This May SUICIDE BOMBERS, TRENCH DOGS and CONTINENTAL LOVERS warm up for their CALL OF THE WILD FESTIVAL appearances with a triple bill that will blow away anything you will see this year. It’s like venturing back to the glorious line-ups of the 80’s when The Dogs D’Amour and Hanoi Rocks, remnants of the New York Dolls and The Quireboys were all on the prowl. If you miss this one you’ll be kicking yourself into next year… We caught up with Chris to talk all about the Tour, Call of the wild, influences, new music and so much more…
The video flickers to life and Australia and Norway come into view…
CHRIS: Can you?
MARK: I can!
CHRIS: Excellent, now I can too!
MARK: How are you my friend?
CHRIS: I’m good, I just got back from rehearsals, I’m having a beer and waiting for you.
MARK: I’m having my 4 a.m. water (shows Chris a bottle of water)
CHRIS: (laughs) I just lined up a few of those (shows me his beer)
MARK: I was going to say here we are finally face to face, I think all those interviews we’ve done in the past have been phone or email.
CHRIS: Yes, we had a phone interview ages ago and we’ve done media. O this is what you look like! (Laughs)
MARK: (Laughs) well this is what I look like in the middle of the night! It’s gets better during daylight hours… or worse I can never remember which… So, it’s nice and early, otherwise I would join you.
CHRIS: (Laughs) I fully understand.
MARK: What a great tour you’ve got lined up! It’s the sort of tour I’d travel half the world for if I had a little more notice. Two great bands I love in Suicide Bombers and Trench Dogs, and one from my hometown that I wasn’t aware of until you told me about the tour – Continental Lovers. Another great band.
CHRIS: Yeah, I think it’s a great tour too. I was aware of Trench Dogs from before, but I hadn’t listened to much of their music, but I listen to them now and I really, really, really like them. And Continental Lovers is probably turning out to be my favourite new band. I’ve been listening a lot to them and as it’s only three albums combined it’s easy to get around them. ‘Tape Deck’ by Continental Lovers is a great song.
MARK: It is, that was one of my favourites. It was interesting talking to them yesterday. It’s the first time in the 15 years I’ve been doing the Rockpit that someone has mentioned my 4 favourite bands of all time in almost the same sentence. So, we had a lot in common, not just that we hail from the same city. And then all three bands go on to play the Call of The Wild Festival?
CHRIS: Yes, we are, I think it started with the Call of The Wild Festival. Our booking agent here in Norway started talking to someone in the UK who wanted to help us, and he turned out to be Continental Lovers manager. So when we all got booked at Call of The Wild Festival, he suggested that we set up a tour around it. I think Joe from Continental Lovers has also been working hard on the booking and a lot of the promo stuff. So it’s like three kind of different bands – we come from the Hard Rock thing where we mix Rock and Roll with a few Metal riffs, and that of course is a no-go for the two other bands. Trench Dogs are this wonderfully loose Dogs D’Amour meets Hanoi Rocks thing. I dig that sound I did that myself for a few years; and Continental Lovers is a little tighter, a little more boxed in and a bit more Glam Punk in your face. They say Cheap Trick, and Tom Petty and Ramones and stuff but I hear a lot of Johnny Thunders and Jeff Dahl in their music. It’s melodic, punky but still Rock and Roll, so three very different bands but I think it will make a great bill.
MARK: I think you’ve nailed it musically.
CHRIS: I’m good at that (Laughs)
It’s a great cocktail of Rock and Roll. I see similarities and the differences, but I reckon it will mix beautifully! As someone who saw many of the bands you all mentioned as influences back in the day it’s the sort of bill I’d love to see. I remember as a kid climbing out of my bedroom window onto the flat garage roof and getting on a bus or a train and going out to see the Hanoi Rocks and bands like that.
CHRIS: So you saw the in the UK in the 80’s then?
MARK: I’d sneak into gigs when I was like 13 or 14.
CHRIS: Man! You must be a few years old than me. Norway was such a long way from the UK back in the 80’s and I wasn’t even a teen.
MARK: One of the gigs I remember very well was the one where Hanoi filmed the Nottingham Tapes at the Palais, sadly the venue closed a few years as it was very accessible to an underage gig goer who could sneak through small gaps! I saw the there twice I think.
CHRIS: Hanoi Rocks is one of my absolute favourite bands. We haven’t really talked that much music with the other bands but speaking to them we all love that band. I used to be in a band called Trashcan Darlings. when I was a kid I loved all these bands like W.A.S.P., Motley Crue, Warrior Soul: all that kind of stuff. Then the 90’s hit and the L.A. scene just didn’t seem all that cool anymore. But instead of going with the Grunge stuff like everyone else did, I went with the new L.A. Bands like Glamour Punks, Heartthrob Mob, Queeny Blast – all this stuff that nobody’s ever heard of. But I also started listening to more Rock and Roll based stuff like Hanoi Rocks, Dogs D’Amour and Punk like Ramones, Sex Pistols, Dead Boys, all of this. SO I had a lot of years where I wouldn’t listen to anything that was kind of like Metal. And then you just get kind of sick of the Ramones thing (Chris sings a traditional Ramones riff) so when you listen to that for ten years you think “OK let’s listen to ‘Shout at the Devil’ again – it really is a great record!”
MARK: (Laughs)
CHRIS: So I’ve been switching back and forth but when you hear these bands, it’s so cool to hear that Rock and Roll again.
MARK: I know what you mean, I’ll pretty much listen to anything with a guitar in it. I was lucky enough to grow up in an era where there were so many exciting bands – the 80’s in the UK was one of the very best times for music – you still had the tail end of punk, hard rock never went away, you had local bands doing new things, Goth, Post Punk, I loved bad like Lords of the New Church, Hanoi Rocks of course, but I’d see Reggae Rock, anything…
CHRIS: The UK had a huge backlash from Punk. Have you thought about it like that? The important thing with Punk was to say ‘Fuck Off’ to everything that had happened before. You weren’t supposed to be a Rock Star but you were supposed to lie about it while still really being a Rock Star. And that was OK for a snotty Punk band like The Sex Pistols but when it finally dies, because the UK was really the epicentre, New York can say what they want – that was ‘Art Rock’ – the UK was punk. But when it ends you have this backlash because people don’t want to get back into the Rock Star thing. It’s the same that happened in America with Grunge – it kind of takes a while to get back into this larger-than-life thing. So, the result was that the UK in the early 80’s had a lot of quirky Pop music because it wasn’t supposed to be overly commercial. The Rock Music was also not the L.A. kind, it was Hanoi Rocks or Soho Roses, Dogs D’Amour, Quireboys – great bands but just so different. And the proof of this of course is when a band like The Cult went and did ‘Electric’. They wanted to be like AC/DC does America, you know? They got such a big backlash in the UK, and they blew up everywhere else.
MARK: They did and it was understandable because I was one of those guys that going down to see the play ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘Love’ it felt like a betrayal especially when Ian went on TV and said he’d never relocate to the U.S. and then almost immediately did. Though ironically for me that was one of the albums that got me back into Hard Rock – just three months before ‘Appetite For Destruction’ dropped.
CHRIS: I never thought it was that close! I think ‘Love’, ‘Electric’ and ‘Sonic Temple’ are great records. I’m not so big on ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘Ceremony’ and the other stuff, but those three albums are really cool.
MARK: I think ‘Love’ is my favourite because that was the real bridge between the alternative, kinda Goth music and the Hard Rock. It stands the test of time.
CHRIS: It’s what I think of as the most original Cult record. That was kinda alternative yet there’s that melodic thing that they do with the guitars. ‘Electric’ is basically AC/DC and ‘Sonic Temple’ is Led Zeppelin riffs made as ‘Arena Rock’ as possible. But Love sounds like 100% the Cult to my ears.
MARK: Then when we got out of the mid-80’s to the early 90’s it all changed again. Some bands chased the L.A. sound or to use that term I detest ‘Hair Metal’ and some went back to Rock and Roll.
CHRIS: I’m violently against ‘Hair Metal’ and it’s probably ironic since I don’t have any hair, but it’s not really that, I don’t care, I remember when the term came in the 90’s and the people that introduced the term were snotty fucking Grunge-heads who were looking down their noses at anything that happened in the 80’s. They just wanted to lump them all together – It didn’t matter if it was Warrant or Whitesnake or Motley Crue or fucking Metallica or Overkill. If they had hair that had a little bit of volume, fuck every cab driver had that in the 80’s! It doesn’t mean anything – they just wanted a term to tell you your music sucked and it’s all about Hair – that’s what the people meant. And now it’s like stupid fucking morons have adopted it and love it, it’s like embrace the hatred – I hate it!
MARK: We’re together on that I hate the term.
CHRIS: This was Hard Rock, Glam Metal, Sleaze Rock – there were all these different term that meant something. There’s a vast musical different between say Metallica and Motley Crue or Whitesnake or Warrant or White Lion. White Lion is basically a Pop band with long hair and guitars. Motley is sleazy Heavy Metal-ish stuff and Overkill had big hair, but they were Thrash!
MARK: I hear you Chris. I love to look back at what I wrote when these L.A. bands first came out- to me Motley was a Heavy Metal infusion version of The Sweet.
CHRIS: Maybe.
MARK: Songs like Merry Go Round and things like that reminded me of that earlier era. But you’re right Hair Metal was always a derogatory term and should always be seen as such.
CHRIS: Agreed!
MARK: It’s a mockery of a term because it does nothing to describe the music – I mean you had bands like Love/Hate going around in the early 90’s, who I still contend at that time were one of the best live bands ever.
CHRIS: What a brilliant band.
MARK: And they sounded nothing at all like the majority of their contemporaries. I was looking at a single month in the U.K. in 1991 and it started with Love/Hate who I saw twice then just before I saw Winger there was a band called Nirvana. Nirvana was awful and I came out feeling rather disappointed with all the hype, this was just before Teen Spirit. I remember when Pearl Jam’s first album came out and thinking we’d gone back to see Neil Young in the 70’s there was nothing ground-breaking about it, nothing particularly groundbreaking apart from the grandad clothes, and I’d seen that a decade before.
CHRIS: I could never take the vocals with Grunge, I never liked those ‘gnarly’ vocals or whatever they call it (Chris does a nice Eddie Vedder – I can’t understand a word) – it’s sounds like a donkey! And I didn’t like the fake non-Rockstar thing. It was maybe right for the time, there was a recession, things were gloomy so the million bands dressed like Bon Jovi just didn’t feel right. All of it just seemed a bit fake at the end, so you needed something a little more dark or sinister. But American Power Metal Bands, The Grunge Era and all this Alternative stuff – it wasn’t my thing at all. I like a few songs by Mother love Bone, I like ‘Territorial Pissings’ by Nirvana but that’s about it.
MARK: Mother Love Bone, a strange band, but I loved ‘This is Shangrila’ and ‘Stardog Champion’ though the rest was kind of samey. Again that 70’s sort of sound. Then you had bands like The Nymphs who didn’t really fit in and who I’’ve seen labelled both Grunge and Hair metal, I guess depending on if you liked them or not. Which was kind of my proof that the Hair Metal category was just an insult. As a consequence, you didn’t know if you were allowed to like them or not. It was that ‘false cool’ of Grunge that I hated the most.
CHRIS: I think Grunge was the American Punk, right? Grunge was for America what ’77 Punk was for the U.K. That was the only other time when you got a whole new generation of people who said that everything that came before was shit. And it really took a while to get back from it even though it didn’t last that long. THE U.S. and the U.K. has always dominated Rock and Pop culture, but Europe got back into the Rock Star thing a lot faster whereas in America the only thing they could like was Steel Panther because they were being funny about it! You couldn’t like the bands that were doing it for real, but you could admit that you liked Steel Panther.
MARK: But even Steel Panther had their contemporaries. Have you heard of a band out of Phoenix called ‘Big Cock’?
CHRIS: (Laughs) I thought you were talking about me?
MARK: (Laughs) I thought musically they were better
CHRIS: (Laughs) They were bigger!
MARK: (Laughs) They were less Metal, lyrically more tongue in cheek, with Robert Mason singing who was with Warrant later and Lynch Mob. While Steel Panther were still Metal School and without a record, they put out their debut ‘Year of the Cock’ in 2005 and it was great, great songs, OTT image. I always thought it was just that poor choice of band name that made them unmarketable to a larger audience.
CHRIS: I’ll check them out.
MARK: I think they only thing we differ on, and maybe because of what I was listening to as a kid, is that I’d give bands like The Stooges and New York Dolls the credit for Punk, but not the social movement around it, America really doesn’t do social movements unless they are self-interested ones. There was no ‘smash and destroy’ of the UK Punk scene.
CHRIS: Yeah that’s it.
MARK: Sex Pistols even play ‘No Fun’ these days so they get it. But New York Dolls one of my absolute favourites.
CHRIS: One of my favourite bands. I collect bootlegs from New York Dolls, Hanoi Rocks, Kiss and a bunch of other bands and I really like to just sit and listen, even though the sound can be fucking awful! I love to just listen to the concert exactly like it was.
MARK: I use to collect the tapes, years ago we’d go out to markets and there were thousands of bootleg tapes of very varied quality. I sadly couldn’t afford many on vinyl.
CHRIS: Camden was famous for that.
MARK: Now sadly it’s just one hard drive with gigabytes of wonderful nights of live music.
CHRIS: I do like to get them on LP because I find myself listening to that more on vinyl.
MARK: I know what you mean that’s added magic. I had a horrible two years in the 90’s when instead of vinyl or CD I was buying tapes (sighs) sadly…
CHRIS: But we are enjoying ourselves too much Mark, we are forgetting to promote the tour!
MARK: So, let’s get back to it. The best triple bill you will see in the UK this year coming this May – three great bands – Suicide Bombers, Continental Lovers and Trench Dogs – all over the Country and ending up with a big party at Call of the Wild Festival. That has to be one of the best Festivals in Europe right now.
CHRIS: Next time we should probably do a BBQ and just talk music, and trade off being the DJ and play interesting stuff to each other.
MARK: That’s a great concept; I shall steal that ‘Rock and Roll BBQ’ idea. I’ll come over one day and take you up on that.
CHRIS: (Laughs) I love listening to new stuff. I’m a very analytical listener, I like to deconstruct things, and I even do that with my own music. I like to see the structure and how things work. I can go off emotion but I kind of like to see how it works so I can see everything and place the right stuff in the framework.
MARK: So, lets get back to the Tour. Give me some dates…
CHRIS: We’re starting in Bristol on 22nd May at a place called the Golden Lion. On 23rd we’re at Wolverhampton at the Gifford Arms. Then we are in London on 24th at the Hope and Anchor. That’s a classic venue, so many bands started out there.
MARK: I think the Stranglers played there in the 70’s and The Damned, Generation X, even bands like The Jam and the classic Aussie band The Saints. I think I saw New Model Army there back in the day and see again in a few weeks.
CHRIS: We’re really looking forward to it. And then 25th we play Bridgewater, The Cobblestones. 26th is Wakefield, 27th Stoke at a place called 11. And then 28th is Edinburgh at Bannerman’s.
MARK: Another iconic venue.
CHRIS: I’m really looking forward to all of these but that’s one I’ve heard of. I remember seeing a Warrior Soul thing from there and I have fans mailing me about that date looking forward to seeing us. The it’s Newcastle and a place called Trillian’s that is supposed to be really good.
MARK: And a venue I used to shoot over too if a band didn’t play my local City back in the day, great venue. Well it was 30 years ago so I hope it is still now.
CHRIS: (laughs) And then the end of the Triple tour is on the 30th May at a place I think must be pronounced SHORE-LY with a C?
MARK: CHORE-LI
CHRIS: CHOOR-LI
MARK: That’s very close!
CHRIS: CHOOR-LI mate! (Laughs) I think The Continental Lovers even though they haven’t been together that long, they used to be in other bands before, and I think they played all of them. Trench Dogs have played the UK too. But this is our first trip and my first with any band. I’ve been to the UK a lot but never playing. So Chorley will be the end of tour party and then we have an off day and then it’s the Call of the Wild Festival!
MARK: Great Festival. Great tour. You have to be there. Get on it people! You have a great time over there stay safe and report back!
CHRIS: Thanks Mark, stay safe my friend!
We did of course talk long into the Norwegian night, but that’s another story for another time…
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