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A
true legend in the world of metal, Annihilator founder Jeff Waters takes
time out of his busy schedule for a quick chat and is not afraid to
speak his mind...
MM:
Thanks for taking the time out to talk to us today, how’s it going?
JW: Very good. We’re at the tail end of our European tour,
we were in Glasgow yesterday and before that Manchester, Newcastle,
Portsmouth and bunch of other places I can’t remember the name of!
It’s good to be back in the U.K. A little different to how I remember
it some many years ago when we last toured here! It’s weird...a lot of
the U.K venues, not all but most, are cold, dark, crappy backstage area.
You fight to get the basic human things you need like water, showers,
towels and all that stuff and only in England! Not in Glasgow or the
rest of Europe – this is the worst place to be on the tour in terms of
how you get treated except for one good thing which is the fans. The
fans are fucking amazing! That evens things out, for sure.
It’s changed since we
did some heavier touring back in our younger years but as soon as you
get on the stage it just becomes so much fun and all that other shit
just goes away. There’s all these younger kids singing ‘Fun
Palace’ and songs that we did 20 years ago and sometimes I have to do
a double-take and think how can they be singing that when they’re only
about 22 years old?! And then you get the older fans who remember seeing
us back in the day with bands like Judas Priest and Onslaught, who are a
great British band by the way. And then you get the third group which is
the kids who don’t really know that much about us but they’re
checking us out because they like Trivium or Lamb of God or In Flames or
other bands who guested on our album three years ago.
MM:
Do you think the Trivium tour you did a few years ago opened things up a
bit for you?
JW: Not anywhere else in the world, but in England it did.
And that’s why we took the tour really. It was cool when Corey offered
us that tour because he was a fan and they were selling these places out
on their own anyway so they didn’t really need a support act like us
but it was great that he offered to bring us along. And some of those
Trivium fans will be in their early 20’s now and you and I both know
that there are some bands that we listen to forever but most bands you
move on from after a while and it’s great that now they’re older,
they’re checking us out.
MM:
Some bands use the self-titled approach when they want to make a
statement about who the band is, was that the case with this album?
JW: No, not really. For me, bands usually do the self-titled
thing within the first few albums but in our case, it was just simply
that we’d never done it before and usually we pick a song title from
the record but none of them stood out to me as being an album title so
our singer Dave was the one who suggested the self-titled thing. And I
thought, ok but it’s our 13th studio album or something
like that and he just said that was all the more reason to get it out of
the way now, ha-ha!
MM:
What inspired you to go with ‘Romeo Delight’ by Van Halen as a
choice of cover song?
JW: I wanted to do a cover because we’d never done one on a
studio album although we had done some before for b-sides and
compilations and I didn’t want to go down the obvious route you know?
So many bands have done Iron Maiden covers and we’d already done a
Judas Priest one and Slayer was out because a lot of the riffs I do are
a little bit ‘Slayer’ anyway and everybody’s done a Metallica
cover in the last few years so Dave said that I should pick one that
changed my guitar playing or really influenced me as a musician and
right away I thought of ‘Romeo Delight’. I remember hearing it at
the time and thinking it was a really aggressive song. And at the time
it was – back then that was what was considered to be heavy shit. That
led me to Sabbath, Priest and Maiden which then led me to Venom, Exodus,
Slayer and Anthrax which led me to Anvil, Exciter, Razor – three
wicked Canadian bands by the way – and then on to Destruction and
Kreator and so forth. If I hadn’t heard that song, I might never have
got into the thrash stuff.
MM:
Obviously you’ve now moved to Earache from SPV, did the opportunity to
return to Roadrunner ever come up?
JW: Yeah, I talked to them a few times. Nuclear Blast made an
offer too and although it sounds like I’m saying we had loads of
offers, we did but they weren’t great offers because we’re not a
huge band. We are pretty successful in certain European countries but
not so much here. We took a chance with Earache and thought that if they
are a UK-based label, maybe we can come back over and do some touring.
And it’s only a short deal at the moment.
There are many young
bands (NB. points to my hoody
which is sporting the name of a young, British thrash band) who just
want to get out there and party and play music, much like I did around
the time of the first Annihilator album, and they sign these deals which
practically sign their life away. The publishing, the merchandise
rights, the masters for their albums, everything is gone. These guys are
sucked into five-album deals which turn out to be thirty years long,
they never see a penny and they’re told to go out on the road for two
years making shitty money in a van with three other bands. We don’t do
that anymore.
We did it with
Roadrunner but that label made us famous and who we are today and
actually, when they dropped us in ’93 it turned out to be a blessing
in disguise because we could have been stuck for life with that
contract. Since then I’ve been doing what’s called licence deals.
That means the record companies don’t own anything at all – they
have the right to put the album out but that’s it. They don’t really
promote the tours either, they should but they don’t, and Earache have
at least helped us to knock on the doors and get us noticed a little bit
and remind people that there is a band called Annihilator that is out
there playing that you should go check out.
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MM:
With the last album, Metal,
were you ever concerned that some fans might not see it as a
proper Annihilator album because of all the guest appearances?
JW: No, were lucky with that album actually. I think I
speak for many writers when I say that if there was a pill or a
medicine that you could take to write a great song then everyone
would take it. Even with my favourite bands like AC/DC, Slayer and
Metallica, I bought all their albums but I don’t listen to every
single song or every single album because they have great ones and
not so great ones and it’s the same with Annihilator. With the
last album, if you put all the guest appearances to one side (and
we didn’t plan on having all the guest appearances at the
beginning either) the album was not very good I don’t
think. |
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My writing
wasn’t anything special on that and neither was Dave’s singing and
although we thought it was very good at the time, it really saved our
asses having all the guest appearances on there. Without the guests I’d
give it a 6/10 and with the guests I’d give it a 7.9. Just because
it’s interesting to hear Alexi Laiho shredding and then I’ll come in
and duel with him and all the other guys too.
MM:
Was it a bit of a headache arranging all the guests?
JW: Well this is something I’m really proud of because
everyone was telling me that there’s no fucking way I’m going to be
able to get guys who are on Sony/Epic like Lamb of God, etc. Whether it
would be the managers or the record companies, people were convinced that
I was going to get blocked by something. It took me about 2 months but I
got everybody without any fees or any bullshit and everyone was so cool
about it.
MM:
The song ‘Stonewall’ was obviously a fairly politically charged song
at the time. Is the environment something that you still feel pretty
strongly about?
JW: Well, it wasn’t even that really. It was more of a
snapshot. When I write stuff like that, it’s usually born out of
something I see on TV or the news. I get ideas from personal things or
what’s going in my friends’ lives and I had a problem with booze at
one point and I quit about 10 years ago so there’ll be things in lyrics
relating to that and I went through a nasty divorce which turned out to be
great fuel for writing songs with, I could have gotten a couple of albums
worth from just that! And things like record companies and managers trying
to rip you off and treat you like shit, all these combined will keep my
inspiration going until the day I die. I mean, I could write a song about
one of these backstage rooms, about how you’re treated like a fucking
pig in a farm, there you go – pig farm! There’s a song title!
‘Stonewall’
was just a moment in time kind of thing when I was probably going to the
store to buy a pack of cigarettes which is ironic because that’s not
really very healthy or environmentally friendly and I stopped and looked
at the river in Vancouver and thought how nice it was and when I looked
again I noticed how polluted it was so I went home and wrote
‘Stonewall’. I’m not one of these guys who go out and wave a flag
and start preaching, it’s more just from life and things around me.
MM:
You mentioned a few Canadian bands earlier like Razor, etc. Why do you
think it is that more Canadian bands don’t break through
internationally?
JW: Well when I did my thing with Annihilator at the beginning
I was still a kid with no knowledge of the music business and I’d never
really been out of Canada either. So I had this idea that if I sign a
Canadian record deal, maybe I’ll be famous in Canada and I wasn’t
really thinking further than that at the time. But then I watched what
happened to Canadian artists in the 80’s and, except for Bryan Adams,
they would be known in Canada and get on the music stations but nothing
would happen outside of Canada. So I had this idea to send my demos to the
United States and Roadrunner signed us and that opened all sorts of doors
for us like Europe and Japan and I ended up bypassing Canada.
A lot of
other Canadian bands didn’t do that. They got sucked into going to
Toronto which was where the main music scene was in Canada and they all
the signed these crappy deals that I was talking about before and I was
lucky enough to get out but consequently I was shunned by the Canadian
music industry at the time. Of course you’ve had some successful
Canadian pop-rock bands but you’ve also got bands like Protest the Hero
now and Devin Townsend’s been at it for years too and while there’s
not a lot, there’s something different about us in that we are heavily
influenced by what goes on in England and in the US so we get a good
variety whereas American bands tend to be only influenced by what goes on
in their own country.
MM:
So no plans to do an Anvil-style documentary then?
JW: Ha-ha, no. I know those guys actually and the movie’s
great. But the Anvil I remember is the first three albums. It’s great
that they got recognition because of the movie but I still blast the first
three albums all the time and it’s almost like two separate bands when
you compare them now to back then.
MM:
Did you see always see Annihilator as a solo project or is that just how
it turned out?
JW: Initially it was supposed to be a band. Myself and a
singer, John Bates, sat down and wrote a bunch of songs including
‘Alison Hell’ and then we found a bass player and a drummer but when
it came down to practicing and getting good, they weren’t into that and
they’d rather go out on a weekend with their girlfriends and party and look
like they were in a band but not actually bother to learn the stuff.
So I figured it was up to me to learn how to play everything for the demos
and I’m not the best drummer in the world but I did it anyway and
eventually our singer suffered from the same thing, he wanted to go out
with his girlfriend when we needed to do the demo so I sang on the demo
that got us signed...
MM:
Do you miss the lead singer role or are you happier when it’s in the
hands of someone else?
JW: I didn’t mind it when I got thrown into it. In 1994, we
finished our run with Roadrunner/Sony and everything kind of seemed like
it was over and a friend of mine said to me that I always sing on demo
tapes to tell the singers what to sing, why don’t I just sing myself? As
far as I was concerned, I didn’t know how to fucking sing but I thought
I’d give it a shot so I did an album in 1994 called ‘King of the
Kill’ which I was just hoping wasn’t going to be an embarrassment and
it ended up being a massive success in Japan and got us a huge tour in
Europe at a time when heavy metal was considered dead!
When I got a
new singer it really dawned on me that I couldn’t back to it because it
was just too demanding to play guitar and do all of the singing at the
same time which is one of the reasons I admire James Hetfield so much.
Plus, Dave and I aren’t really frontmen. We both play guitar and sing a
little but you’ll see tonight that we’re missing a frontman but it
doesn’t matter to me.
MM:
What’s the plan so far for Annihilator in 2011?
JW: Well in December I’ve got to do all the things I’ve
been putting off for a year, ha-ha! First part of January I’m going to
start writing again and putting riffs together and then do what I usually
do and take a month or two to come back to Europe and do guitar clinics
then maybe back here for some shows and summer festivals.
MM:
Cool, well thank you very much, it’s much appreciated.
JW:
Thank you, hope you have a good time tonight.
Interview
by: Adam Grindrod.
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