Off The Wagon

"Metal's a bit of a po-faced genre that takes itself too seriously,” Alestorm frontman Christopher Bowes proclaims. “It's too worried about this image of being all metal. But you know what? Fuck it, it's more fun just making stupid songs that people want to hear and have a good time listening to. That's what we like doing. Anything that's just ridiculous, over-the-top nonsense is what I like to hear. I think more people like that, they just don't realise it yet,” he laughs.  

Since releasing debut album, Captain Morgan's Revenge, in 2008, the Scottish outfit have tapped into this sensibility better than most. Building a career on bombastic songs about pirates and a reputation as one of metal's hardest-partying acts will do that. Their next full-length, tentatively due in early 2014, may push things even further. “There's a lot of places we can go with pirate-based lyrics. Like on our last album we had a song about pirates travelling through time to kill Vikings. That's not exactly traditional piratical, Caribbean fare. We're gonna do more stuff like that… Like making a song about baking bread, but a guy with an eye-patch is making the bread. There's a whole world of nonsense we can do. Stupider and stupider is the plan.

“It would be good not to get labelled as 'that pirate-metal band', but just simply being called a metal band. That's the point, when you transcend sub-genres, where you become a proper, established band and not just a little crappy gimmick. We still get loads of people coming (to shows) dressed in pirate hats, costumes and all that. But we seem to be getting more and more people who just seem to be normal metal fans. And that's cool as well.”

Alestorm will capture all this booze-fuelled silliness during their upcoming return to Australia. Given the rabid reception afforded them during previous tours down under, filming their inaugural live DVD on these shores seems a no-brainer. Aside from taping the Melbourne show in its entirety, said release will also detail various off-stage shenanigans. Countless livers may never be the same again.

“It's gonna make the DVD interesting to watch, 'cause it's gonna be different from the usual, bullshit festival appearance video people usually do,” Bowes explains. “I don't think a lot of the world realises that there's a big scene down there. Plus the other thing we wanna show is a whole lot of the backstage stuff: spending our whole week flying every day across the continent, getting to gigs, hotels and being wasted for a week – that's another crazy element of touring Australia.

“At least half the cameras are going to be pointed at the audience. Microphones all in the crowd, you're gonna get that feel of people partying, you'll hear people singing along and telling us to fuck off,” he laughs. “It's gonna be visceral and real. There's a lot of money being thrown at this. But I would love if we could make it real, no fake shit. We're not a band that uses backing tracks. So many metal bands these days when they play live are playing to keyboards and backing vocals on tape. We don't do that at all; everything we do is completely one hundred per cent live, which is depressingly rare these days. We'd love to carry that across the DVD, so we're not doing that thing that everybody does where you're going into the studio and re-playing all the tracks. It's gonna sound live, raw, gonna be full of mistakes, but that's what happens when we play live. That's what it's like coming to a show, so that's what we want to get across – something real.”

Alestorm will be playing the following dates:

Friday 18 January - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 19 January - Manning Bar, Sydney NSW
Sunday 20 January - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Tuesday 22 January - Amplifier Bar, Perth WA