Born out of the West Coast metal scene of the 80’s, Metal Church quickly became one of the standout talents of the genre. After signing a deal with Elektra Records, they released two critically acclaimed albums. Their self-titled release ‘Metal Church’ established the band as one of the pioneers of the thrash/metal scene and earned them a major tour with then label mates Metallica. Metal Church are heading to Australia for the first time ever in August and is expected to play highlights from 2018’s Damned If You Do along with a round of classic tracks including Gods of Wrath, Metal Church, Watch the Children Play, Beyond the Black, Start the Fire, Ton of Bricks plus more.
We talk to guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof about the upcoming shows as well as the life of touring now compared to the early days, the latest album and much more.
Andrew: So thanks for your time, really appreciated! So hows things?
Kurdt: My pleasure man, awesome!
Andrew: We’re pretty excited to see you guys down in Australia for the first time ever, it’s been a long time coming!
Kurdt: I know right [laughs]. I know, can hardly believe it man, finally! Been wanting to come down there for years!
Andrew: I remember speaking to Mike (Howe, vocalist) I think about a year or so ago and we talked about the possibility of you guys coming to Australia and I think various reasons have sorted of prevented you from coming here so it’s exciting to see you finally here for the first time. For those of us and for many of the Metal Church fans who have never seen you guys before, what does a live show from Metal Church look and sound like?
Kurdt: Well it looks like us old guys playing these old metal tunes really loud and having a whole lot of fun. There’s a lot of laughing and smiling and having a lot of fun with what we’re doing which usually seems to translate to the audience so everybody has a good time.
Andrew: Awesome look forward to it! So obviously you have a huge back catalogue to pick from so setlist-wise, is that a difficult decision knowing you are going to play in the country for the first time?
Kurdt: Yes it’s really difficult [laughs], because, yeah we try to figure out what to play. We started concentrating more on the Mike Howe era stuff because we had played the David Wayne era stuff so much so we want to concentrate on the stuff that Mike has done. But we do some old stuff, we cover everything. But I get requests all the time, ‘Can you play this song?’, or ‘Can you play that song?’ and it’s like, ‘I’d love to but in order to play everybody’s song we would be playing longer than Bruce Springsteen’.
Andrew: [laughs] What’s that process for picking a setlist? Do you like to change it up, do you like to stick to the one thing? How does that work for you guys?
Kurdt: Well we like to change it up for us but we also like to be a little more careful about…I mean there’s some that we have to play. We gotta play “Watch the Children Pray”, we gotta play “Start the Fire”, we gotta play “Fake Healer”, we gotta play Badlands”. We gotta play the favorites and then we try to mix it up a little bit but it’s great when we have a new album out and we can play some new songs in there too.
Andrew: Yeah obviously “Damned If You Do” came out last year so how has that been going so far? What kind of feedback have you been getting from the fans so far?
Kurdt: So far it’s been great feedback! Even online with all the haters and everything, very limited amount of hate. I mean you always get some people that hate things but everybody gets that, poor Metallica they just get roasted but you just do what you do and you ignore it. My attitude is every record I’ve ever made is always the best record I could make at that time, that’s always what I try to do and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But as far as the response to “Damned If You Do”, it couldn’t be better.
Andrew: When you do get some of that negative feedback, do you identity sometimes with the fans perspective when you listened to the bands you were a fan of when you were younger as well?
Kurdt: Oh without a doubt, absolutely. And you can always tell whether they’re actually listening to the record and actually know what they’re talking about or if they’re just haters, just trolls. That’s real easy for me to tell, they’ll make comments about the production on it and they’ll use words that mean, ‘Well you don’t fucking know what you’re talking about’. You can tell by the way they phrase things and say things like, ‘No you don’t know what you’re talking about’ with production or mix or something like that. We get that a lot from a bunch of people like, ‘Well I’ve got a mastering program so I know how to master records’. It’s like, ‘No shut up’. But I’m always open to listening to somebody who knows what they’re talking about and has an honest criticism, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But yeah these trolls and all that kind of stuff, that’s why I just don’t pay any attention to any of it. I just go by when I do interviews or talk to somebody or people in person and they say, ‘Oh I love this album’. We always do a signing after the show, people bring the album stuff to get signed and they’ll tell me.
Andrew: Yeah exactly and I think there’s a lot of times where they wouldn’t say that stuff to your face so there’s not much to it so to speak.
Kurdt: Yeah it’s keyboard courage.
Andrew: Exactly. So when you are down in Australia, is there anything outside of the shows that you are maybe wanting to do like touristy stuff or certain things you want to check out?
Kurdt: Yeah I would love to but I don’t think we’re going to have any time. We’re going to get there and then we have a day where we added a second show which is great but we had two days to kind of climatise and get used to it. But they added a second show so we fly in, then we have one day off which we’ll probably be resting because we’re old and have been traveling a lot [laughs] and then we play the show and then we have the next show and then immediately the next morning we fly to Sydney and play that night and then we fly to Brisbane and play that night and then we fly home the next morning. So yeah it’s going to be one of those…
Andrew: Fly in fly out kind of things.
Kurdt: Yeah.
Andrew: Well that’s unfortunate but hopefully next time you come back you get to see a bit more of the country.
Kurdt: That’s it, if this goes as well as we think it is then we’ll definitely come back and promoters and stuff will have us back and we can maybe schedule it a little bit differently. When we talked about coming down there we were hoping to get down there and Mike and I talked about staying a week afterwards and have a vacation but we just can’t, we just don’t have time.
Andrew: As the years go on is that getting more difficult as far as the travel? Because obviously the traveling part is a huge part of touring and it’s something that I find when I talk to musicians that’s probably the most difficult thing about being in a band these days. Is that getting easier, more difficult? How do you deal with that?
Kurdt: As you get older, it’s harder. It’s definitely harder so that’s why most bands of our peers and stuff are probably going through the same thing. You have to tour a bit differently, the days of being on the road for two or three months at a time are looong gone, just won’t do it. So a couple of weeks here, we did a month in the States a couple months back and we had a bus and all that stuff and we have to because we’re old, we can’t do vans. I’m not doing a van tour [laughs]. But to go out and live in a bus for a month, that’s when we decided, ‘Look, two weeks. If we’re touring, do two weeks’. Or we can do long weekends fly in, do weekenders and stuff but unless we’re playing arenas and doing that kind of situation, being on the road for any length of time is too brutal. Because if you’re doing arenas like we’re opening for somebody or something like that, it’s a whole different situation. You wake up at the venue, there’s catering, you know where your showers are, you know where you’re dressing rooms are, you know where everything is. When you’re out playing clubs, sometimes you pull up to a club and nobody opened and you wake up and you don’t know where the hell you are, nobody’s there and you’re just stuck and it’s like, egh! So a couple weeks of that is fine, the shows are great! I love playing clubs and the shows are fine but all the traveling as we’ve gotten older is a lot more difficult definitely, I can’t lie [laughs].
Andrew: Yeah definitely, I can see why. I mean then you get cool things like I believe you guys are doing the MegaCruise coming up shortly?
Kurdt: Yeah that’s awesome, that’s in October.
Andrew: That’s a different experience, obviously being on a boat and traveling. That’s gotta be a very cool thing to be a part of.
Kurdt: Those are fun. We’ve done a few of them and my other band Presto Ballet, we’ve done a prog rock one who are actually doing the next Cruise To The Edge with Yes. But yeah Metal Church has done a couple, we’ve done 70,000 Tons Of Metal Cruise and we’ve done the Monsters Of Rock and those are all a blast. Because everybody is really cool and all your friends are playing, it’s just a really good time.
Andrew: I’ve never been on those cruises but everyone I know that’s been on them says they are amazing. The fact that you get to interact with so many other people as well, other people from around the world and all the bands and stuff must be a cool experience.
Kurdt: Yeah it’s really fun. The MegaCruise is going to be great because all our buddies from all the way back in the day, it’s us and Anthrax and Megadeth, Armored Saint who we just got back from Europe with and Megadeth who we just toured with. So it’s all our friends, Testament and all of them!
Andrew: Awesome! So we’ve been speaking of touring and those early days when Metal Church first started and going on the road for the first time, go back to those early days and what was that feeling like being on the road for the first time when you were younger guys?
Kurdt: Well when you’re in your 20’s and you’re doing that thing and we were out playing arenas, well even before we were doing that when you’re in your 20’s and in a metal band, you’re immortal. So there’s no stopping you so that’s a whole different vibe than what it is now. You play a gig and you can drink all night, get hammered and wake up the next day and do it again. It’s like, no if I have a couple of beers now I’m feeling it for a few days, the conversations on the bus now are completely different, sometimes we just laugh our asses off. After the show we’re like, ‘Ok I’m going to go in my bunk, yeah ok good night guys’ and we’re just like Bahaha! Same thing but the atmosphere, we’re comparing ailments and stuff like that [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] A different vibe now I guess but that’s ok, as you go along you learn and experience all these different things.
Kurdt: Exactly! It’s just a matter of the myth of living the party life, yeah you can do it when you’re in your 20’s but you will not survive it if you keep doing it and a lot of people haven’t and that’s why they haven’t survived. Or they’re completely sober and can’t do anything anymore, they’re done, they’ve fried themselves. So the myth of living the lifestyle, you can do it when you’re a kid but you can only do it for a while.
Andrew: Yeah you gotta look after yourself for sure. So how did this all start for you? How did you get in this industry of music and being in a band? Was there anyone in particular that sort of inspired you to want to play music?
Kurdt: Well my first earliest memory is the Beatles on Ed Sullivan like a lot of guys my age. So that was what started with me and then I wanted to be a drummer so I got a toy drum set for my birthday and I continued to beat the crap out of that until it was disintegrated and my parents were like, ‘Oh must be serious’. Then for Christmas I got a real drum set and I played that for years and then I switched to bass and I started to learn how to play bass and after a couple of years I switched to guitar. To me there really was never any other option other than like through high school a little bit I played football, that was kind of there but then I went, ‘Na’. Getting stoned and listening to Rush and playing guitar is a lot more fun, so I just stayed with it and I haven’t stopped.
Andrew: So you mentioned you played different instruments, drums and bass and stuff. Why did you stick with the guitar?
Kurdt: I think it’s because I can get more done. I mean I still play drums, I just finished a solo record where it was kind of a personal challenge where I just did everything and played everything on it and even did the vocals and it’s just old school guitar riff rock like Ted Nugent, Montrose and just guitar rock. I just finished that record a little while ago, I’m not sure if it’s coming out yet or not. I’ve got to get over myself a little bit! Hearing myself sing it’s like, ‘Err I dunno!’ But I still play everything and I do demos and play everything but it’s just fun, I just like doing it. It’s just creating music and playing all different kinds of stuff, it’s just a lot of fun. Same thing with playing different styles of music, that’s why I’ve got other projects and stuff that I do because rock music is really cool.
Andrew: Yeah that’s right! Everyone has a different story of how they got into it, it’s one of those things where all it takes is one little thing and it switches and all of a sudden they are right into that world I guess. For you, you mentioned the Beatles but was there anyone else in particular a little bit later that kind of really pushed you more into it?
Kurdt: Well the Beatles when I was really young and then growing up, just loving music and always listening to as much as I could get my hands on. Hendrix, everything and just listening to as much of everything as I could and really into it and it just continued. My favorite stuff is late 60’s, early 70’s. I’m a big 70’s fan so all that kind of stuff, early 70’s stuff which I still think is the golden age of hard rock. So that’s all my favorite stuff and I just never stopped, I never even stopped and thought about it. I just did it, this is what I’m into, this is what I love. I love this and this is what I’m going to do so I never looked back.
Andrew: Sometimes a question that gets thrown at people is if they weren’t playing music, what else would they do and I guess there isn’t really anything else you would be doing outside of music.
Kurdt: No not at all. I’d be dead, I probably would have drank myself to death or something, I can’t imagine.
Andrew: Well thank god for music man, it’s really a wonderful thing!
Kurdt: Yeah it’s saved a lot of people.
Andrew: Well it’s been wonderful talking to you today, we really appreciate your time. I think everyone is pretty excited to see you guys in Australia for the first time, I hope the tour goes really well and if it does, we hope to see you back again.
Kurdt: Absolutely, we hope so too. Thanks very much man.
METAL CHURCH August 2019 Australian Tour Dates:
Wednesday 28th August – MELBOURNE – Northcote Social Club
Thursday 29th August – MELBOURNE – Northcote Social Club
Friday 30th August – SYDNEY – Crowbar
Saturday 31st August – BRISBANE – Crowbar
Tickets From: https://metropolistouring.com/metal-church-2019/
