Fighting Fires

“You go to Australia and it's just nothing but flat whites and delicious seafood,” George Pettit reflects on a decade with Alexisonfire, and tells Dave Drayton why Australia was a must visit on their farewell tour.

Despite peddling music with more than its fair share of aggression – with a decade in the game, and a large portion of that time at the top of said game (Alexisonfire certainly did their part in bringing heavy music to a wider audience) – the Canadian five-piece could hardly be accused of taking themselves too seriously. You need only glance at their vault of ridiculous music videos – from the gang-fight farce of their first, Water Wings (And Other Pool Side Fashion Faux Pas), to Hey, It's Your Funeral Mama, where a series of doppelganger Alexisonfires are trained to take over the tour-weary band – or the ridiculously high-spirited cover of Moneen's Passing Of America from the 2005 split between the two bands to see Alexisonfire's sense of humour.

It's no real surprise then that the band's often-bearded and near-always bespectacled frontman, George Pettit, starts our conversation with a joke. “I'm laying in bed. It takes [it] out of you, I gotta do a bunch of interviews in a row here, so I'm trying to spice it up a little bit,” he says playfully. “I'm still wearing the clothes that I wore to the gym earlier today, so drink that in a little bit: dirty gym shorts!”

Since the August 2011 announcement of the band's intent to break up, it has been these small things – going to the gym, family, a life outside a band – that have dominated Pettit's life. Having spent the majority of his adult years touring with Alexisonfire, of the break-up, he says, it's time for a change. Where other members of Alexisonfire continued their musical endeavours, most notably guitarist/vocalist Dallas Green with solo project City & Colour, and Wade MacNeil in his new posting as Gallows frontman, Pettit opted to remove himself from the scene.

“When the band was done I didn't have a lot of desire to dive right back into playing music. If anything that I really missed out on by playing in the band – not that I really feel like I regret anything about doing this band for as long as I did – is that I didn't go to school, I didn't learn a lot of skills outside of ones that were pertinent to playing music, so I've gone back to school. And then family has obviously been extremely important to me, so since I've been home I've got a little guy who's going to be three in December, his name's Owen and he has been taking up a lot of my time,” he says with a paternal chuckle. “So between those two things and my beautiful wife I've just been spending a lot of time with family and school.”

With a 15-date farewell world tour set for December to commemorate the band's decade-long existence and four studio albums – 2002's self-titled debut effort, 2004 breakout album Watch Out!, 2006's CASBY Award-winning Crisis, and Old Crows/Young Cardinals – Pettit will obviously be once more entering the ring. Though in the flurry and frenzy of the announcement of the band's break-up, a mere 18-months ago, it seemed as though any possibility of future farewell shows or reunions were to be doubted as rumours of an unamicable split abounded. The post made by Pettit on the Alexisonfire website is still there to read: “Was the break up amicable? Not really. Was it necessary? Probably.”

With the time and space to allow wounds to heal, however, a final tour 'done right' – as opposed to the European, Canadian and Australian tours completed in 2010 guarding the knowledge that Green planned to leave the band – began to take shape. “We mentioned it at the actual break up, we talked about, you know, 'We should probably do one more farewell run', and the last few tours we did we were living under the knowledge that Dallas was going to be leaving, and we didn't share that with anybody because we didn't know what our next move was going to be, we didn't know who we could find to replace Dallas, and we worked on that for a while. There was a lot of – I don't want to say anything to dramatic like 'darkness' or anything – but yeah, it wasn't fun for the last two tours, we were staring down the end of the band and we were doing it privately,” Pettit reveals. “Whereas this is more something that we can do, you know, this feels right. We've all had time to digest and to move on to new things and now we can come back and celebrate ten years of being in a band and do it one last time with everybody, and not just privately in the backstage. There's no pressure to do anything, it's not like we're sitting here thinking about, you know, 'Oh, we gotta make another record. We gotta do whatever'. It's just like: let's just look back on the things that we did and we can do it with everyone involved, everyone knows, and that's a good feeling. I think that'll be a good feeling for everybody.”

The only question that remained to be answered was whether it was going to be a farewell show, or farewell tour, and if the latter, just where exactly a band that spent the better part of a decade travelling the world would go to say goodbye. Australia, says Pettit, rapidly revealed itself to be a no-brainer.

“Australia has always just been overwhelmingly supportive, and not to mention that touring down there – the touring in Australia is just so stress free, it just feels like vacation to us more than it does tour. We did some hard touring I think at times, where we weren't necessarily enjoying ourselves, or there were stresses on the road, you know: the bus is breaking down, we gotta switch buses four times, we gotta do this, and we're all on no sleep and everyone gets sick and all this stuff. You go to Australia and it's just nothing but flat whites and delicious seafood and you're sitting on the beach and people are friendly and nice.

“And the shows, you know,” Pettit continues, the excitement in his voice hinting at the optimism of a band embarking on their first tour out of their home country, “the shows got progressively bigger, the records were always really warmly received in Australia and that's just it. There's nothing but positive experiences for us down there.”

And so it was that Australia, alongside Canada, UK and Brazil, were lined up to send the band out in style. And according to Pettit, it was down under that knocked nearer neighbours USA off the list. “No disrespect to the Americans, and a lot of people in America are feeling slighted that we didn't go down there and play any shows, but I mean we live 45 minutes from Buffalo. I live like maybe half an hour from Buffalo, New York, and we chose to go to a 37-hour flight to Melbourne over that, and I think that speaks volumes about our love for Australia and how supportive they've been for us. We love Australia and I'm done blowing smoke up your arse here, but this is serious: we love Australia.”

When and Where:
11th December Horden Pavilion 
12th December Festival Hall