We conducted this interview in a very small van (with a door that wouldn’t close) where the whole band (plus 2 of us) sat down, in the middle of a rainy Dutch afternoon, trying to cope with the rain and cold.
Metal Blast: You’re Scottish! Why not highlander metal?
Chris: That’s what Germans do! Yeah, we see them wearing kilts so, we might as well sing about pirates.
Metal Blast: You usually have a laugh about the bands that take, as you call it, “the paganism bullshit” too far. However, you’re still associated with Pagan and Folk metal anyway.
Chris: Are we? Fuck.
Metal Blast: Yeah. So, what genre do you want to be consider a part of? If you say pirate metal… is pirate metal just anything that talks about pirates?
Chris: I guess so!
Dani: We don’t really care about fucking genres.
Chris: We’re like those Nü Metal bands in the late 90s, that would say that they played “just metal”. well, that’s what we do, we simply play metal.
Metal Blast: How are you different from Swashbuckle, especially now that you have used some thrash elements?
Chris: Well, only a few riffs.
Dani: They’re our friends. They’re cool.
Chris: We are nothing like them though! Except for the pirate shit. They play a darker metal. We play happy music for happy people.
Metal Blast: You recently parted ways with your former drummer, and now have Peter on board. How’s that going so far?
Chris: Well, to begin with, if you’re thinking of Alex, he was never IN the band. He was merely replacing the guy we had before, who left all of a sudden. He’d usually quit the band every 2 or 3 weeks anyway.
Dani: Or he wouldn’t show up to a show without letting us know. In this case, he quit right before a pretty big show.
Chris: He [Peter] plays drums good. He hits them and they sound pretty.
Gareth: Well, we don’t want to inflate his ego but, at least, he’s better than the last one!
Metal Blast: Your album got leaked last night.
Chris: It did? Fuck
Dani: Well, we saw it in stores yesterday anyway. Someone bought it, ripped it and uploaded it probably.
Metal Blast: How does that even happen?
Gareth: The stores fuck up. They receive the albums and think “Oh, ok, let’s sell them”, not considering the release date.
Chris: I don’t care if it leaked.
Gareth: It would have been nice if it had leaked after the release date though.
Chris: Fuck it. People get to listen to our stuff and then they come to the shows, buy t-shirts and headbands and whatever.
Dani: Fuck it.
Gareth: Yes, go and download our stuff!
Metal Blast: You’re all pretty young. How do you manage to mix both this and your regular jobs or studies.
Dani: I don’t study.
Chris: For all of us this is it. We don’t do anything else.
Gareth: I’m terrified of the moment I have to look for a proper job “So what have you been doing for the last few years”?
Metal Blast: Well, you can say “I’m the guy dancing with the midget” in the Shipwrecked video. Speaking of which; whose idea was to have the dancing midget.
Dani: Him! (points at Chris)
Chris: Well, the label asked us what we want for the video. I said “I want hot women, drunk people, a midget playing the violin…”. They said “Ok”… I said “Really?!”.
Gareth: It was really funny. We recorded this thing in Serbia, and the guy that got us the Midget was like “Is this midget good? We get you another one!“.
Chris: “This is gipsy Midget!”
Dani: And we’d say “Fuck it if he’s gipsy, what’s his name?!”
Metal Blast: You know, our photographer is from Serbia.
Chris: Oh.
Gareth: Oh.
Dani: They love meat there. They’d give us huge plates of meat. No sauce. I’d kill for ketchup.
Chris: We spent three evenings there, and we’d only get big plates of meat with nothing else.
Gareth: No offense.
Metal Blast: You finally covered “You are a Pirate”, the LazyTown song; and internet meme that has been going around for years. Who came up with that one?
Chris: We sold out to the internet! Every0ne was telling us “Oooh, you have to cover that lazytown song” so, fuck it, we did it.
Gareth: The internet is a good place; I’ve heard good things about it. Everyone likes the Internet.
Peter: I didn’t even know what that thing was after we recorded it.
Gareth: It’s not the first time we do it though. We played it live years ago.
Metal Blast: Are there any chances you’ll record a video of it with all of you wearing pink wigs?
Chris: Yes! I wanna do it. All hot girls with gigantic tits and pink wigs.
Metal Blast: Wasn’t the “hot girl” 13 or something?
Dani: NO! She turned 18 last year.
Chris: …
Peter….
Gareth:…Someone has been paying too much attention.
Dani: 4chan!
Chris: Ah, God Bless 4Chan!
Metal Blast: In your new album, which I totally didn’t download, you have a song called “Scrapping the Barrel”, in which you have a whole tirade about critics who say that you’ll run out of themes to make songs on rum, islands, treasures and pirates. Have you received too many criticisms like that?
Chris: Yeah, we’ve had too many critics going like “ooh, it’s all the same shit, they’re just like Running Wild“. Fuck them.
Dani: Yeah, fuck them. Chris came up with these awesome lyrics that really aim at those fucking critics.
Metal Blast: It’s not a world tour without touring South America, are you gonna go there too?
Chris: Well, we have an offer to play in Brazil. We’ll probably play in Latin America, South Africa and all those stupid places.
Metal Blast: You know, I am from Latin America.
Gareth: he means South Africa; South Africa is crazy, Latin America is cool.
Metal Blast: So what’s your weirdest experience on the road so far?
Chris: Well, we had this thing in Belarus… fuck, is there anybody from Belarus here?
Metal Blast: Well… my mother….
Chris: Yeah right.
Dani: We spent like 9 hours on the border because they had a problem with our visas. Then when we had to come out, they had the same problem. They had to get some guy from the government to let us out.
Gareth: it was really weird, because they had all these very old computers with floppy disks.
Dani: And they had to actually travel from one border post to another, carrying the floppy disk, It was insane.
Metal Blast: How did you feel when Prince William got Married?
Dani: I didn’t give a flying fuck!!
Gareth: I thought it was lovely. I was in London that day… I wasn’t invited though.
Chris: I really hope they put Kate Middleton in a bill or something. I wanna jack off to it. She’s a babe.
Metal Blast: Any last words for your fans?
Christ: Eat scottish beef!
Gareth: Yeah it’s starting to be decent again.