Something’s wrong. Matt Heafy is pissed off. The rest of the band seem less than ecstatic as Metal Hammer trots into the chilly reception of Trivium dressing room to say ‘hello’. The atmosphere in the surreal-looking dressing room backstage at the Manchester Apollo – looking like someone’s chintzy mid-nineties living-room - is tense: eye-contact is minimal, and it already feels like it’s time to leave.
Ten minutes earlier their manager, Justin, had told us that we had our own Metal Hammer dressing room with a crate of chilling beers. Initially it felt like the sweetest gesture, but could being invited out of the group’s space really be The Big Fuck Off after all. We are reminded of the time ex-Classic Rock editor Mick Wall was locked in a tiny room on the Poison tour so he missed the show and couldn’t interview the band.
And I thought we were friends.
Is Trivium the girl who gives you her number on Saturday night but ignores your call on Tuesday? Is this to be the vibe of their spiritual homecoming tour? What have we done?
This is Trivium’s third headline tour of the UK; a tour that simply marks another victory on their steep upward career trajectory. And as sponsors, it seemed only right that Hammer catch up with Trivium - Matt Heafy, Paolo Gregoletto, Corey Beulieu, Travis Smith - and support acts, Gojira, Annihilator and Sanctity on the road.
The Apollo’s backstage area is buzzing with activity as all the bands get set up, settled in and soundchecked for tonight’s show, the fourth of 15 dates. Band members and techs string guitars, tighten drum stands and ‘one-two-one-two’ microphones.
One high visibility member of the tour is the red-haired Sanctity singer, Jared MacEachern, who - with his ADHD - is like a heavy metal Tigger: bouncing around in his newly purchased kilt for tomorrow’s Scottish crowd, frequently exclaiming the awesomeness of this and that.
Second on the bill are French metallers Gojira who – with Trivium - are fresh from Lamb Of God’s US tour where their enviable tightness was praised by all.
“We rely on having really good onstage sound for that tightness,” explains singer/guitarist Joe Duplantier. “That nano-second silence just before the breakdown is as important as the loud parts.”
His equally understated brother, drummer Mario Duplantier looks up from his practice pad and adds with effortless Gallic dryness: “And we’ve been going for 11 years so it’s been a long time coming.”
Main support comes from classic Canadian thrashers, Annihilator at the keen request of Trivium’s Corey Beaulieu. The current line-up includes original mainman Jeff Waters and 17 year old bassist Russell Bergquist.
“I met Corey doing Roadrunner United,” explains Jeff: the man with Rob Flynn’s looks and Dave Grohl’s demeanor. “When they announced the tour, Corey called me and asked if we’d like to come out with them. The last time we were here was in the early nineties so we jumped at the chance.”
One of the last times Annihilator played here in the UK, they were main support to Judas Priest on their Painkiller Tour in 1990. Also on the bill were ill-received openers, a pre-‘Cowboys From Hell’ Pantera.
“They didn’t go down well at all,” he laughs. “Then look what happened. Meanwhile I went into rehab and Annihilator died in the UK and the US. It’s good to be back.”
Visiting our dressing room to restock on beer, we pass Jared again: running around like a lunatic, looking like a convincing extra from Braveheart. His fellow bandmate, drummer Zeff Childress – like a bearded Jimbo from the Simpsons - attempts to Skype his ballerina girlfriend back in North Carolina. Also imping around like a hard rock Puck is tour blame-monkey Ralph: “Just blame me, it’s probably my fault anyways”.
The sun is out (which is weird for Manchester), the beer is flowing and the creative hubbub is at fever pitch. For a moment there we almost forgot our hosts.
“Listen, I feel really bad for being weird earlier,” says the Trivium singer later that day, as he sits in their Laura Ashley-gone-Swedish dressing-room with a frank but warm expression on his face. “Things have been making me spacey, plus…” he trails off and smiles bashfully. “Sorry, I’m not explaining myself very well,” he stops for another second and takes a breath before he and Justin tell us the saddest story we’ve ever heard.
Last year local metal head Adam Riaz was in a Manchester hospital with terminal cancer. As he lay in hospital his father locked himself, Adam’s mother and four sisters in their home, set their home on fire and burned them all to death. Adam’s dying wish was to see the Trivium show and meet his heroes. The band agreed in an instant. As the date grew closer, Adam became too ill to leave the hospital, so the guys suggested they visit him in hospital when they arrived. Adam was ecstatic. Two days before the Manchester show and the realisation of Adam’s dream, he died.
So Manchester has a particular poignancy for Trivium. And it shows.
But that’s not all.
“I’ve had some throat problems,” the singer ponder, effortlessly chugging out an amazing new riff on his seven string guitar. “I had to get a quick fix so I took these oral prednisone steroid things. There are so many fucking side-effects. The list on the bottle starts ‘over-exaggerated happiness‘. Further down it says: ‘anger, depression, upset stomach, nausea, diarrhoea, paranoia, blood, bubonic plague, death…’ all this shit.”
“I hate to take medication because it always fucks my personality up a little,” he says. “It’s like a double-edged sword. That’s why I’m so dazed.”
Led Zeppelin blasts from Travis’ laptop, the TV is on, Matt is playing guitar, Corey is pulling dumbbells and Paolo and his girlfriend talk in a corner: an oasis of calm like the central reservation of the A1/A406 interchange. On top of Adam’s story, the meds and the nerve-jangling environment, the 21 year old shredder has other problems: there are equipment problems, the band had to deal with some difficult personnel issues, and find an emergency replacement for a guitar tech whose mother has become very ill, and left the tour to be with her.
“I just wanted you to know it wasn’t you,” he laughs before adding comically: “it’s not you, it’s me.”
Maybe it’s the hilarity of Corey trying to Google the topless Angela Gossow pictures or Paolo’s stories of being a pathological prank caller in his youth; maybe it’s their rendition of Dokken’s ‘Dream Warriors’ during soundcheck, or that Matt is no longer like the lobotomised Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest; whatever it is, the day’s contemplative melancholy is spent and the evening is shaping up to be a great show and a wicked party. Not least because just outside the door is a “Scotch/Irish, English/Welsh” singer/guitarist running loose with a pint of Guinness, kilt and no pants on.
Tonight’s show is awesome. Last time Trivium where in the UK they were supporting Iron Maiden and on two occasions had bottles of piss thrown at them. But this is their own crowd, and accordingly they convulse and cavort with wild physical praise. The Apollo is a blurred picture of skin, hair and tattoos.
“If they keep going the way they are they could well be a threat to Metallica’s Biggest Metal Band throne,” shouts John from nearby Lowton at the bar. “What are Metallica now anyway?”
“I don’t know who chose the bands,” says his friend, Mike. “But it’s a wicked line-up. Sanctity are great. I’m surprised that an opening band would be so good.”
“We’re here to see Annihilator,” says Baz from Megadeth tribute band, Megadeath, “I’ve been waiting ten years to see them.”
“We hadn’t heard Gojira before but thought they were amazing too,” interjects his comrade before saying of Trivium: “It’s good to see the shred coming back to metal: massive riffs and great solos. Those elements died out in metal for a while.”
By this time the St John’ Ambulance room is brimming with casualties, and the mosh pit is so big that people who come out of the toilets get swept up in the cyclic melee like ducklings in a savage mill pool.
After the show Corey and Travis crack open well-deserved beers, but as Travis says, “I’ll have a few beers, but I don’t want to get retarded.”
Mr Heafy is off the ale due to his medication being enough to fuck his brain up without pouring beer on it. But Corey is on fine form we plan how to get British glamour model, Lucy Pinder (the one with the huge cakes), out to a show. And despite Corey’s protestations that he loves “huge fake tits”, he’d forgo that to meet Lucy and her all-natural appendages. Bless.
Just before we retire, we sit on one huge eerily new chesterfield with Matt.
“So come on,” he says playfully. “Ask some deep questions, plumb the depths man, I’m ready.”
It’s too late (pissed) for that, but it gets us thinking: is there something that Matt really wants to get off his chest? Is there an untold story waiting to be Jackanoried?
“Lately I’ve wanted to talk about my problems, my weaknesses and what’s wrong,” explains Matt Heafy as we sit in the decidedly less glamorous confines of the Glasgow Academy’s dressing rooms the next day. “I want to say how I’m not as cool as people try to make me out to be, that I shouldn’t be on a pedestal, that I’m just a normal guy who’s got problems. I’m a geek, I like cartoons, I’d probably get my ass kicked by someone tougher than me in 10 seconds.”
This change in the usually mindful and guarded Trivium frontman is due in no small part to some publications’ reportage of the band, who they feel have misrepresented them, skewed the truth and baited them with antagonistic questions.
“[Some magazines] have an agenda to find shit on us, find the weak places,” he says after tonight’s equally amazing show. “They make up some shit that isn’t real and try and attack and dissect who we are. They’re looking for us to slip up, and they’re going to try to exploit it. But like I say, I’m going to call all the weaknesses [myself] so they’ve got nothing else to use. Even if I do, then I’ll trip up and I’ll say ‘there you go, you got me - there I’ve said it’.”
We head down to catering where Travis is sitting in his personalised black Trivium dressing gown and ordering a lots of meet products.
Matt knows that as a popular band, magazines will want to write about Trivium; but that with no tales of mass sexual debauchery, drug-fuelled violence or other assorted rock ‘n’ roll behaviour, writers are under pressure to push for something edgy, something newsworthy, something controversial.
“There are a lot of bands that make up fake lives for the press,” Matt spits, almost disgusted. “’We’re battling demons, we fuck everything that moves, we snort hotel rooms, we kill people every day’.”
But Trivium aren’t prepared to play up to media pressure to ‘perform’, simply to deserve column inches from tabloid sensationalism-purveying rock rags.
“Our music and our show speak for itself,” he says laconically.
Another show finished, the departing crowd sidle off into the now freezing Scottish night. As we walk to meet Corey and Travis who are signing things near the bus, Matt recalls a recent time when a journalist came to interview them. The band were their usual congenial selves and answered a raft of straightforward questions. Suddenly the hack switched tack and starts attacking the band, baiting them, trying to get a rise. After dealing with the interrogation with a maturity ahead of their years, the resulting article was a damning document that criticized them as boring.
As Corey explains, it’s hard for someone to paint a picture of something they only saw for a moment.
“Also,” he adds, “we get on with some people: the people who want to hang out, have a beer, get involved - not just sit on the outside, watch us, then try and describe what we’re like.”
If you want to know what these four Floridian musicians are really like, you have to meet them (like the hundreds of fans who do on a daily basis). But what Hammer can say with certainty is that Trivium are a band not driven by deep-rooted demons, drugs or nymphomania – just a desire to write and play good old fashioned, heavy fucking metal.
With that, Paolo raises an eyebrow and gingerly opens a bottle of expensive single malt whiskey. The be-kilted and now bare-chested Sanctity singer stands at the door like Conan McBarbarian, and the night begins.
Facts & Stats
Percentage of Corey’s speech made up by the words ‘like’, ‘stuff’ and ‘y’know’:65%
Percentage of the rider table taken up by guitar equipment not food 87%
Speed of Corey and Matt’s guitar practise programme: 1,099mph (speed of sound)
Projected score of next Trivium album based on the new song idea: 10
Girlfriends on the tour: 1
Age of the single malt Paolo cracks open after the Glasgow show? 12/14?
How much Matt Heafy has grown since we last saw him: two feet (probably)
Requests for Metal Hammer’s own embroidered Trivium dressing-gown: 4
Average number of hours Paolo spent prank calling on a daily basis: 1
Band members signing stuff each night: 4
Approximate time spent signing things each night: 1.2 hrs.
Temperature in Glasgow: 30 degrees
Last time it was this hot in April: 207 BC
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