Artist Interview: Bring Me The Horizon

Bring Me The Horizon at Valley View Casino Center

 

First off, how has the tour been so far? You’re playing an arena tonight, any feelings about that?

It’s been pretty cool… Today is the biggest show of the tour, but all the shows have been pretty big. It’s pretty crazy, good times.

This is the second time you’ve done a tour with Pierce The Veil, how do you guys like touring with them?

Yeah, we became friends with them on the Taste of Chaos tour, and we’ve also done Warped Tour with them before. We get along pretty well, on tour we would play football (soccer) together. Good dudes, we get along with them great. We’ve toured with [headlining act] A Day To Remember as well, in the UK, and we get along great with them too.

Your sound is actually a lot heavier than ADTR’s, have you been able to reach out to a different fan base by touring with them?

Yeah we’re really open to doing that, which is why we wanted to do this tour with them. They’ve been doing well, getting some mainstream radio play. so maybe we can come along and steal a few of those fans.

Moving on to your most recent album, you got a new guitarist in ’09. Did he contribute the the new album?

Yeah, we all wrote the new record together. We would all just come together and jam… we don’t really write full songs, they come together and we write them bit by bit. It was actually good, because our last guitar player was really lazy, and he wouldn’t join in or anything like that. He never wrote anything… so it was cool to have someone that actually wanted to be there and contribute.

In Kerrang! in 2006 you guys were voted best band, and then worst band in 2008 and 2010. How does something like that affect you guys, or do you even pay attention to it?

It don’t affect us at all, really. Those polls are weird, like we also got Best Album and Worst Album for the same one, and I saw My Chemical Romance being really popular… I don’t know. I’d rather people have an opinion on us than not care at all.

Good point. After this tour, you’re doing some more European shows, who are you touring with for that?

Yeah, that’s going to be our U.K. tour, we’re touring with the guys from Parkway Drive, Architects and Devil Wears Prada.

With the Architects, there was actually some controversy a while back regarding a video of a staged fight…

Yeah it’s funny because we’ve been friends with them since we started, and we tour with them a lot. They’re like our best friends… we were bored one day in Germany so we made a fake video, and loads of people believed it. It was actually filmed on a crappy little phone. We tried to make it as authentic as possible, we even threw in punch sound effects on it, and used ketchup and stuff. It’s funny that people believed it.

They believed it so much that some fans were even making death threats to them, right?

Yeah, that’s why we had to come out and say it was fake. One kid walked up to them and did this (mimes cutting a throat with a knife), and the guys were actually scared that the kids were going to do something to them.

Back to the music, with Suicide Season you guys came out with a remix album for that, do you have any plans to do something similar with the latest album?

I don’t think we want to remix an album again, but I think we want to do something else. It’s probably going to get re-released some way. I think the reason we remixed that album was because some bands, they release the album again with an extra song or two, or a video, and we wanted to do something a bit more than that. So I think we want to do something again, we just don’t know what yet.

Have you guys been tossing around any ideas or doing any writing for new material?

No, not at all actually (laughs). We don’t write while we’re on tour. I think if we tried we would go mental. It helps us to do the whole CD in a block, rather than writing bits and bits and bits. It can get really intense, so it’s just better to set aside a time for it.

You guys recently released the video for “Blessed With A Curse,” how has the fan response to that been?

I think it’s actually been alright, to be honest. We did it for free actually, the kid needed to do it for something… He was working for a bigger company as an intern, and was just a fan of the band. So we went to Stockholm and shot it for free, it was cool.

And the concept behind the video, which I haven’t fully grasped, was that his idea too?

Yeah, I don’t really know what it’s about to be honest (laughs). Honestly I think it was just meant to look good [which it does].

If you didn’t get the chance to check out BMTH at their show at Valley View Casino Center, you can always support them by purchasing their newest album, There Is A Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is A Heaven Let’s Keep It A Secret, available just about anywhere music is sold.