Becoming More Metal & Being Happy For Kiss To Stop

Australia is one of former Murderdolls frontman Wednesday 13's (real name: Joseph Poole) strongest markets - the perennial visitor has been here almost annually since 2010. The previous tour of Australia was an unplugged, storytelling-based affair, but his impending return will feature Poole and band in "full electric, full make-up, full everything we do" format. However, the singer still plans to revisit the acoustic-gig approach in the future. "It was a humbling thing to go on stage and not have to dress up, and not get into the Wednesday 13 character, so to speak, with the make-up and all that," Poole recalls.  

Does the glam-punk favourite have to prepare much to get into that Wednesday 13 mindset before performing? "I don't think there's that great of a separation between the Wednesday on stage and off stage. I think on stage you're just going to get a little more intensity and my adrenaline, and that's the performer side of me putting on a good show.

"But I don't really feel like I separate how I am on stage and how I am off stage. But it is cool to, kind of, become this character. About an hour before the show when I start putting on the make-up, clothes and stuff, it's a natural thing. You just start becoming that. I've been doing this for so many years now, it's just part of the transformation. I've always heard Alice Cooper say he's Alice on stage and off stage he's a totally different person. I don't think I'm like that; I think I'm just a little more intense on stage. I'm pretty much the same weirdo you see on stage, I'm just not dressed up like that."

It's perhaps fitting then that Poole and band's latest album Condolences - issued via new home, heavyweight label Nuclear Blast - adopted a more metal-oriented sound that was hinted at on previous releases, but not realised to such an extent. Although a self-professed "glam kid", the performer name-checks Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeth, Pantera and Prong among his early metal touchstones, and has also embraced Lamb Of God, Gojira and Machine Head in more recent years.

"It's just been a natural progression for the band," Poole points out. "The past three records we were definitely hitting on some heavy material; that's just a natural thing from the band and from me as well. I've become a huge metalhead over the past ten years and I constantly listen to metal. We kind of always incorporated a little metal; we've never been punk enough to be punk, we've never been metal enough to be metal.

"We're just kind of in the middle, which is great, because [we] don't really have any rules that we have to follow, we just kind of do what we do and we try to make the best music that we can, and what comes out, comes out. On this last record we knew before we went in - we started writing it and we knew it was going to be heavy, just [from] the way we'd been talking. But it wasn't a contrived thing where we sat down and said, 'Let's write the heaviest riff ever'."

The arena-sized showmanship of Kiss is another act Poole, by his own admission, owes a significant debt to. Founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons have proposed that b(r)and could continue one day, featuring an entirely new line-up donning the greasepaint.

"Kiss is one of my all-time favourite bands. I grew up - me and my brother, I remember him giving me the Kiss dolls with half their clothes missing to play with and I kind of incorporated them into my GI Joes… So Kiss was always this larger-than-life band and the older records, the original records with the original band, are classic to me. But carrying the Kiss brand on... I don't even know if I would be interested in that.

"It's one of those things where Kiss has looked at their band like Coca-Cola where it's just going to keep going and going, and I think for some bands it's ok to let the sun set and look back on your legacy instead of just sort of run it into the mud. That's kind of, to me, what it sounds like they're doing and what they've been doing for the past 20 years. I saw them on their reunion tour in 1996 and it's still going. I love Kiss, but they can stop any day now and I'll be completely fine with it."