CIRCLE PIT

Protest The Hero – Interview

We were again very lucky here at CIRCLEPIT and our fantastic writer Gemma-Louise Harris went off to interview the truly talented, “Protest The Hero” before their Manchester show. She was lucky enough to chat to Tim Millar and Rody Walker.  Have a read through, it is a fascinating interview.

CP: So, it’s exciting times for Protest the Hero right now – your UK tour kicks off today in Manchester?

Rody Walker: It’s been a while since we’ve played in the UK - it was around November 2009, when we toured with Propagandhi.

Tim Millar: We’re really looking forward to the UK tour, especially visiting Nottingham - they have one of the best poker rooms in the world!

Rody Walker: Why the hell would that be something to look forward to?!

Tim Millar: Ah, it’s an experience, man… and there’s a chance you’ll catch some aces and walk out of there with a couple of pounds in your pocket.

Rody Walker: I was looking forward to seeing the T-Rex bones in Manchester, but I missed out!

Tim Millar: Basically, we’re trying to tour as much as the UK as possible, and play in as many different countries as we can before the new record comes out.

CP: You boys are heading over to Australia soon, aren’t you?

Tim Millar: Yeah, we’ve never been before and we’re really excited! We’re not too sure about the fanbase we have over there – but we do get MySpace and Facebook messages from a few fans out there. For some reason, we’re headlining the small stage at a festival over there, so I figure the organisers put us there to play when either all the good bands are playing, which could be bad, but all in all, we’ve had an overall positive response from fans over there, yet still don’t really know what to expect.

Rody Walker: We’re also looking forward to the warm weather too and of course, the poisonous spiders. It’s so fucking frigid in Canadaright now, it’s even nice to be over in England where it’s a little warmer.

CP: What can we expect from your new album Scurrilous?

Rody Walker: Well, the new album will be launching on March 22nd… I feel it’s a little bit of a departure for us, but it is very difficult to be objective. We’ve been relying on the reporters to render their thoughts and opinions to kind of help me form my own, which sounds horrible!

Tim Millar: I guess it’s the same for me! I’ve been told it’s heavier and more technical, but I thought it was less heavy and less technical… but I think one big change was that Rody made a big effort not to scream unless it was a very aggressive part of the song.

Rody Walker: It wasn’t really an effort! It was more like “I’m sick of fucking doing it, I think it sounds like shit”, so I just don’t want to do it any more.

CP: How does Scurrilous differ from your previous album, Fortress?

Rody Walker: It’s not completely different. I think throughout our career (if we can call it that), the direction we’ve been heading has always been fairly obvious with each record. It’s basically a further progression into obscurity and nonsense (laughs).

Tim Millar: The biggest thing for me when we were writing, was that we kept a lot of things in mind that we didn’t keep in mind with Fortress. For example, as far as tempo goes, there’s only one song on Fortress that has a consistent tempo all the way through. However, with the Scurrilous record, we made a conscious effort to do that, to keep the beat going the same, just because it’s so hard in the studio to programme all the little tempo changes and stuff. It makes it sound a little more cohesiveness and flowing, but at the same time, we tried to write some conventionally structured songs.

CP: Is there a central theme to Scurrilous?

Rody Walker: You could certainly stretch and say that because it’s all coming from one place, describing things that are occurring within our lives, that it is conceptual in that respect. But I guess that’s stretching it a bit; I think we’re just going to go ahead and say that there’s no concept. It is what it is…

Tim Millar: In the past, we kind of thought what the record was about lyrically before we actually dove into it. However, this time we just wrote the music, wrote a bunch of songs… the hard part was trying to find a way to fit them together to make them sound cohesive.

CP: How have you found the overall recording process; has it been a long journey?

Rody Walker: Oh yeah… it was fucking slooooow! It started August 31st 09 and it ended December 22nd 09, so for four months or something, our lives were just completely gone!

Tim Millar: We were living within a native reserve for part of it and living in a sketchy hotel for the rest. We recorded the album in a town called Caledonia in Canada, which is about an hour from where we live. Within the native reserve, this tobacco tycoon built his nephew a multi-million dollar recording studio because he has a hip hop project. I guess in between his albums, he needs to get some bands in, so we decided to head over there.

Rody Walker: We collaborated again with  producer Julius ‘Juice’ Butty, who we’ve been working with for the past two records.

Tim Millar: We also worked closely with the house engineer at the studio, Nick Blagona, who’s been around since the 60s. He helped engineer the likes of Deep Purple…

Rody Walker: Haha; he fucking snorts weed! Someone was getting ready to roll a joint and this guy just came up and snorted it up and said “that’s how we fucking did it in my day”…

Tim Millar: It was cool to be around a guy that has so much experience, but I think the first time we met him, we thought he was a big liar, due to all his crazy stories. However, we looked him up, and seeing his discography, we were really impressed.

Rody Walker: He fucking recorded Saturday Night Fever, and King Crimson records too! Yeah, he helped out massively with the entire recording process.

Tim Millar: We also had some guest musicians contribute to our new record too; Propagandhi’s Chris Hannah sang a track. It sounds crazy to have a little piece of Propagandhi on our record.

Rody Walker: We also had Jadea Kelly return from our first record – which is kind of exciting! We did it a little bit for ourselves but also for our fans of the first record. A little bit of nostalgia…

Tim Millar: We also managed to get some ‘doggy’ vocals in too. In Fortress, that little cat ‘meow’ was Juice’s cat; she’s dead now, but she was a whiny bitch! However, he’s now got an old studio dog  that we’re in love with, so we got the old dog in the booth and recorded some barks to accompany a track.

CP: Who oversees the song writing process; is it a collaborative effort?

Rody Walker: Some of it is very much group orientated, but what happens initially is the four guys, with the exception of myself, get together and they write the bed tracks for the music. They pre-produce it, really. Then I have to come in and listen to the shit, in order to figure out what to sing over it. It’s a bit of a daunting task.

Tim Millar: Pretty much, for the first year we spent writing all the music, and by the end of that year we recorded it all, pre-produced it, passed it over to Rody and let him do his thing with it. It works for us, but in retrospect, we could have written the record a lot faster if we had a vocal hook and based the song around it. However, we stick to what we know. The four of us were practising Monday to Friday…

Rody Walker: Whereas I was drinking heavily Monday to Friday!

Tim Millar: Yeah, we didn’t see Rody for a while…

CP: Which artists really inspire you?

Rody Walker: I think collectively, there’s only one band that has really inspired us  all, which is of course Propagandhi. Also Sikth… we all have very different influences as individuals, some of us are metal oriented… country oriented… etc.

Tim Millar: I used to be metal oriented, but as far as listening to music now, I tend to listen to a lot of jazz, classical… because when you get home from tour and you’ve been sitting around, constantly listening to loud, loud music, it’s kind of nice to listen to other stuff.

Rody Walker: You’re just so intellectual!

CP: What’s on your iPod?

Tim Millar: Well, I haven’t been using my iPod for about a year!  But last night, I listened to Soul Position, which is basically hip hop…

Rody Walker: See! He’s so complicated, there’s so many “layers” to him (laughs). I’m just kidding Timmy!

Tim Millar: Argh… I’ll just shut up now! Anyway… I do also enjoy anything from Vince Guaraldi to Blotted Science, from Beethoven to modern rock. Although my favourite lady is Kesha right now! I genuinely liked the Tick-Tock record for its production…

At this point… both Rody and Tim break out into Kesha songs…

Rody Walker: For me, I don’t know… I go back to things I used to listen to when I was younger, like my Propagandhi records. I also like a lot of country music, as well as Mary Gauthier. I mostly listen to the fucking Les Misérables soundtrack (laughs)… I just can’t get into new music right now! The scene right now just feels so super fucking saturated with the same thing, it’s like something that has been taken and watered down over the years. I really can’t find the enthusiasm within myself to enjoy it… I’ve stopped paying attention.

Tim Millar: Even bands I used to love as a kid, I just don’t seem to keep up with them. For example, I haven’t even heard the new Dillinger Escape Plan record. I’m sure that if I listened to it, I’d love it, but for some reason, there’s a disconnection from my hearing about a new album to getting it the day it’s released.

CP: Can we expect to see you at any of the UK summer festivals this year?

Rody Walker: Yeah, I believe in the summer time – we have tentative plans right now.

Tim Millar: We’re trying to put together a festival tour – I hear there’s Sonisphere and Download over in the UK - so we’ll have to see what happens. We’re small sheep in the grand scheme of things, so whoever will take us… We’ve always missed Download; we’d love to do any big festivals over here, because what we consider a festival is a shitty Warped Tour… but it’s a lot different over here.

Rody Walker: Ha! We’re another fart in the shitstorm!

CP: If you could tour with one band, who would it be?

Tim Millar: Rush

Rody Walker: In a hypothetical situation… I’m going to reach for it and say Queen, with Freddie though!

CP: What’s been the highlight being Protest the Hero so far?

Rody Walker: Definitely playing with Propagandhi. They were the reason we started the band, and they’ve definitely been a massive influence on our music.

CP: Finally, where does the name Protest the Hero come from?

Tim Millar: The meaning is constantly changing and evolving…

Rody Walker: We used to be very angsty as teenagers… we used to be very “fuck George Bush, man…” We wrote down a shit load of potential band names, then we decided Protest the Hero was a fucking good name. But nowadays, we like to think of the name as protestbeing the hero, as opposed to protesting against a hero – if that makes sense?

Tim Millar: Or… Protest is the name of the hero.

Rody Walker: Yeah; essentially that’s what I meant! Like a big fucking fat guy in tights with a big P on his chest! Yeah, we should develop a superhero…  like the street vigilantes in Seattle, ha!

Many Thanks to Rody and Tim of Protest the Hero for their time and also to our very own Gemma Louise-Harris for her great interview!!

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