www.burntoblack.com and www.myspace.com/burntoblack.
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new york dolls Meanwhile...
Back in the Jungle Words: Sion Smith. Colour Pics: Joe Gaffney. B&W Pics: Bob Gruen.
Paris. City of culture, beauty, towers and museums. Behold the stark underbelly of the beast with its heroin chic, underground labyrinth of the dead and the Holiday Inn. That might be a little unfair but it’s how I feel when faced with the desk clerk. My French extends to ordering beer and croissants and, courtesy of Eddie Izzard, letting everybody know that the monkey is in the school, but eventually we meet in the place known to millions the world over as we are both reduced to line drawings on a scrap of paper, me pointing at my hair and offering up my ear buds. It does the trick. Minutes later, Sylvain Sylvain and I are hooked in and ready to roll, and then it dawns on me. I must tell him my New York Dolls story! Back in the day when I used to be able to drink more than four Budweisers without getting obnoxious, I had this idea that anybody could be famous for not doing anything at all, (maybe I should make it into a TV show, millions are at it now), so I made a demo tape up of some tunes from some albums that nobody at the papers would ever have heard of, knocked up a cover, called the band something dumb as hell (in this instance, Mr Face and the Cosmic Spacehoppers), took some snaps and sent it in with a little bio that went along the lines of “influenced by New York Dolls...”. Lo and behold, the very next week, there I was in a column all by myself with a pretty good review. The week after, the guy who ran the music pages wanted to know if we could play at some mini festival or other so we quickly ‘split up’. Sylvain thinks it’s hilarious, but it’s not the first or last time that the bands influence will be worn like a badge of honour. With their new album about to hit the shelves, it’s in the lap of the Gods as to who will pick up on it - was it tempting to try and carry on from where you left off? “We were never asked to reproduce anything we had done before you know, which was brilliant because we didn’t really know what we were going to do either, but to not have the past hanging over you that heavily while we did whatever we were going to do was a gift!” One small consideration comes into play here as I sit marvelling at the speed and eloquence
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of the man - he sure can talk. Only, none of it is trash. Listening back to the tapes now, every nugget is a gem, but it’s no rehearsed speech I’m getting. Sylvain is a man with passion in his heart for what they’re doing now. “You know it all started coming together for real in about 2004. We’d been asked so many times to reform in some shape or other before that, but now the time seems immensely right. “David and I talked about a lot of things and it started coming together real quick - like I pulled Sam (Yaffa) into the band because, when David was looking around for bass players, he met a whole bunch of people who were great bass players and he calls me up in Atlanta where I live now and says ‘shit man, I’ve got seven here to choose from’, but when we started out, our schooling was from bands like the Shangri-Las and Bo Diddly and Sam was as close to that as we could get. So I said to him over and over; ‘I want Sam, I want Sam!’” “The Dolls were a big influence on him but he understands were we came from as well. Once all of the parts were in place it was like we had come together as a real band again and it started taking on a life of it’s own as these things do. I realise I’m in danger, mostly because I’m interested as hell, of going over the same ground as a host of other writers from today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. On those grounds, you’ll excuse me if we don’t dwell on it too much as I jump tracks to see what else is in Sylvains head. Bro - you gotta have a Kiss story for me... LOOKING FOR A KISS “Ha. Course! Everybody has got one of them don’t they? I think we pretty much introduced them and did some shows, with Aerosmith too the promoters used to bill our shows as things like ‘The Glitter Rock Tour’. “We didn’t really have that much in common with them. I’ve seen and heard so many things about the two of us over the years, but what I can tell you is that I always kinda liked Paul Stanley, he was a little bit cooler than the rest of those guys in the band. This one day we were chatting and I think they were about to go on tour, and he asks me if I have any advice for him. “So I tell him the truth. If ever you’re out with your make-up on and somebody asks you for your autograph, just sign it Alice Cooper. So he
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“I FEEL SORRY FOR THESE KIDS THAT CAN PLAY WITH DIGITAL MANIPULATIONS. WE’RE ALWAYS PERCEIVED AS BEING THIS
BAND THAT COULD
HARDLY PLAY, BUT WE COULD AND WE STILL CAN!” looks at me strange and we move on, but later on, the year after I think it was, this guy comes running up to me in Detroit airport and he’s shouting ‘Sylvain! I just signed my first Alice autograph!’ He had me in stitches that day. Whenever any band like us went out on the road, the perception was when people met you was that you were Alice Cooper! “You have to give credit to the king! If you wrote anything else in those autograph books, people would just look at you all disappointed. Must have signed thousands of autographs for that man! It’s no wonder he was so big!” FLUSH THE FASHION You know, I introduced Malcolm McClaren to the band as well. I was in the fashion industry before and Billy Murcia and me had this company called Truth and Soul sweaters. This is in like 1971. There was this big trade show in New York and they would put up clothes and everything it was huge, but down in some corner was us. McClaren and Viv Westwood were there with their Let It Rock line, the rest as they say is history.” MURDER STYLE You know, I can’t think of a rock n roll band and I mean real rock n roll bands, not metal bands, that aren’t made up of something that equates to at least 50 per cent New York Dolls from Hanoi and Guns to more underground bands like Lords of the New Church. “Ha - Stiv tried to buy my leather pants off me once for 200 bucks. I think he got it into his head that I’d agreed to the sale one night after a show, so he calls me up asking when he can pick up his pants - I tell him they’re not for sale. Man he fucking swore at me for months after.” 0
From the affection in his voice, there’s two of us here that kind of miss having him around. Talking of which - isn’t it a bit strange to have so many members of band taken away from you? “Not really. Not anymore. It’s rock n roll not rocket science and I made my peace with whatever happened to those guys long ago. “The album we just made and the shows we’ve just been playing, it’s just been great - it really does feel fantastic to be doing it all again. Sure it’s a bit different but the spirit and the soul is their. “I feel sorry for these kids that can play with digital manipulations. We’re always perceived as being this band that could hardly play, but we could and we still can!
basically saw it through - without David this wouldn’t be the Dolls. THE CRIMSON IDOL MEETS HIS MAKER Being as how we’re OK with flashback scenarios here and there really is nothing to say about getting back together and making a new album than ‘welcome back and it’s a great record!’, maybe you can put something else into perspective for me - this is another one of those personal ghost stories by the way! I heard years back that Blackie Lawless was in the band for about five minutes once. Is that true? “As true as it gets - and I think 5 minutes is not too far off target either! It’s 1975 and we’re touring the Red Patent Leather show. We were down in Florida trying to perfect stuff and what
“THIS GUY COMES RUNNING UP TO ME IN DETROIT AIRPORT AND HE’S SHOUTING
‘SYLVAIN! I JUST SIGNED MY FIRST ALICE AUTOGRAPH!’” “We cut our teeth the hard way, by playing and playing - and playing live shows at that! We just wanted to be out there and you can’t help but get better when you play that much - but you can hear digital breakup in some records. There’s no soul, it’s like these big machines coming to get you!” With David and me, there’s a certain magic that happens when we get together and you just keep going. We’ve both done different things over the years, but you gotta perform and there’s nothing better. David went through lots of different changes but this was his baby. He
basically happened next is that we broke up just like that but we should all have seen it coming really. “Malcolm McClaren comes up to me and says that Jerry and Johnny have just left the band and we’re broke and we need to do something to get enough money together to go home, so we decide to play a show. Arthur was hanging out with these guys - I forget who the others where, but one of them was Blackie. “We’re in the middle of Orlando and I teased up their hair and we went on stage and I said. ‘you stand here... and you stand here’. We
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new york dolls ALL DOLLED UP In the early 1970’s, Bob Gruen and his wife Nadya bought themselves a portable video recorder. Figuring that it was just a toy that would one day be worthless, because ‘hey, who the hell is going to get any use out of one of those!’ - they fooled around and after shooting some test footage of Ike and Tina Turner, decided to take some footage of the Dolls. ‘Some footage’ later turned out to be over 40 hours of archive material of one the most seminal bands of the rock era. All Dolled Up finally saw the release of the edited highlights of the work. “The first time I ever heard
of the band, a friend of mine takes me to this club and tells me that I have to see this great band in action, but there were so many girls there that we never saw the band at all, we just wandered around! “The second time though, I was just blown away. There was so much raw energy on the stage it was spilling off into the crowd and you could tell! The place was jumping!” “Later on, I got to show the footage to Johansen and he was really encouraging about me coming back time and again to capture more. I think it was captivating for them because back in the early 70’s, unless a band was filmed for the television -
played the show and then everybody went home, simple as that. “But you know what, I was never close to that guy at all, but I heard that when Arthur was broke that Blackie sent him some money, That was good... nice that he remembered my pal and was able to help him out a little. BACK IN THE USA... And so ends, or maybe even begins again, the story of the New York Dolls. There honestly didn’t seem to be a lot of point of sitting with Sylvain and asking about how the band got back together and about the recording of the new album because there’s nothing to tell. The Dolls are a rock n roll band. They wrote some new material and then they recorded it (so if that’s what you were looking for, you should be satiated now!) What this more than pleasant hour spent with Sylvain - who seems as happy as a man can be right now as we look out onto one of the most famous cities in the world - has highlighted to me is how much more influential they were than I originally thought. The Dolls were long gone by the time they appeared on my radar (yeah, not even I’m that old!), and like many others, I back-tracked towards them from the Lords, Hanoi, Smack et al and stopped. It’s impossible to go further back than that without coming out of your box completely. You can nod your head as Sylvain says to the Shangri Las, but it’s not a road I want to go down. No. The New York Dolls are as original as they come. A frankensteined monster mash of some guys who could pen a decent tune and some other guys who knew hip fashion when they saw it. They broke the mould after that happened then as we have just seen, rock legends must come to Paris to see what happens next. This is the law and is as it should be.
B U R N M A G A Z I N E | w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k
which was very unlikely unless you were going places, you never got see how you really looked.” The release features a lot of interviews captured on the fly, which is probably the best way with the Dolls, but the live footage is priceless. With the benefit of hindsight, you can tell from watching this that mainstream success wouldn’t come easy, but there was so many subliminal things going on that it was obvious more than one or two bands would pick up the gauntlet and run like hell with it. “It was a crazy time. I’m surprised there aren’t more casualties. Those days were crazy days...”
You can check some of Bobs other work at bobgruen.com where there’s some great shots of Led Zep, Kiss, Lennon and the Stones too..
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live nickelback www.friendsoflive.com
OTHER
SIDE
UP
Words: Andy Lye
NICKELBACK’S LATEST ALBUM ALL THE RIGHT REASONS SHOULD BE SOUNDLY INGRAINED IN YOUR BRAIN BY NOW, HAVING BEEN
OUT FOR A GOOD NINE MONTHS... At the time, lead guitarist Ryan Peake and new drummer Daniel Adair sat down to discuss a few things with us at their rather flash hotel in central London. Why should you care nine months after the album came out? Because we didn’t talk about the album itself. We talked about the band. Its members. What goes in. What goes out. What happens around a new album. And what happens in between. Most interviews follow a pretty rigid question-answer-question-answer structure for about 20 minutes. This time we found that we just had three-way-conversations about various Nickelback-related topics. We’d move on to another topic, and just talk about it. Cups of tea and coffee even arrived half way through. This was not a business operation. So that’s how it’s going to be delivered. Just three of the topics of conversation, script fashion. It’s absolutely the best way for this to go. Pulling statements out and writing around them would lose a lot of the humour and information discussed, just to apply a bit more narrative. While that’s normally preferable, it’s not here, and you’ll understand why in about 15 minutes time. And it never hurts to read something a little different from time to time. Read on! DANIEL AND SHIT DA: I’ve known these guys since ’98 or ’99, something like that. I worked in a music 0
store and sold a bass to Mike (Kroeger). I knew the tour manager and I lent them the guitar they used in the video for “Too Bad”. RP: Oh, so that’s where we got it from! DA: And they smashed the shit out of it. So I got in shit because it was like “didn’t you even charge these guys!? That’s like a $3500 guitar!”. So I said “well, you know, they’re a huge band and some favours might trickle downhill” RP: It sounded like shit too. DA: Yeah, they didn’t even plug it in! FAMILY TOURING I’ve been told, and I don’t know if it’s right, that you take your families on tour with you. RP: Yeah, that’s right. How does that work? I mean, what do your families get up to? How about the kids’ schooling? RP: My kids aren’t old enough. I’ve got like a two-year-old and four-month-old at the moment, and Mike has a four-year-old and a two-year-old. DA: And dogs! RP: Yeah, and dogs. A big retriever that poops a lot. But year, we’re fortunate enough when touring that we can each get a bus. That makes life easier for everybody in all aspects. We don’t step on each others’ toes. DA: I don’t have my own bus! RP: He doesn’t, no. You’d just get lonely! w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k | B U R N M A G A Z I N E
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nickelback It’d be very lonely on your bus. DA: It’d suck. Half the time it’s about the time you spend together on the tour, you know, the fun times in between. Maybe I could just have your dog on my bus. RP: You can have my dog’s ass for sure. But we can stay on the road longer, right? Presumably that’s something that’s going to have to change when the kids get older. RP: Well, touring’s going to have to change. If we bring everybody on tour we can stay as long as we want. It doesn’t matter. My wife’s job she can do on the internet and computers and whatnot. Shit, I think I move every two years too. I gotta stop doing that! When the kids get old enough they’ll be at school no longer than a year. I don’t wanna be like that. DA: He keeps making money on his houses because of the values of real estate. He knows what he’s doing! Shorter tours on the cards then? RP: Maybe break it up a little. Do two weeks here, go back for a bit. It’s really hard to manage that properly because that’s not really effective touring. You know, if you go out for two weeks, then take a week off, you’re not going to let your whole crew go for that week, or not pay them. The same with the buses. You don’t send them back to Toronto then bring then come back to Vancouver, or wherever the heck we’re at. Rental of gear. You could do it. It’s just silly!
WHEN NICKELBACK AREN’T NICKELBACK DA: I have a band back home called Martone. But I barely ever get to play with them anymore! It’s an instrumental, progressive, fusion kind of shred-fest band, lots of odd times. The star in the band is a guy called Dave Martone, who’s a Berkley graduate, a Parker guitar endorsee. RP: He’s pretty OK. DA: Wooooo, yeah! He’s smokin’. We just released a DVD, and got a couple of albums out. The DVD is of the one show we’ve played in five years, because I’m never home anymore. Dave tours and teaches masterclasses, stuff like that. But when I go home and actually have a couple of months off we’ll go right into the studio and try and write a bunch of stuff. That’s my super-creative outlet. The type of people that are gonna buy it are actually gonna understand it. We’re not looking for radio play or anything. It’s just a real creative kind of thing. And I have a puppy now, and that’s a pain in the ass! RP: Uummm. What do I do? That’s my other life.
DA: Mr Mom. RP: Yes, I used to come home and do a lot of carpentry and woodwork type stuff. I’ve got kids now, and it’s nuts! But it’s better! The cool thing is I come home and I take the kids camping. My wife has started a clothing line, which kind of parallels to this industry a bit, but it’s kind of a better scenario. She takes independent designers and to each of them she basically says “listen, I’m gonna be the company, I wanna feature you”. She initially did it because we were going to the Canadian Music Awards and the Grammys and whatnot and she wanted something to wear. So she found designers that made stuff that she liked, that were making like two or three pieces a month to sell to pay the rent. But they’re really interesting. And she said “can you custom make stuff like this” and they did it, and she was like “why aren’t you out there, bringing your art to the World?” DA: It’s like artists trying to get a record deal. RP: Yeah, just trying to get to the next level and hoping someday somebody notices me and says “I like it!” It’s one of the scenarios in any job where everybody says “I can do this and I can
“WE’RE NOT TRYING TO BE A LABEL AND KEEP THEM FOR 40, 50, 90 YEARS...
DO I SOUND JADED?”
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make this happen and I can put this together”, and then you just sit back and whatever. So we said “well, why don’t you do that? Let’s just do it”. So she did it. She’s started this company that features these artists where basically we don’t sign them on to contracts. Where some people do, like record labels, where it’s almost like an assignment. We’re just building these people up and if their name gets built up, the company’s called Obakki, so it’s just “Dave Wallace by Obakki”, “Genevieve Graham by Obakki”. So our name’s being built up and so is theirs’. But if they wanna take off and go to design for somebody else we just say “Good luck”. And we’ll get
somebody else. DA: Like giving them the springboard. RP: Everybody wins. We’re not trying to be a label and keep them for 40, 50, 90 years. Do I sound jaded? But it’s fair for everybody. We don’t go out to India or China and get stuff that’s super, super cheap for them to work with. That’s also something I do outside the band. My wife’s big into charity, like, that helps build orphanages and health care centres and computer schools teaching skills to people that don’t have the opportunity and educate kids. That’s my short answer. DA: Thanks for condensing that. RP: You’re welcome.
See what I mean? There’s no way a three-way conversation would have flowed in a regular ‘article’ style. And by approaching it this way, the guys have been able to share a different side of the band. What goes on around them. Because it’s not often we get that from a band. Back stage and on tour, yes, but the rest? They’ll have done a hundred other interviews this year talking about the songs, the recording, the shows. But if you can do something different once in a while, for them and for us, won’t everything just get a bit repetitive and over-done? Speaking of repetitive, not one mention of “How You Remind Me” either. Not bad huh?
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live www.friendsoflive.com “They called us a dead generation, they told us that we wouldn’t survive, they left us alone in the maelstrom, as you can see we’re all clearly alive!” sings Corey Taylor on Stone Sour’s recent single 30-30/150... The song is the first single off of Come What(ever) May, the band’s follow-up album to their 2002 self-titled debut - and it fucking rocks. 30-30/150, much like the entire album, adheres to the single most important identifier of good music: it grabs you by the short and curlies, and keeps you cemented to the edge of your seat, right from the second it kicks in up until the moment the speakers finally fall silent. When Stone Sour released their platinumselling eponymous album in August 2002, the focus was not on the quality of the songwriting or the unique sound the band had created, but on the members; singer Corey Taylor and guitarist Jim Root were best known for their work with metal pioneers Slipknot, and many ignored the fact that Stone Sour had in fact existed since 1992 and was very much the main project for Corey up until he was asked to join Slipknot in 1997 (ironically after Slipknot beat Stone Sour in a local Battle Of The Bands competition), “I was already a fan of the band,” Corey Taylor recalls. Corey and Stone Sour are currently on their tour bus, racing down a motorway through France towards their next show, and the cellular phone reception is weak so Corey’s voice is coming down the phone-line intermittent and distorted. “I’d seen them live and I remember just wanting to be the singer of that fuckin’ band!” He laughs. “When they asked me try out, I thought I’d check it out. I was completely into it, and was totally different from anything I’d done. Leaving Stone Sour was the hardest decision I have ever made.” When Slipknot first crawled out of Des Moines, Iowa in late 1997, the world took a deep breath - and has been holding it since. Here was a band of 9 musicians, identifying themselves with the numbers 0 through 8,
that Stone Sour is more than just a side band. “Even when we were doing Slipknot, me and the guys would get together and record shit,” Corey reveals. “When it came to the point after the Iowa recording and tour cycle, I needed to do something completely different - and Stone Sour was right there.” The runaway global success of Slipknot must have played a part in the release of the Stone Sour album? “In a lot of ways, I think it actually hindered Stone Sour,” Corey muses. His voice is wearily contemplative and has a clear air of intelligence. “Think about Slipknot. Think about what people know about Slipknot. Here comes this band with Jim and Corey, and already on that, there are preconceptions forming about whether people will either instantly embrace or deny it, just through judging us on Slipknot. It was an uphill battle: we toured incessantly, we did every radio show, every interview we could just to get the name ‘Stone Sour’ out there, and try to get people to realise it was completely different. Making people see that they couldn’t go by their expectations was a lot of work, and now that hard work is starting to pay off. Of course, we have a lot of Slipknot fans that don’t care about Stone Sour, and a lot of Stone Sour fans that don’t care about Slipknot - and that’s a great place to be.” Three singles were released off of their first album, each one fostering more success for the band; Bother (which featured on the Spiderman OST) reached Number 2 in the US Mainstream Rock Charts, and rocketed the band into their own realm of fame. “Fame is just like the natural gas after you’ve mined all the oil,” Corey reasons. “It’s just an after-thought. It is what it is. I don’t let fame affect the way I write songs, because if you do, you end up turning into a band that’s quite crap.” And rightly so - there have been far too many bands in recent years writing songs almost directly targeting them at the mainstream. “Well, that’s the credo of the band: if we write it and we feel it,” Corey continues, “then let’s put it out there. Why hold back just
“FAME IS JUST LIKE THE NATURAL GAS
AFTER YOU’VE MINED ALL THE OIL,” COREY REASONS.
“IT’S JUST AN...ITAFTER-THOUGHT . IS WHAT IT IS. sporting gruesome masks and uniformlycoloured boiler-suits, and playing a notoriously intense form of heavy metal - people either loved them or hated them. Over the better part of the last decade, Slipknot has become almost a brand-name in metal; eleventeen-year old ‘mini-moshers’ can be seen in any town or city garbed in over-sized Slipknot hoodies, congregating in and around record stores. With the momentum and popularity of a multiplatinum selling metal band behind them, Slipknot’s #8 (Corey Taylor) and #4 (guitarist Jim Root) unmasked and announced the release of Stone Sour’s first album in 2002 - for the most part, people believed that Stone Sour was more of a one-off side project than a band to be taken seriously. The release of critically acclaimed Come What(ever) May has signalled 8
because you’re worried that people might think it’s too different? Fuck that! Band’s never used to be like that - they used to be like, ‘Okay, we wrote this, let’s see if there’s a couple of ears out there that dig it.’ With Stone Sour, we’ve always tried to cover the middle ground that so many bands have left open.” And, following that dogma, Stone Sour have gone above and beyond with the songs on Come What(ever) May - the songs range from all-out mosh anthems such as 30-30/150 and Socio to acoustic, soulful ballads such as Through Glass and ZZYXZ Rd. The band had toyed with similar musical fusion on their debut, but the degree to which they suceed on Come What(ever) May is phenomenal. “Putting Through Glass next to 30-30/150 is like putting Bother next to Get Inside - they may w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k | B U R N M A G A Z I N E
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STONE COLD
KILLERS Words: Seb Willett
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stone sour sound completely different, but that’s us, and they work together,” Corey says, “and that’s what matters. We started the musical diversity with the first album, but it was almost like we were being too tentative. We didn’t even know if anybody would pay any attention to us! When we found out that we had an audience, we were like, ‘Fuckin A!’” Corey laughs. “With this album, we were like, ‘Okay, let’s take what we started, and just fuckin’ build on it.’ We never want to be so genre-specific that people will know what to expect - we always wanted to be one of those bands that if we feel something, we’ll put it out there no matter what people think. I’m so proud of this album - and it’s not very often I can actually say that! We really wanted to strengthen the line that separates the two bands [Stone Sour and Slipknot]. We wanted to show off our strengths: our songwriting, our diversity, and our very human approach to it all.” Above anything else, it’s becoming clear that Corey is very determined about isolating “the two bands” from each other; the heaviness of the first album seemed to draw unnecessary comparisons to Slipknot, but, as Corey says, the second album completely blows any comparisons out of the water. Even Corey himself found his expectations being entirely upended. “We went above and beyond every expectation I had for this album!” He laughs. “I wanted the songs to sound strong and the production to sound clean - and the songs ended up sounding so much better than I thought they were going to. It’s almost chilling!” Considering how much time Corey and Jim appeared to be devoting to keeping the cogs turning of Slipknot, it’s hard to imagine how they found time to write for Stone Sour, “We would always get together in the off-time at home,” he discloses, “and we would just write and write. By the time we had finished touring Slipknot... Fuck man! We had about 37 ideas for songs, so the biggest problem was whittling it down from a box-set to a proper fuckin’ album, because we had so many great ideas!” He pauses. “We wanted to make sure that whatever we came out with felt the best and sounded the best. So we just picked the songs and really concentrated on them, and voila, we have a sweet fuckin’ album!” As we continue to discuss the dynamic that exists between him, Stone Sour and Slipknot, there’s a screeching of tyres down the phone, and Corey screams: “What the FUCK?” There’s silence for several seconds, and distant talking on the bus. “Hold on a second, we’re about to have a 0
fuckin’ problem with some fuckin’ ass-hole...” More silence. “Okay, this guy was just being a fuckin’ asshole... Pull him over, and we’ll fuck him up!” Corey laughs. “Sorry about that, dude... We’re on a bus, so you never know whose ass you’re going to have to kick next! What was I saying?”
Being in both bands.... “Oh yeah. I do one, then I do the other - I bounce back and forth. I’m more hands on with Stone Sour than with Slipknot - even though I write the lyrics in Slipknot, it’s very much their [Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan, Joey Jordison and Paul Gray] band - I came in late. Those guys have always had a vision of what the band is. I try to contribute to that, and I’ve written a little music, but it generally seems to take care of itself.” A cough. “With Stone Sour, I was one of the founders back in ‘92, so it’s definitely much more hands-on for me; I try to get into the artistic and musical side of it, and help guide it. Stone Sour has always been one-for-all and allfor-one, and hopefully we’ll continue with that.” There seems to be no discord between Corey and his bands - but what if the day ever came that he had to choose between them? “I wouldn’t! I’d just let a fuckin’ bomb go off,” he laughs, “if somebody tried to make me choose. I’d say, ‘Fuck you, you’re not going to push me into something like that.’ I’m really lucky: I’ve got two bands that allow me to make
any kinda music I want, and two bands I’m really proud to be. Not a lot of people can say that - and not a lot of people do it for the right reasons anyways. Hopefully I’m doing it for the right reasons...” Right reasons? “Just total freedom - the freedom to do whatever I want. Music on tap!” Corey chuckles. “If I get an idea, I know there’s at least one band I can do it with. It’s just total expression, and total creativity.” Total expression and creativity is an important thing for a band to maintain throughout their career, regardless of how illustrious or successful they become and something that a lot of people strive for in their own lives. But, with the level of anonymity and ‘freedom’ of speech offered by the Internet, it seems that too many people are satisfied to settle for pseudo-articulation of opinions (usually targeting a band like Slipknot with abuse and criticism) and hiding behind the lifeless glow of a computer screen, “I think that people who hide behind screen-names and whatever are juts complete fuckin’ pussies,” Corey declares bitterly. “When I say something on the Internet, trust me, people know it’s me. If you don’t have the balls to say that shit with your real name, then you shouldn’t fuckin’ say it to begin with. It’s given a lot of pussies a place to say their shit,” he trails off. “But, if you spend all your time worrying about the people that hate you, you start ignoring the people that love you. So, I’m over it - you can talk all the shit about me you want, I don’t care! Will I lose my mind over it, or stop making music? No! Sit in your mom’s basement, enjoy the chicken casserole she makes you every Sunday night, and shut the fuck up!” He laughs. “Those people don’t get to me now, and they’re never going to. I’m not gonna waste my breath trying to sort them out. All I have to say to them is, ‘Fuck you, eat a bag of shit, you suck!’ That’s really all they deserve.” One of the most prevalent Internet phenomenons in recent times is multi-million user profile-site Myspace.com. The website networks millions of people around the world, allowing bands and their fans an open forum to express themselves - and to a huge audience. “Oh yeah,” Corey says matter-of-factly, “I have a Myspace. I got on there to talk shit!” He laughs. “I was a late-comer, though. I saw that everbody was getting on there, and I was like, ‘Fuck that!’ But then the more dudes I met in other bands and the more friends I made on the road, I realised that they were all on Myspace.
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stone sour There’s no better way of keeping in touch with them all. I got on there and started writing all kinds of blogs and changing things up as much as I could - but it’s got to the point now where I’m just writing stuff to make people laugh. I’ve only got one picture up, and no music, because I think it’s just a waste of fuckin’ bullshit...” He trails off slightly. “I try and make fun of as many of those stupid quizzes as I can - especially the ‘Which member of Slipknot are you?’ ones!” He laughs. “They’re fuckin’ stupid! They’ve got mine completely wrong: apparently I love numetal and consider myself a leader... What the fuck does that mean though? I don’t love fuckin’ nu-metal, and I certainly don’t look at myself as a leader!” For somebody who doesn’t consider themselves a leader, Corey Taylor certainly does a good job of fronting bands: Slipknot have become a household name and Stone Sour are on their way to enjoying similar success - and as much as he’d like to convince us that it’s all down to the songwriting of the band, the
charisma and energy that he exudes both on and off stage is incomparable. Slipknot live shows have always had a reputation for being intense from beginning to end (reportedly Shawn Crahan would take a dead crow onstage in a jar, and at opportune moments during the set, inhale deeply from it and vomit into the crowd), and although Stone Sour shows are far less controversial, none of the intensity seems to be lost. “Touring with the two bands is quite different actually,” Corey imparts. “Sometimes, I really don’t enjoy myself when I’m touring with Slipknot - but when I tour with Stone Sour, I laugh my ass off every day!” He laughs to himself, no doubt at the momentary recollection of past experiences. He pauses, then continues, this time his voice more solemn, “Slipknot brings it’s own darkness around with it. There’s always tension.” This tension hasn’t escaped the public eye either: the last few years have been filled with rumours concerning the break-up of Slipknot
“WHY HOLD BACK JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE WORRIED THAT PEOPLE MIGHT THINK IT’S TOO DIFFERENT?
FUCK THAT! BAND’S NEVER USED TO BE LIKE THAT THEY USED TO BE LIKE, ‘OKAY, WE WROTE THIS,
LET’S SEE IF THERE’S A COUPLE OF EARS OUT THERE THAT DIG IT.’
and conflicts between band members. But, it seems at least for the moment, through the cathartic nature of numerous side projects, that the future of Slipknot is secure, “We plan to tour with Stone Sour for the next 2 years,” Corey promises, “so the future is wide open. Even if people just go, ‘Fuck that album!’ we know we made a good album, so I can live with that. I know a lot of people say that, but, a lot of people are fuckin’ stupid too! But whatever, I’ll always be doing music of some kind. Writing, some production here and there, and apparently getting into this record label I accidentally started!” He laughs. As well as starting Maggot Recordings several years ago, apparently Corey is now involved in a new label: “GBM Records. Brand new. I basically started it so I could release the Facecage album I produced. But, other than all that, I don’t try to look that far forward. My vision of the future is just in tour cycles now...” And, with 2 years of tours planned and an album that could strip the enamel off of your teeth at 30 paces, Stone Sour are finally picking up the momentum that they’ve been building towards for the past 14 years. Slipknot or not, one thing is clear about Stone Sour: they’ve worked hard and fought harder to get where they are - and they wholly deserve it.
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dashboard confessional
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dashboard confessional
With a smash hit album and a profile almost as big as the Simpsons over in the US and a series of live shows about to burst open here in the UK, the boss brushed off his passport and uncovered a rather
DashingBlade Christopher Carrabba is wandering around the Myrtle Beach arena that Dashboard Confessional are playing tonight, looking for somewhere quiet to lay the smack down. For a few moments it seems as though the front of the stage might be our safest bet, but I’m grossly mistaken as the soundcheck soon kicks in and we buffer from closet to stairwell before happening across a small room far enough away from the hustle of the day to day workings of a traditional American pit-stop. With the new album Dusk and Summer startling the rock world with its positioning of number 2 on the Billboard chart - although modern rock seems to positioning the higher echelons more and more these days - Carrabba immediately cock-blocked any nonsensical and lame pigeonholing of nightmarish emo association and became resolutely respected for songwriting alone. Seems to me that any band these days that is prepared to go out with acoustic based songs and wear their heart on their sleeve is immediately branded ‘emo’ - if that were truly the case, then we’d be in a bad, bad way. From where I’m standing, all I see is a genuinely talented songwriter doing the thing that all talented songwriters should be doing hitting the road and getting it on with the crowd and when it comes to that department, Carrabba is old school all the way. He has more in common with Johnny Cash and Springsteen than most think. He has this need to be understood - probably most of all by himself by means of his lyrical output, but again, to me it seems a chasm has been traversed in the making of this new record. Previous recordings left me interested for sure if not a little disappointed that they didn’t punch my lights out, but they were certainly nowhere near as dangling on the hook as I am with Dusk and Summer. What’s changed? “Nothing has changed... I don’t think. Time moves on and takes us with it. Any writer will tell you this - whether you work for a magazine, write novels or are a songwriter: the material you wrote a while back, you probably thought it was the best thing you’d ever done at the time, but when you look back, you wonder what you were thinking because it all seems as though a B
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dashboard confessional UNPLUGGED: The Dashboard Confessional release of MTV Unplugged 2.0 was released in 2002. Available in a CD/DVD package it essentially becomes Dashboard Confessional's first live album - it’s also the first non-platinum selling artist to be on MTV Unplugged. After a few months, RIAA certified the album platinum, (meaning it sold over one million copies), making it their best-selling album to date. The album is the first one to have peaked at #1 in the Top Heatseekers and the Top Independent Albums chart. The songs featured on this album are slightly changed and a little more upbeat versions of the songs from the albums Swiss Army Romance, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most and their EP, So Impossible. Curiously, this is the first time Dashboard Confessional perform the tracks Remember to Breathe, So Impossible, Turpentine Chaser, Living In Your Letters, For You to Notice and Hands Down as a full band unlike the ones on their original albums which featured only Carrabba.
The track list goes something like this (actually, it goes exactly like this!): 1. "Swiss Army Romance" 2. "The Best Deceptions" 3. "Remember to Breathe" 4. "The Good Fight" 5. "The Sharp Hint of New Tears" 6. "So Impossible" 7. "The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most" 8. "Turpentine Chaser" 9. "Living In Your Letters" 10. "For You to Notice" 11. "The Brilliant Dance" 12. "Screaming Infidelities" 13. "Saints and Sailors" 14. "Again I Go Unnoticed" 15. "Hands Down" This 52-minute selection is a well-chosen parade of hits and relative obscurities from the band. Those who have been to a DC gig know that one of the audience tics that has grown up around Carrabba is that the audience often sings along to the songs, often louder than Carrabba himself; that tendency is kept somewhat in check here, but it's still present, which might make MTV Unplugged a rather annoying listen for some!
High School student could have done it! Then again, sometimes, when you look back you can still think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done. Those are all things in your life that rely solely on perspective. “I don’t think I’ve personally changed that much really apart from getting more mature and road weary as bands tend to do on the road”, he laughs. “I hope I’ve grown as an artist but the aspect that has changed for me is how I work.” “When I started out, I had all these fantastic ideas in my head and the first couple of recordings I did... well, the first one took me three days to produce and the second one took me six days, but I was confined by my knowledge of how the studio process works and also by doing them in the hours when nothing was going on in the studio so that I could do them for next to nothing. “This is really the first time I’ve been able to translate fully what’s been going on in my head to the end product, so to see it go so high on Billboard is pleasing to say the least!” Pleasing as it may be, Carrabba is giving me no sense of being anything other than himself. Sometimes, when perceived success comes like lightning, it can be pretty hard to deal with - hell, just take one look at the Walk the Line movie, but I’ll come to that later... while I’m busy thinking of this, Chris continues full of the reasons why: “Dusk and Summer sounds pretty damn close to what I had in the front of my mind. I’m not sure you can ever get the whole thing down that’s in your head when your being creative but this is as close as I was ever going to get right now.” There’s that work ethic in action for you. There’s no faulting that with Carrabba either. Recently taken down and out by a good dose of flu, it’s been the only thing that has been able to derail the train on it’s long journey to mainstream acceptance, but it sure didn’t stop it for long. Carrabba has far too much to say and get out of his system to let a tiny virus turn an album release into an event worthy of Chinese Democracy proportions. While I was waiting on Chris finishing up with the journo before me, I hit the internet to see what other people had to say - (sometimes we do that just to make ourselves feel better!). There’s a couple of sites out there who seem to have got the wrong end of the stick where Dashboard are concerned. I bring Chris up on his religion, as there’s more than one interviewer out there that seems to be hanging their hat on it, but I’m not seeing it myself. “I don’t know why that is. Well, I might do... we used to be signed to a
label that whose main purpose was spreading the Christian message, but I think we were the only act on there that wasn’t going down that route! “I don’t know what the phrase ‘Christian’ means over there in the UK, but over here it just means something like ‘Starbucks’ to me. I’m a Catholic - and a lapsed one at that, but that’s how I was brought up. At the end of the day, I’m just a man looking for himself and for some answers... just like everybody else. “Maybe it’s the word Confessional in the band name that takes people down that road. Who knows what goes on in peoples heads.” This ‘man looking for himself’ - that’s the very door I was looking for. For all the dissemination people do over the band, I basically had Carrabba pegged as a hopeless romantic in the finest tradition of Byron and Keats. Bring that concept a little more up to date and you can see where I culled the Johnny Cash comparison from. For any writer to say that Dashboard Confessional are an ‘emo’ band or any other for that matter is unbelievably irresponsible and short sighted. Worse still, it shows no respect for the art. Technically speaking it would be like a guitarist picking up a magazine and stating that what they had just read by journalist ‘x’ was pretty much same as a posting they just read on a forum by a ten year old... look, I’ve rattled my own cage now! But back to Johnny Cash. I’ve never been the biggest fan in the world, but he, like Springsteen and one or two others, found the way to bring whatever is on the inside of themselves to the outside in a form that was very pleasing for other people to stick around long enough to want to know more. This indeed is how legends are begun. These artists are the ones that reverberate in life as listeners are immediately able to pick up on a vaguely familiar thread that they can take and interpret as they wish. Carrabba listens to me politely while I rattle away, nodding in all the right places. We’re standing on solid ground here as I seem to understand the artist and I think... the artist respects that fact that I got it. Maybe. I point out that it’s a good time for bands like Dashboard right now as acoustically written songs are really shining through. You only have to look at how many extra tour dates a band like the Goo Goo Dolls had to add to their UK tour to see that this is true. Is it the honesty that shines through? Whatever it is, I can always tell when a song has been written on an acoustic. “So can I. There’s something that resonates through a song that’s been
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“Dusk and Summer sounds pretty damn close to what I had in the front of my mind. I’m not sure you can ever get the whole thing down that’s in your head but this is as close as I was ever going to get...”
written with that much honesty. I don’t think you can write ‘honest’ songs in any other way. Once you plug in and you start to build layers, you’re almost working in a different art form. It’s equally valid as a song, of course it is, but it’s not the same underneath.” You like performing like that don’t you. “Sure. It’s a great way to get your songs across and a chance to really see how people react to them close up. When we did UnPlugged, we were a very young band - it was such an honour to be asked to do it as it always appeared to be the bastion of the super successful - and now, I see we’ll be over in London doing an acoustic show too! That will be so cool.” He’s referring of course to the show at the opening of the new FOPP store in Tottenham Court Road. There are no tickets - it’s a turn up event and there are going to be serious amounts of people there - does it make you nervous being virtually naked in a stage with just your songs between you and the people? “Not really, to be honest, that’s where I belong. You know I wrote most of my songs and
performed them in some fledgling form in front of my friends and family, so I’m used to it in the harshest of environments! It’ll be a blast”. Such is the curse of the writer on a schedule and an artist on an even tighter one that we get time called on us. In an unprecedented moment of respect, we trade numbers and promise to hook up to continue this conversation when the band hits London in a couple of weeks. There’s more to Dashboard Confessional than meets the eye - of this I’m utterly convinced. With Dusk and Summer, Carrabba may be on the cusp of something remarkable if I’m not mistaken. It’s an album that will see you coming back for more each time you listen and on some level, it never fails to deliver. Is the cutting room floor full of out-takes? “Oh yes. There’s material down there that I thought was no way good enough for the album. I’ve since listened to those scraps again, and there’s some great songs lying around. Some whole, some in bits. What you see in Dusk is a very rounded album almost exactly as I intended as I said before, but there’s a whole stack of
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I don’t think you can write ‘honest’ songs in any other way. Once you plug in and you start to build layers, you’re almost working in a different art form... - on songwriting on an acoustic
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Radio City’s Love Affair with Rock
songs that would make great b-sides - if we still had such a thing. Nothing will be wasted though. Everything will be reworked or recycled into something. Might there be another album sooner rather than later then. “I have no idea and that’s the honest truth. The priority at the moment is day to day on the road and delivering the best show we can.” With this being far from the end of the story, I can promise you this... our journey with Dashboard Confessional will be continued. Ω Somehow, someway, very soon. SS
The live pictures featured here come from the Dashboard Confessional show on 12th August. DC are the latest in a long time of artists to sell out this world famous venue. Located in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Known as the Showplace of the Nation, the Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932 with the film version of Philip Barry's play The Animal Kingdom (1932). The theatre is also home to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, a New York Christmas tradition since 1933, and to the women's precision dance team known as The Rockettes. Designed by Donald Deskey, the interior of the venue incorporates glass, aluminum, chrome, and geometric ornamentation. Deskey rejected the Rococo embellishment generally used for theatres at that time in favour of a contemporary Art Deco style. Radio City has 5,933 seats for spectators; it became the largest indoor theater in the
world at the time of its opening. The Great Stage, measuring 66.5 feet deep and 144 feet wide, resembles a setting sun. Its system of elevators was so advanced that the U.S. Navy incorporated identical hydraulics in constructing World War II aircraft carriers. According to Radio City lore, during the war, government agents guarded the basement to assure the Navy's technological advantage. In what was to become quite a cool event, on April 1, 2006, Dream Theater played their 20th Anniversary concert at Radio City Music Hall, featuring an almost 30 piece orchestra. Top venue...
AEROSMITH OUT OF THE CELLAR
STONE SOUR FEAR AND LOATHING IN PARIS
BACKYARD BABIES
QUEENSRYCHE
OUT ON THE ROAD
COHEED & CAMBRIA
PARTY POLITICS!
NEW YORK DOLLS SYLVAIN SYLVAIN’S PIRATE LOVE
CALLING PLANET EARTH
NICKELBACK
DOUBLE COVER SPECIAL EDITION
JUST FLIP ME OVER!
ISSUE 11 2006 £3.40
OFF ROAD WITH RYAN PEAKE
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