INTERVIEW - Alexisonfire by
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review of Alexisonfire live at the Apollo!
It’s a freezing, damp and dreary Sunday evening outside the Manchester Apollo and hundreds of teens are braving the weather to queue for the roaring thunderbolt of noise which is the Taste of Chaos tour. I slip, feeling ever so slightly guilty, into the warmth of the backstage area to interview the platinum-selling Canadians Alexisonfire. The lovely Tour Manager guides us into the plushest (i.e. breeze block walls, bars on the window, atmosphere of a prison cell) of dressing rooms where I meet singer Dallas Green and guitarist Wade MacNeil for a chat about their latest album, Sweden and dojos….
EM: Entertainment Manchester is obviously a Manchester-based website; do you have any favourite Manchester bands?
Dallas: Oasis are from Manchester, right? I like the first two Oasis records a lot. Who else? There are other Manchester bands which are bigger…
EM: The Smiths, Joy Division…
Dallas: There you go, we like those bands. I don’t know about any new bands, gimme some newer bands…
EM’s little
brother: The Maple State
Dallas: Never heard of them. There’s probably a whole lot more bands from Manchester we like, but we don’t know they’re from Manchester…
EM: Are there
any Canadian bands we should be looking out for?
Dallas:- Attack and Black, we’re going to try and bring
them next time we come over
EM: You started as a sort of ‘underground’ band, do you miss that scene?
Dallas: We still kinda have it in a lot of places, which is cool because we’re like an independent band, we’re not like…you know, major label bands tend to have a huge world-wide push when their record comes out so that everyone knows about them. But we built our fanbase all around the world slowly.
Wade: We’re going to Sweden after these shows. It’s good that we get to do this, and then we’ll get to go there and play like, way heavier!
Dallas: Even in America we’re still a small band, we get to play small places. We just did an American tour and most of the clubs were like 300 capacity.
Wade: We played in a parking lot
Dallas: We did, we played in a Kung-Fu studio, a dojo. Its fun, we get to experience everything, apart from you know, we’re not playing Wembley arena….
EM: Does anything beat the feeling of playing live?
Dallas: Not really, it’s pretty much the best part of the day, even if you wake up and you feel like we feel right now. I went to sleep at 11 this morning. It’s hard to switch gears when you come over here because it’s six hours ahead. I feel awful, but when I play I’ll feel amazing. It’s always like that. You can feel sick as hell and when you play it’s great.
EM: Is touring as Rock ’n ’Roll as we’re lead to believe?
Dallas: It depends on what level you’re at and what kind of band you are. But everyone has fun. It’s not as glamorous as people would make it seem, at least, we don’t live that way. We do our own stuff still; we don’t have a huge crew. We just woke up and came in here…
Wade: It’s lovely; I guess the people reading the interview won’t be able to take in the room that we’re in, with the fireplace…
Dallas: And the leather couches…
Wade: It’s actually more like prison
EM: It appears that through the different types of vocals used, there is a split personality within the band. Does this reflect the characters of the members?
Dallas: Yeah, I guess that would be a good thing to say. All five of us are individuals; we’re all our own person. I think when we started it was kinda like, whoever wanted to sing, just sing whatever you want to. We didn’t necessarily write about the same thing, either. People interpret songs how they want to interpret them and that’s what we did. It’s always been that way. We’ve built on that and now we write together. I mean, I sing because I can’t scream and George screams because he can’t sing
EM: When recording your new album, Crisis, it’s been said that you had a more carefree approach to writing compared with your earlier music. Did you worry about the result?
Wade: I don’t think we really pine over it. We take the writing of the songs seriously. We stop touring, write songs for the next month and a half then we go into the studio. We’re out of everything at that point. You guys can ask a lot of questions about whether we were deliberate, but it’s just the way the songs came out
Dallas: I don’t think we’d ever write a concept record
EM: Do you enjoy the recording process?
Dallas: Yeah, definitely, it’s fun. At times it pisses you off, you know? You just want it to be done. As soon as you start you just want to be done. But it’s lots of fun; it’s a totally different shift in gear.
EM: How does this album differ from the last? Have you taken anything from the last record into this one?
Dallas: No. I don’t think that we necessarily look at our old songs and go “let’s write a song like this.” I think sometimes what will happen is we’ll start writing a song and we’ll think “this kinda reminds me of...” the feeling that we have when we play another song. We just, it’s weird, we just write the songs that happen. Maybe we’ll be like “let’s write a heavier song” and we’ll do it
Wade: We try our best to not repeat ourselves, obviously
EM: Do your side projects, like City & Colour, allow you to explore something different?
Dallas: Not really. I’ve been playing acoustic guitar and singing at shows since before I was in the band, a lot of people just don’t know that. It’s cool because I write a lot of songs all the time. Some songs just don’t make sense as an Alexis record. We’re not the type of band that would put an acoustic song on a record just to show how diverse we can be. So, I had a wealth of songs and I thought “well, I have been meaning to put it out…”
EM: What’s next for Alexisonfire?
Dallas: We’re back here twice next year…
…and with that, looking only slightly jet lagged, Dallas and Wade get ready to perform their show, which is renowned for being highly energetic, thrilling and most of all, heavy.
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