Gallows

Alex Hoban gets on the dog and bone to Frank, lead singer of hardcore outfit Gallows.


Hey Frank, you’ve been in Canada the past week, what have you been up to there?

I’ve just been out meeting some people, signing visas and stuff so that we can play SXSW in March. I know a lot of people out there, tattooists – I know a lot of them so I hung out and got a tattoo. I’m mates with a band called the Cancer Bats and I’ve met up with them out here, talked about our Canadian dates on the Warped Tour. I met with Greg from Distort records. It was snowing heavily, it’s so crazy we have snow about once a year here but out there it’s the norm.

Did you take any good photos?

I’ve got some good ones of me up the CN tower. I haven’t been out the country for two years, so it was a bit of a shock, arrived at 3 in the morning and was wide awake, so just wondered about town through the night. Sunday morning I went straight to the top of the CN tower. It’s fucking huge, the glass floor is amazing.

You’ve got a bit of a reputation for causing trouble. How are you facing up to that?

Everyone thinks we’re this skinhead band that goes about getting in fights and causing loads of trouble, but we’re not – we just don’t take any sh*t. There’s a massive difference between going around looking for fights and standing up for yourself when someone just wants to cause trouble. We’ve got this reputation now, we’re not a bunch of miscreants – well, we might be a little bit – but we don’t go looking for fights... people are just always trying to test us and tread on our toes. If someone calls me a c*nt in the street then that’s just not on and I’ll go up and have a word. If someone calls me a c*nt and doesn’t have a good enough reason for it, I’m going to come up to them and give them a f*cking slap.


What’s the worst instance of people giving you sh*t then?

When we were on tour with Bullet For My Valentine a lot of their fans didn’t appreciate us or where we were coming from. They’ve all got the wrong impression of us, but I don’t know why I’m trying to clear my name, those kids don’t know what the f*ck they’re talking about anyway if they’re at a Bullet For My Valentine gig. They don’t have a f*cking clue about good music for start. I want to get away from the image that the press are making of us as f*cking bare-knuckle boxers, we ain’t about that. We just want to play some good music, even though we’re not afraid to fight back. If someone slags us off then I’ll let them know how I feel.

Things are looking good for you, where do you hope to be in a year?

This time next year hopefully we’ll be in a position to grab some awards. We’ll see how this record does this year first. I know for a fact it’s not going to be our best record. The stuff we are writing now is definitely better than anything on our old one. In my eyes the current record already feels old because we’ve moved on with more new material. We’re still all holding down day jobs, trying to make it work, the stuff we started writing at the end of the year is the best, so we’re already excited about putting out another record and impress people with it. I’m amazed at how well our record is doing at the minute, how well people are accepting it.

What music have you been listening to lately?

I’ve been listening to so much grime. The Klashnekoff album is f*cking good. I just got this record by this fellow called JME, it’s f*cking brilliant, the lyrics are amazing. Klashnekoff did this track called ‘It’s Murder’, that they used on the Kidulthood soundtrack, it was the first song I heard by him, there are some f*cking piss lines in that, so vicious! Since then I’ve fallen in love with him. As far as I’m concerned, all grime artists are the best lyricists. Rap’s always had a massive influence of Rock, but grime has taken everything that’s good about both genres and done something new. Klashnekoff is definitely the best out there, along with Sway, who is also f*cking heavy.

FUTURE GIGS

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