Thomas Bredahl - Volbeat

June 21 2009 (Hellfest - Clisson)

In spite of seeing only 10 minutes (damn interviews schedule, but that's part of the game) of their show, I was eager to have a little chat with the very sympathetic guitarist of the great Danish band VOLBEAT, who recently released a special tour edition of their latest album "Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood". Notwithstanding the fact that, playing at the HELLFEST was a great opportunity for them to finally mark their territory in France. Needless to say they passed the exam.

Fab: So are you happy to be here at the HELLFEST 2009 ? How is your feeling after you show here?
Thomas Bredahl: Yeah, it was good. We played at twenty minutes to two, so that's pretty early (laughter) but it was great, you know. Nowadays, we play pretty late on the festivals, most of the festivals, and it' frightening to play when there's no people, because they've been partying for two days, and usually you don't know if there's gonna be any people. But we were happily surprised when we saw the whole field going, and they really seemed to be into it. At this early hour, some people haven't even wake up! We played pretty well, good feeling, good people, good sound on stage…

Fab: Could you tell us about the cover artwork and the "slashed" titles of your albums? Is that a concept you'll follow throughout your career?
Thomas Bredahl: We're pretty much into this like, to the long titles. Non necessarily a slash, but it's just a fun thing to play with words, instead of just having a title with only one or two word. A lot of people can interpret it their own way.
Artwork wise, we love these dark colours, so I think we're gonna stick to that. I can't promise that we're gonna do that for the next eight albums, but it's really something that defines the band and defines what we're doing and what's inside the cd, so. But we're working now right now, we have started writing for the new album, still coming up with ideas for, not necessarily colour wise, but I think we're gonna keep the same colours, and doing some different stuff with graphics in between. I think it fits very well with the mood of most of the songs, it's a little bit dark but not like CANNIBAL CORPSE (laughter).

Fab: Will you release someday a kind of comic related to your songs, your lyrics?
Thomas Bredahl: We hadn't thought about that but of course, you know, since some of our videos got this comic book approach. Our covers are never like pictures or real stuff, it's a natural thing for us. But that could be an idea, including that in the cover (or booklet) rather than releasing it as a comic book itself. I don't know if we have good enough stories for a comic book (laughter).

Fab: Well, I mean, like in a big box set.
Thomas Bredahl: Yeah, it's a good idea, I'm gonna write it down (laughter).

Fab: Have you started to work on new material?
Thomas Bredahl: Yeah. We've been…right now it's like three four months of festivals. So we're doing a lot of travelling and then back home for a few days. And every week we try to hit the rehearsal room just to try, to jam some things. We have at least four songs, and I know that Mikael (Poulsen) our singer and Jon our drummer have been working on a few things this week, so you know, we're starting to work on the first songs, trying to see where we're going, and story wise as well. But you know, we love to write a lot of music in between, jam a little bit and then maybe…it's just better to have more material and then cut it down a little.

But we've definitely started working, but it's not like…since it's festivals' season it's not easy, we just work when we got the time, and then we'll take a couple of months off, in September and October, to focus fully on this. Then we will have time to meet several times in the week, writing in between, that's when the whole thing starts accelerating, but it's always good to have something written so we got somewhere to start. Imagine coming back from three months of festivals, and you hit the rehearsal room like "all right, the new album…any ideas?". Because actually the hardest stuff is normally writing the first, two to five songs, because you got to start writing again. You wrote an album, then you toured for a year or two years, and maybe you didn't write that much music, so you have to start getting into that, that small world where you write music and where you're thinking about all that. Now, we got a head start, we started doing it, and I think it's gonna be easier then, to just continue working on that on a two full month. (Now) We're in a tour mode;: next week four festivals, last week three festivals… So when we're home it's really like weekend : relaxing time, try to land a little bit in your head, going out again… it can be a little bit hard to start focus on this writing thing. But since we travelled that much, and since we're seeing a lot of bands live, that's a lot of inspiration coming.

Fab: Do you still define your music as ELVIS metal?
Thomas Bredahl: (general laughter). We've never defined our music, actually. We don't want to limit ourselves to be a metal band, or a rock band, and especially not an Elvis metal band because you know, if you put that label on our music, then we'll have to do this all the time. What sort of music do we play? We just play music, so we can do anything : jazz or whatever. I guess "Elvis Metal", it's something a journalist came up with…

Fab: And because of the voice of Mikael…
Thomas Bredahl: Yes, of course, and because of the inspirations. You got this metal part, and you got this fifties/sixties melodies, and the lyrics as well. People like to define stuff, but we prefer all the people doing it, so. If someone wants to call us "Elvis metal", that's cool. If somebody wants to call us "Misfit metal", fine by us. If someone doesn't want to call us metal, because they don't think we're metal…we never said we were, so. Definitions are fun, but we don't define on our own. If people ask, what sort of music do we play, we'll say that we play music, and they'll have to try to listen to it, and get an idea about it. But of course, it depends on who is listening to it. Which kind of references that person's got. If somebody has never heard of THE MISFITS, of course, you will never think that we've got MISFISTS influence. If you know THE MISFITS, you can hear that a lot of our punk rock stuff is MISFITS inspired. And maybe you've never heard of METALLICA (ndlr: go figure)…it's a lot in the eye of the beholder, in the ears of the beholder that whatever sort of preference or definition you wanna put on it, just do it and tell your friends that these guys are playing "Elvis metal" or "Misfits metal" (laugher).

Fab: On the next album, is there gonna be a continuation of the concept on the adventures of "Danny & Lucy", "Fire song", "M. & Mrs Ness" and "Mary Ann's place"?
Thomas Bredahl: I don't know. The thing is that we don't write the lyrics, we write the music first. Just singing gibberish "la la la" to get the melody going. And when we have most of the album written, Mikael starts working on the lyrics. But, I don't know, of course, that story has continued on the last two albums, there's more to tell in that story. But this whole idea about…I don't think it was a plan, to write it, but it's really…

you write a song that's like three-four minutes long, and you got a chorus, there isn't much time to tell anything. And then you write a song like "Fire Song", and "Danny & Lucy" on the first album, you start thinking, (to) whatever happened to the parents of Lucy that was killed in this car accident. And then you write "Mr. & Mrs Ness" (second album), what happens when your daughter, you have this teenage fight or whatever when she goes out with this all blury guy. They're like, fighting before, and, suddenly they killed themselves, what happens to the parents, psychologically And the mother cannot take it and ends up shooting herself. And the dad, when the police come, they think he did it, that he shot her, so he's like, catched and taking away. And then on Mary Ann's Place (third album), it's like you have the father revisiting his wife's grave. So it's all about, whatever happens you know, what happen when your daughter dies in a car accident? How do you react to that? You don't know. What could happen? You could end up shooting yourself because you're blaming yourself. And what happens to a husband who's wife shot herself, because their daughter died in a car accident. Of course, he got to revisit her grave, every year or every day, and of course he's really sad, because his whole life is gone. When you write a song, ask yourself "what happens next?", so it's a natural thing to continue. But I don't know what's gonna happen. Maybe he'll end up hanging himself, I don't know.
Actually, there was somebody on YouTube that I saw who did not a cartoon but an animation on the story. We didn't do it but somebody took a lot of time to do the whole story as an animation movie.

Fab :Could you speak to us about the metal scene in Denmark nowadays?
Thomas Bredahl: Yeah sure. There's a lot of bands in Denmark that are playing shows, doing tours, releasing good albums on good record labels as well. The funny thing to say is that you don't have a Danish sound. It's not like you have the Norwegian Black Metal scene, you had the New Wave Of British heavy metal, you have the Swedish melodic death metal scene, etc…But in Denmark, it seems like you got tons of bands, but they all sound different. You got us, playing some sort of Elvis metal whatever, you got HATESPHERE playing this sort of more old trash oriented stuff, you got AS WE FIGHT playing metalcore, you got MERCENARY playing more eighties melodic inspired stuff, like IRON MAIDEN style, but up to date…You got ILL DISPOSED an old school death metal band. You got MNEMIC as well, with a French singer. There are some bands that have been around for years (ill disposed, mercenary, hatesphere…). Those guys released a lot of albums, did a lot of touring. Then, there's a lot of new bands coming up because there are bands like us or others, which are doing very well, and of course the focus from labels and fans…something seems to be happening in Denmark. There was a german journalist that wrote that Denmark was the new Sweden. But we're a small country, we're only five million people so, but I wouldn't say that there isn't like a scene in Denmark, because of course there are shows, everybody knows each other, more or less. Lots of bands doing differents styles of music.

Fab: What are the good places to hang out when you're a metalhead in Kobenhaven (ndlr: yes, I tried to speak Danish)?
Thomas Bredahl: (laughter) It depends on what you want, of course. There are a lot of pubs where you can go and see a show. One day, you can have a pub act, or a metal band. There's a place called "The Rock" where there's a lot of metal and rock bands playing there, and they have some night clubs stuff going on…there's a "Glam Rock night", with a Glam Rock DJ. There's also some more…there's a female porn actor who just made a monthly, or maybe twice a week, a club down in a basement where you gotta lot of strippers, you got some rock'n'roll, metal bands playing. I haven't been there, but it sounds like a good place (laughter). It's called the "Jewel Rocks". Go check it out (laughters).

Fab: What are your plans for the close future?
Thomas Bredahl: We're gonna do festivals all July and August, and then, we're gonna take September and October off to focus on writing, getting our shit together for the new album. Then we're gonna do a European tour in November, and for once, we won't be playing in Scandinavia (laughter). We're gonna do at least two or three shows in France, then moving to Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic etc…And December, I don't know, maybe, depending on how much we need to write again, and then celebrate Christmas at home. And sometimes in January, go into the studio, that's the plan.

Fab: Do you still have contact with your compatriot Lars Ulrich?
Thomas Bredahl: Not necessarily, but actually, this week, we got an email from James Hetfield asking us if we had time to hang out, two days later, we went to Mikael's home, etc… Lars wasn't around. The thing is Lars is originally from Denmark, he lives in San Francisco, so whenever he's in Denmark, he spend a lot of time visiting family, old friends and all. But the other guys, they don't have the families (to visit), so, we hang out, that's cool. Give us a call next time you want a support act! But I know it's all about schedules. But that would be great, we had good time playing with those guys (ndlr: VOLBEAT opened for METALLICA just one show in Denmark).

(Spirit) This last answer is quite amusing, as we know now that two weeks later METALLICA announced that VOLBEAT and GOJIRA would be the openers for their north American tour this autumn. I think you've been heard Thomas ;)