Cancer Bats
Interview with Liam
By Cobie

Toronto’s Cancer Bats have made a name for themselves by touring relentlessly across Canada and the United States. What has always made Cancer Bats stand out is that nobody can ever label them as anything but original. Sure, they’re not the only ones making aggressive punk/metal-inspired music, but they put their own stamp on it, and it’s a sweet stamp!


Lucy: Your band have been quite quiet for the last few months. Are you looking forward to playing gigs again?
Katie Jane Garside: I think I give very obtuse ans
How would you describe the Cancer Bats' sound?
I like to think of it as our A.D.D mix of every genre that we're all stoked on, like punk, hardcore metal, stoner rock, everything. Because none of us can completely agree on everything, we all come from different backgrounds, so it all gets funnelled into the sound that we have.

Having fun in England?
We're having an awesome time, we love coming over here. For us it's nicer to come to England and Europe than go to the US, because this feels a lot more like home to us. It sucks that it's like a flight over here, but there's a bigger difference in culture between Canadians and Americans, than Canadians and British people. It feels like we're a lot more welcomed here. We played this show in Glasgow on the night of the big Rangers game, and our promoter was telling us that it was gunna be the worst show of the tour, and then not many people came, but the ones who did show up were just so stoked, and even though the venue was half-full everyone rocked out just as hard.

What do you think of the English metal scene?
It's awesome, there's a lot of good bands that are coming out of here. Not just the metal scene, but the music scene in general is really rad, like there's so many different shows and everyone goes to see different bands. It's cool that there are so many good hardcore and punk bands, and even people into good indie stuff.

What do you think of hardcore bands losing the punk aesthetic in favour of more commercial metal aspects?
I think that's the trend right now, and there's a lot of bands that cant help but get swept up in that. But whatever, there's good bands and there's bad bands in every scene so when something gets really popular a lot of kids will just start playing that style, but they'll grow up eventually.

What do you think the future holds for hardcore and metal in general?
I guess music is kinda cyclical, so if bands like Suicidal Tendencies and Metallica never got big in the 80's we wouldn't have found out about them. Even Green Day getting big and exposing punk rock is great because is get's younger kids who might not have found out about that music involved. Its great that there's a larger DIY element to hardcore and punk rock at the moment, and things like that always trickle down and gets kids excited to want to start their own bands and get into it for the right reasons. And that's gunna keep happening, and its great because a band like Gallows, who didn't get because they're fabricated, it's because they're a good fucking band.

With bands as diverse as Black Flag and Led Zeppelin as influences, do any of you have any guilty pleasures?
We don't really feel guilty about anything we're into, so we'll all admit to liking the bands that we like.

None of you into Britney then?
She's got some good tracks. The thing is, Britney Spears doesn't write any of that music, so the people that are working for her are really talented, so every once in a while there's a really great song, like Toxic, that was a fucking banger. Whoever wrote that was fucking awesome.

Are you pleased with your new record?
I'm really happy with how it turned out, we never thought people would get into it as they did. We just sort of shut ourselves away and outdo Birthing The Giant for ourselves. We were really worried that no-one would like it when we finished because it's a completely honest album that's heavy and everything that we wanted to do. But it turned out people really like the heavy songs so that was cool. It's given us validity to the idea that we can do whatever we want, that we don't need a part in every song with cleaner singing; I yelled a lot more on this record and the guitars are heavier. It's really exciting that it happened and people liked it.

http://www.myspace.com/cancerbats

Thanks to Liam for his time and Ian Cheek for setting things up.

Pix by Jay Wolf
Intro half inched from http://www.punknews.org

wers to questions...It's never about looking forward to it. Actually maybe I should change the
script, maybe we are looking forward to it. (Laughs). It's difficult to say because the last few months have felt strange, it's felt like going down a plughole. I've got a real sense of vertigo at the moment. So I can't tell you that I'm looking forward to it. I will get through it and find where I land after that. That's what will happen.

Lucy: 'Taxidermy' and 'Drink Me' are quite drastically different in their musical styles, so what kind of sound can we expect from the 3rd album?
e don't know yet. We're playing a lot of new mat