Full Interview with Christopher Bowes of Alestorm

J: You mentioned the next album’s going a little off the rails. I’m a big Gloryhammer fan, as well, and I noticed that with those albums as well. The first is about questing in medieval Scotland, the next one is exactly the same thing but in space, and then the third is completely off-the-rails. Is that the trajectory of Alestorm, too?

CB: Yeah. When Gloryhammer started, the whole idea was to keep things very conservative. It’s a fantasy power-metal album, the only weird thing was that it’s set in crap places in Scotland, but even that people can forgive. Apart from that, it was just a very standard power metal story. We thought, you know, let’s just play it safe, do some fantasy metal. But then it’s like, I feel like when we decide “who cares what people think? Who cares if we’re conforming to expectations?” We can just do stupid stuff like putting it in space and have a techno song about the universe being on fire… I think it’s when we do the stupid stuff and we think “this is risky, this is going to be dumb”… that’s when it pays off the most, people love that stuff. It just goes to show that the more stupid things we do, the more we get away with it. Let’s face it, there’s tons of music out these days. Every day there’s hundreds of albums coming out. I’m sure they’re all very good, but who wants to listen to them? What makes yours stand out? You’ve got to do ridiculous things. I think it’s a bit commercialist to say that, but that’s what makes it fun. It’s just doing something totally different that’s not been done before. That’s the new thing you’re bringing to the music, like “hey I’ve got this album and it’s completely fucked up and nothing like what you’ve heard before”. And that’s the justification. Let’s just go wild on the next album. We’re happy with where we are, and if it all dies here, well… fuck that. 

J: What would you guys say are some of your influences that people might not expect?

CB: When this band started, the whole thing we were going for was copying all those prominent folk metal, epic metal bands at the time. Finntroll, Korpiklaani, Turisas, they were the big names back then. But that was never really where my musical roots lay. I was always into sort of extreme, symphonic, pretentious, over-the-top black metal with narration and things. My favourite band growing up was this band called Bal-Sagoth from England, and they’re like this crazy symphonic power black metal band. They didn’t do very well. They were signed to Nuclear Blast Records for a while, but… they could have disappeared into nowhere, but they released this phenomenal symphonic, epic metal with more keyboards than guitars. And that’s what inspired me because I’m a keyboard player, I don’t play guitar at all. So it was like “oh wow, there’s this band making epic, heavy, catchy, brutal metal with a keyboard” and that made me think “I can do this, I have a place in the world, I can play my keyboard in a metal band.” Before that, I just thought metal was Pantera, System of a Down, these guitar-based bands. So that’s where it all came from for me… finding out the keyboard can be the lead instrument in a metal band.

J: And you guys have two keyboardists in your band, right?

CB: Yeah, I believe we’re one of the few, [maybe] only, major metal bands that actually has two keyboard players. I think it’s very rare these days to even have one because everyone just puts all their crap on a backing track. You can understand why, it saves on costs: you can either have a keyboard player bring all his gear, or you can just have an iPod. But we like doing it all live, we don’t use any backing tracks or pre-recorded tracks at all when we play live. It’s that punk-y thing I mentioned before. It’s dumb and stupid: we’ll stop halfway through and insult someone and start again.