Dublin, Ireland‘s Primordial are nothing if they’re not hard to classify. The band, formed in 1987, could have been called black metal in their earliest work, but have long since transcended such easy genre-tagging. Because the lyrics of frontman Alan Averill come from a specifically Irish perspective and Ciáran MacUiliam (he and bassist Pól “Paul” MacAmlaigh are the remaining founding members of the band) has never been shy about incorporating Celtic influences, Primordial saw a major profile upgrade as part of the folk metal explosion in 2006-2008. In 2009, they toured the US for the first time as part of PaganFest.

Like many Americans, my first exposure to the band was 2005’s The Gathering Wilderness, which was their fifth album overall but first for Metal Blade Records, who also released To the Nameless Dead in 2007. By my judgment, To the Nameless Dead was the best album that came out that year, and though it would be two more years before I was able to catch the band live, I was still thrilled to do so. Likewise, now that Primordial have issued their first live DVD, All Empires Fall, I was equally excited to interview Alan Averill.

Averill is known for his opinions on a range of topics both music-related and not almost as much as his brash stage persona, and though All Empires Fall was the impetus for the conversation, there was more I wanted to get a sense of his feelings on social issues in his home country, where the Catholic church had at the time of our discussion just been in the news following more reports of sexual abuse by priests, and, by Averill‘s account, society has more or less collapsed.

To quote Marty DiBergi, “I got that. I got more. A lot more.” In the following Q&A, Alan Averill talks about the state of Ireland, his feelings on nationalism, economic hardships and rails against venues in the US for taking a percentage of merch sales from bands (which I’d never heard of before), through it all showing every ounce of the passion he carries with him into shows and onto albums.

Please enjoy the interview after the jump.

I was going to start off by asking you why the Dublin show for the DVD, but that seems so obvious that I’ll ask instead if there was any other show you would have used?

For practical reasons, obviously Dublin makes the most sense. Because we were working with my cousin’s small production company, doing it somewhere else would have meant bringing them. We just really didn’t have the budget for that. Thankfully, in the last couple of years, we’ve been able to sell out that venue in Dublin, which we wouldn’t have been able to do five years ago, so we could trust in the fact there would be enough people there. It could have been lots of different gigs I could think of. Places it could have been. It could have been in Athens. It could have been Helsinki. It could have been in Munich – well, maybe not Munich. It could have been in lots of places, thankfully. I’m quite thankful to say that nine out of 10 shows we do have a strong level of intensity that I would have no problem putting them on the DVD. But Dublin just made the most practical sense. It’s where we’re from, and it was just nice to be able to put “Live in Dublin” on a DVD, because you never see that on anything. That was a small part of it, that bit of pride to be able to say that.

I was fortunate enough to see you guys when you came through New York on PaganFest, and I remember you had said something about bringing your culture to the crowd. Do you consider Primordial a kind of cultural ambassadorship?

Yeah, sure. It’s art. It’s not entertainment. Seeing a show can be entertaining — and I don’t really care if that sounds pretentious or not — but to me, I view Primordial as a continuation of the great Irish artistic tradition, whether it’s Brendan Behan, W.B. Yeats or Thin Lizzy. There’s something of the other in it, and the whole point of what we’re doing – of course, it can still be a metal show – is to try and engage people and move them with what you create, which, let’s be honest, I couldn’t do if I was singing about zombies or fast cars or unicorns or something like this. There was never any question that it had to have this cultural resonance and historical significance. Especially for playing in America, where you have so much Irish diaspora spread throughout the country and so many people with Irish roots, playing something like “The Coffin Ships” was quite poignant, because this is where people came. Well, not to L.A., but to New Jersey or New York or whatever. It was quite pertinent.

At the same time though, a Primordial show is still very much a performance.

Sure. It’s still blood and thunder heavy metal. That’s what we love (laughs). It’s still the white-knuckle grinding proper heavy metal show. If you don’t want to engage with all those things, “Empire Falls” is still a classic metal song that a guy with an Iron Maiden t-shirt who never heard the band can go, “Ah fuck, that’s not bad. I can get into that.” It’s not alienating in that respect, but for those people who do want to scratch the surface or do engage with the band on another level, it’s all there as well. It’s not difficult to penetrate, and it’s not difficult to be swept up in the live thing. It’s inclusive, as opposed to exclusive. I try and sort of bring people into the songs, into the show – however pretentious that sounds – but that’s the point.

That’s what being on stage is, isn’t it?

I suppose the traditional black metal ethic would be to try and be alienated from your fans or whatever you want to say. To try and move people with what you’re doing. There’ll always be people who’d rather stand at the merch stall and are waiting for whatever band afterwards, and that’s no problem, but also there, you’re trying to challenge people’s preconceptions and trying to challenge people with something, and when they go home after the show, they go, “Fuck, we saw a proper metal show tonight. Not the usual lame shit.”

Do you think that ethic is part of what’s allowed Primordial to transcend that black metal realm?

I suppose traditionally most black metal bands didn’t have the touring and work ethic as the original death and thrash [bands], because it was that little bit removed, and a lot of them were very poor live when they started. I suppose in some respect we did come from black metal and the black metal ethic. The concept of playing gigs to random people and drunkards in Anthrax shirts should have been potentially anathema to what the whole scene was, but there’s also a certain amount of naivety and chest-beating bravado that went with the whole thing. We very quickly realized that’s not the way we wanted to do things with Primordial, even though the songs can be about very dark things, etc., we wanted to try and engage people with them.

How do you develop a performance persona from that?

It just developed over the years. For me, it’s a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing. It’s the same person, of course, but I was always drawn to metal in the ‘80s like Venom, Manowar, Mercyful Fate, Bathory and Sabbat far more than the D.R.I.s of the world. They just didn’t appeal to me. I liked the larger-than-life theatricality of Celtic Frost, and that’s what I always wanted to do with a band. So there’s no way I was going to shamble on stage in blue jeans and a Metallica shirt. It just wasn’t going to happen. It also takes another form. When you paint your face, you focus your energy for what you’re gonna do, and it does take on a certain amount of ritualistic symbolism, and I subscribe to that kind of thing. It mentally prepares you for what you’re gonna do, and it makes it easier for me to immerse myself in the songs. I wouldn’t call it playing a character, because it’s still me, but it just happens to be what’s on the inside.

In one of your blog entries on the Primordial website, you discuss nationalism, and I wanted to ask you if you think it’s possible to be allied to a country but not necessarily a state.

Well, there’s a very different distinction between a nation and a state. The state is defined by a geographical boundary. You can have a nation which has no state, which could be Kurds or Armenians. A lot of things have happened in Ireland that have made me question my views on, at the very least, Irish nationalism. We’ve witnessed the almost instantaneous collapse of the economy and a lot of the social order that existed around it. The church has been exposed as nothing but a pedophile ring. The government who’ve ruled the country more or less since the inception of the state have turned out to be charlatans, liars and thieves as well. The property and banking sectors have collapsed. Basically all the old institutions, from the health board to everything, have collapsed, and I think traditionally I would have been against the state but for the people. Now I find myself being against the people as well. The misdeeds of the state were perpetrated with the help of regular people, and I think the romantic idealism that existed in the late 19th Century/early 20th Century that surrounded the initial fight for, say, Irish freedom or whatever you want to call it, the establishment of that state never happened. The systematic murdering of the intellectuals of the time who could have brought about perhaps a greater state never happened. A lot of things have happened to change my views in the last while have altered my views of nationalism. It’s a recurring theme in Primordial. The whole last album is connected to this theme. It’s not nationalistic, it’s just viewing nationalism and how people relate to a piece of dirt they think is theirs. I think it is possible to relate to a nation without recognizing the state. It is possible to support a different view on political situations without being geographically or ethnically even part of it.

How do you see this change in ideology that you’ve been undergoing playing into Primordial, which is such a lyrical vehicle for that kind of thinking?

Traditionally, we always flew an Irish flag from the amps when we played and this, that and the other. One of the songs on the newer album is questioning the ethics of that. It’s questioning what exactly is it that you’re proud of this nation and state? It’s about the unquestioned inheritance of the misdeeds and heroic deeds of your ancestry, when realistically you’d probably not necessarily had anything to do with them. It’s questioning the nature of your flag, the nature of your nationalistic inheritance and that sort of thing in a different way to the last album. I think it’s important to come at things from different angles. I never run out of things to write about, which is good (laughs).

When are you going to be recording the new album?

June. June is what we’re looking at. We’ll record in June, do a bit of mixing in the summer, then it’ll be out end of September or October. That’s the plan. Right now we’ve got some songs that are 25 percent finished, some are 75 percent finished. But it’s getting there. It’s nearing that level of completion. It’s getting to that moment when in a couple of months it’s going to be recorded.

Do you have a title yet or anything like that?

My working title is Sacrifice, Revolution and Redemption, because they’re the main themes of the album, (laughs) but it won’t be called that. But they’re the themes I’m working on that. “Redemption” is a good word for how the lyrics and the ideas are shaping up. There’s a lot of lyrics dealing with religion and dealing with perceived spirituality and that kind of stuff.

I know you mentioned the Catholic church before, and I’m on the East Coast of the US and we had a similar kind of explosion of exposure of abuse a few years ago. It’s awful to read that in the news.

We have two huge reports, the Ryan and the Murphy Reports, that came in the last couple years, that basically expose the Catholic church in Ireland for a pedophile ring. Nothing short of that. And most of the problems throughout the rest of the developed world to do with Catholic pedophilia are Irish priests sent on missions, whether that’s in Africa or America. I think you’ll find lots of Irish surnames with those priests that are arrested in Canada and America. So we have to question why Ireland. Why not Polish priests? Why not Italian priests? A certain amount of it is the intellectually retarded, backward nature of Ireland. A lot of people aren’t happy with my views on these kinds of things because they don’t like to hear you knocking your own country, but it’s true. Ireland never really had the industrial revolution like the rest of Europe, and it was essentially an intellectual backwater, which since the inception of the state, has allowed its brightest and cleverest to emigrate because it had absolutely nothing for them. The people who could have potentially changed the makeup of Ireland were gone, leaving the country to the grubby hands of Fianna Fail, the ruling party, at the behest of the Catholic church. And like I said before, I used to be for the people and against all these things, but now you realize that in small-town Ireland, while this was happening, everyone knew. The baker. The butcher. The doctor. The local this, the local that. Everyone knew what was happening. Now I find myself in the position that I’m against everything (laughs). We’re witnessing the absolute deconstruction of Irish society, which, standing on the outside of it, is very interesting, but it’s also a little bit distressing for a lot of people. It’s a very strange to be a Irish person living in Ireland. We’re halfway down the spiral. We haven’t reached the bottom yet. There’s more coming. And it is some amount of it that will inspire the next Primordial album, but I don’t want the usual Christian-baiting lyrics that are archetypal in heavy metal, that’s not my style, so I’m going to have to come at it from some different angle. But everybody was in on it. Whether it was the church, who took in kids promising them an education, a better life, then basically farmed them out to farmers to work as slave labor and often to death. Ireland is like a failed African state, or the Ukraine in the 1920s. Under Lenin, there’s echoes of this stuff, collectivization. There’s a dark underbelly of Irish society that’s been exposed to people now, and it’s strange times.

Where do you see it going?

It’s only gonna get worse. The country’s fucked. The people are depressed. Sadly not aggressive enough and violent to go out in the streets and tear the place apart, which they have been doing in Athens, which I’d really like to see. Look, if the Simon Wiesenthal Center can pursue 80-year-old Nazis like Demjanjuk and put them in prison and our government is debating whether priests should even resign for harboring pedophiles, it says a lot about Irish society. Half these people should be strung up and should be in prison, and I think the general public are just so disillusioned with everything that they’ve just basically been lied to by every state and institution. Now that the recession has knocked us down to 27th most productive economy in the EU, everyone has to emigrate again. So yeah, cheery stuff (laughs).

Should make for a good album, if nothing else.

Yeah, well, you know, I’m a bit outside of it all, all the time. My upbringing is slightly different. My background is different. My attitudes are different, and so it affects me in a different way.

Having some distance now from To the Nameless Dead, what’s your take on what that album accomplished? Not only in the sense of exposing the band to a wider audience, but creatively.

I’m still really proud of it. I think it still sounds great. It’s a good album. It’s very rare that a band gets to album number six and still has the fire and energy they had when they were 16, 17, 18, and to me it still sounds full of life, which is really important. It’s the best production and overall aesthetic that I wanted. At least with the book version, it is. I don’t know if you got many of them [in the States]. It’s just another step along the path. It doesn’t rehash what we did before, it makes a few different statements, but it sort of dropped like a bit of a bombshell, especially on the press in Europe, who’d heard us before but never really clicked into the band, and all of a sudden we were number one in all the soundtracks in the magazines and all this kind of stuff, and they’re like, “Where the fuck did this band come from?” and this is album number six. We don’t really think about it though. We just write songs, and we know when they’re good enough, and I think people who like the band trust us. But I’m still proud of it. It was obviously a very big step up for us.

Is there anything you want to try different or build on for the new one?

I want it to sound even more like it was recorded in 1981 or 1982 than before (laughs). We really want to push for a bit rougher – somewhere between Motörhead, Overkill, Killers by Iron Maiden and Heaven and Hell would be perfect if we could get that. If we could get Martin Birch out of retirement. That’s what we want. And just to make another album that has no compromises and sounds full of energy and life. That’s all we can really ask for, and after that, it’s up to everyone else. It’s up to the label and the press and the fans and this, that and the other. We can only do the first bit.

Are there any plans to come back to the US to tour?

Since we toured the US the last time, we’ve been offered three or four tours, but it comes back to the recession and the whole thing in Ireland. It’s made the liberties we can perhaps take with work a couple years ago almost negligible now. They’re just not there. It’s almost impossible to find the same space in time to do. It’s made if very difficult. And don’t forget, touring [there] is like a hiding to nothing, because the dollar is so weak against the Euro. When people go home and they have kids… Like on that last tour, Moonsorrow were playing for nothing. They were playing for $400 a night. You play to 1,200 people in Montreal, and someone hands you $400, which is the price of, what, 32 tickets? But there you go. I don’t think people realize that when they see the band that it’s such a relative sacrifice that you make, especially when venues are taking 30 percent of your t-shirt sales and stuff.

Wait. You had venues take a cut of your merch?

Every venue takes between 20 and 30 percent of your merch and there’s nothing you can do. They have someone to stand there with a clicker, clicking the t-shirts they sell. Nothing you can do about it, it’s just become part of what touring America is. If you add import tax, printing costs, 20-30 percent gone and how strong the Euro is against the dollar, if we don’t sell a t-shirt for more than $15, we are basically giving them away. Seeing as we had one for $12 on that tour, we might as well just give them away to people outside.

Or sell them out the back of a van or something.

They won’t let you do that. There’s always going to be some stupid law that you can’t have an open vendor or something in the car park. Believe me. People come and they balk at the $25 entry price, and I understand that too, but I think people are probably a bit blind to the brutal economics of the situation. Moonsorrow. There’s a band that sells 20,000 records, playing for free. For nothing. And some of those guys have kids, they have jobs. There’s a third kid coming for Primordial in July. How do you justify going to America to play for a month and bring home, what, $150 a week? “Here you go.” So it’s a hard thing to do. We are going to manage to do it before the end of the year, but I think unless you’re one of the bands headlining at the top and still able to bring 500 people in the States, or if you live in Eastern Europe and your tour America, it might be easier. In Ireland, where the cost of living is so high, it’s difficult. But I’m not complaining (laughs). I’m just stating the fact. After all, we’re still a metal band and part of being fuckin’ metal is just fuckin’ putting your nose to the grindstone and doing what you have to do. I love being on tour. I’m not gonna bitch and complain and moan about it. We put in 100 percent every time we play. But there’s certain facts surrounding it.

That stuff is a concern, definitely.

Especially this percentage thing. I remember having an argument with somebody in Montreal and I was asking the merch girl, “Can we fiddle this?” and there was a guy standing behind her and he was like, “Nah man, it’s the law.” “Well, what law?” And he goes, “It’s the law.” “Well, it might be your law, but it’s not the law of the state. Do you realize where all these bands are from? Do you realize how much they’re getting paid, how much money they get to make, and you want 30 percent of it for nothing?” He just went, “It’s the law.” It’s not the fucking law. I don’t think the Canadian government is forcing these people, “You have to take 30 percent of these bands’ merch.” And they’re trying to bring it in in Europe. There’s no such thing as a band union. What you would need would be Slayer to stand up for all the little bands to stop it happening to them, but they’re never gonna do that, are they? Those guys are probably being paid $40,000 a night to play anyway, so they make their money. You would need the Children of Bodoms of this world to go, “No, we’re not playing your venues unless you take away your 30 percent” or whatever, but realistically, that’s never gonna happen. I’m sorry. That’s my little thing.

If it keeps artists and bands from being able to afford to tour, it’s a big deal.

It does. We broke even on that tour and made a little bit on that tour, but not much. We probably made the equivalent of minimum wage to bring home, which is still stretching the boundaries of being justifiable to your family and stuff like that. At the same time, there’s bands who come over, who, they’re in the hole from the moment they start. Look at Rotting Christ. The cost of their visas to come over and play in the US, and they’re getting no fee, and they’re in the van and they’re driving themselves and this and the other, and they do it. They’ll suck it up and do it. They’ll do a 40-date tour of America, and then come back to Europe and then come back to South America. And people complain, “Oh, the ticket was $15,” and “Why was the hoodie $30?” Now you know.

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Metal Blade Records