Cancer Bats

Since the release of their debut album in mid 2006, Cancer Bats have made themselves a name in the metal and punk scenes. They have graced the cover of Kerrang!, toured relentlessly and released two more albums in the years since. Despite their success, the guys remain down to earth and easy to talk to. Vocalist Liam Cormier is often found wandering through the crowd after a performance, speaking with fans. His easy going attitude and friendly demeanor defy metal stereotypes. The band has been touring in support of their latest release, Bears, Mayors, Scraps & Bones.

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This is for thepunksite.com; it’s only been about a year since they interviewed you last and it focused more on the album, so we will maybe not talk as much about that. So far, how’s the tour going with these guys?

It’s going awesome. This is kind of the third leg of the tour. We’ve done the east coast and Ontario and now we’re heading west to finish off in Vancouver. We only have six shows left. We are stoked. It’s been rad, it’s been a cool mixed bill with these dudes being such a different kind of metal than anything we do, so having both of us together is definitely rad.

You were here not too long ago with Devildriver. 

Yeah, they are super metal too. With that it was more like us playing for their fans. I mean, there were lots of Cancer Bats fans there but I think that the fact that this is more of a co-headliner, we were switching off on different dates. We headlined in Ontario, then we split the east coast stuff and they are doing these dates. It’s cool to see kids stoked to see what’s happening, not really knowing what’s going on. The way we billed it, it’s hard to tell, it’s not really like “the Cancer Bats tour.” 

Even when I was looking at the show posters, I was confused. I was like, who is the actual headliner here?

Yeah, kids come up to you and are like “are you playing last or what?” 

Obviously this is a different crowd than when you came through town with Billy Talent.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, kids who came and saw us at that Billy Talent show are coming back to see us. Last night in Regina there were a bunch of kids who only just discovered us opening up for Billy Talent and they were psyched to see us again. This is like their first real Cancer Bats show. It’s cool to have that happen.

That’s the good thing about playing with such diverse lineups.

Yeah, playing with different bands makes it fun to see what kids will come to later shows, like “I saw you with Alexisonfire.” 

Are you familiar with the Living With Lions controversy that’s going on right now?

We actually played with them out east at one of our shows. I was looking at that whole Holy Shit thing. It’s weird what people will make a controversy out of. Even on the CD, they had to put a sticker over Shit, which I thought was clever, but everyone knows what was behind it. I just don’t know how anti Christian the whole thing actually was. I haven’t looked at the lyrics, so maybe it is brutal, but I have a feeling that it isn’t.

No, it’s not at all. 

It’s one of those things that gets blown out of proportion because some random person gets offended. The most offensive thing was a piece of shit with a halo, I was like oh it’s just a funny play of words. It’s a tough spot to be in though, we get government support through Distort in the same way that Blackbox does, so it’s like that could very well happen to us. We don’t really have stuff that’s too touchy.

I think the strange thing is that it’s like a Blink 182 type of potty humor, nothing really serious. Someone like Propagandhi or DOA who are actually saying pretty controversial things and get funding through FACTOR aren’t the ones being attacked. 

Yeah, they openly criticize religion.

You just wonder if this is going to open a door to mass censorship. 

I wonder. I wonder if it will bring more scrutiny on a lot of bands about what their actual content is. Maybe it will bring stricter regulations from FACTOR. I don’t know, we are going to record another record, so I guess we will see.

I recently read an interview where you were talking about reading Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.” How was that? I just picked it up a week ago, but haven’t started it yet.

That was awesome! It’s one of the better books about the whole New York scene. I like that it takes a different look at the whole punk scene. If you read other stuff like “Just Kill Me…” Patti Smith’s in that and a lot of people have a very different perspective on her; no one liked her when she first moved to New York. It’s neat to see a different take, where she liked everyone. You are like, oh awesome and have more respect for her after that. I read a lot of biographies; I’m pretty interested in that. I just read the Chris Farley biography on this tour. It’s super dark and so depressing. 

It jumped out at me because Patti is a punk icon and it reminded me that Cancer Bats appeal to both metal and punk crowds. You have such a diverse fanbase and I can’t think of too many other bands that have such a widespread appeal. I think it’s really cool.

We are all over the place. We don’t really subscribe to any genre of music, we are just music fans. In the same way that I think there are other bands out there, we are just fans of music. Someone is like oh hey, I like metal and you guys seem to kind of like metal too. It’s okay to like hardcore and punk rock, you don’t have to completely look the part. 

You do a lot of collaborations. You do a lot of guest vocal spots on other albums and you have a lot of guys coming to contribute to yours. What brings that on?

We have a lot of friends. It’s this thing in punk rock. I remember growing up and seeing that always happening on records. People were stoked on one another and they would ask their friends, you’d wanna have your buddies around. When we are recording that’s the rare time that we are actually home and hanging out, so if our other friends are not on tour, then like Wade (Alexisonfire, Black Lungs) is hanging in the studio or the Comeback Kid guys are like hey you should come over and sing on this or the Silverstein guys… It’s cool when stuff like this happens. 

It’s nice to see at a bigger level. I know in the city here, it’s like okay I have to go do my buddies video this weekend, then we are doing some gang vocals this night and so on. It’s a small local scene, so everyone is friends. 

I feel like Toronto is the same way. When we were just starting we were in the Alexisonfire and Blue Skies at War videos. Like that same vibe, where we were like we need our friends to come do this. It’s always easy too when you have friends who don’t have jobs. You know what I mean, like real jobs, so you are like, hey can you come out to the studio today? Yeah. Tomorrow? Yeah. It’s almost availability sometimes. 

I think you guys have come a long way in a really short time. I think it was late 2007 when I saw you guys playing in a tiny club in the small town of Red Deer for about 10 people. I just came in by accident to see what was happening. 

I remember that show!

It seems like only a few years later everyone knows who you are. 

We definitely hit the ground running. Scott and I were older, already 24, when we started the band so for us it was that we had to either do it then or not at all. For us it was, the more serious we were, we wanted to be just as serious as all the dudes we hung around with like the guys in Alexisonfire and Comeback Kid. They were touring a ton and we wanted to be like them, so even when we were recording our demo, we were already in a rush to do bigger things. Maybe not bigger, but more fun. It was never like we need our band to be this big, it was more like man, we need to tour. 

You guys tour a lot. The only other Canadian band I can think of that tours as much is the Flatliners. It’s an argument about the definition of success. The goal used to be to get a major label and sell lots of albums, but now it seems more of a DIY grassroots punk thing again. 

Its regressing I think. You tour yourselves; it’s going back to the old punk rock aesthetic. The more you do for yourself the more successful you are going to be. You don’t have many other people there to fuck it up. It’s more like bureaucracy for us, where we don’t want to have anyone else telling us what to do. They are sitting back and dictating to us what kind of music we should be playing. We don’t want to be stuck in that box. Naturally the way we market ourselves isn’t going to fit into their idea of how we should do things. It’s like back in the day selling records was different. Now being on YouTube or MySpace is so important. You show up and play an awesome show and that ends up on YouTube and people see it and are like wow that bands awesome. It’s almost less relevant to be on the shelves of HMV now. 

Cancer Bats have a reputation for an amazing live show. Do you think that the album sales are dependent on that or do you think the live show success is based on solid album sales beforehand?

I think we have finally caught up to our live set with our recording. That was a big struggle for us. People would buy the record then be like wow, you guys are so much heavier live. Birthing the Giant was crazy for that. We recorded it and we were like this is awesome, but the guy who was producing it didn’t get hardcore as much as we did. Even as we recorded it we were like we already play these songs way heavier and dirtier. I remember being in the studio and being like can we make it dirtier? It was our first record and I didn’t know how to do that. Over time you learn the tricks to make things heavier and dirtier. By our third record we really captured our live energy. 

What’s next?

We are going to write another record. This is our last tour for Bears, Mayors, Scraps & Bones. We are playing a couple of festival shows, but this is it. Hopefully it will be out next year and we will be back soon.

Are the festivals in Europe?

Yeah, we are doing some there; then we come back and do some in Quebec. 

It seems like Europe is huge for the festival scene, which hasn’t really caught on that much in North America.

We have Warped Tour and Mayhem, there’s some stuff. Cities are starting to have some stuff here, but Europe is something else. If you haven’t seen it is so hard to describe. 60000 people partying so hard. It’s part of their culture. People have been going to these festivals for 10 years and they keep coming back for more. 

Although North America does have a great music scene, sometimes it seems like they are behind the times. Talking to Canadian bands like Real McKenzies and This Is A Standoff, they have a much stronger following in Europe. 

I think the thing with North America, the big thing you notice is that there is a certain age where people stop going to see live shows. It seems like people in their thirties wouldn’t go see a hardcore show in Canada, it’s looked down upon. Whereas in Europe, you’d be like, what else would I be doing? You don’t just buy a house and give up on music. You will have 40 year old guys at a punk show. Here if you are that old and go to a punk show, everyone is looking at you like you’re weird. The metal scene is a little different though, it still has a lot of older dudes. In Europe it doesn’t matter how old you are, you are just as much into music as when you were a kid and now you have a job to pay for tickets and merch and stuff. I feel like that whole side of things is different in Europe. 

(a fan comes up & asks him to sign his lawn gnome & he draws the Cancer Bats logo on his forehead)

Is that the strangest thing you’ve ever had to sign?

I feel like that is pretty tame, but I can’t actually think of anything weirder right now, so maybe. 

Age is a huge thing in the straightedge scene. I often feel like I am the grandpa when I go to a hardcore show. These kids are all like 14. 

I don’t know what the reasoning for that is. I guess I could break it down. But the scene in Europe is so much bigger. People come with their kids. It’s like a 14 year old kid who is like, this is my dad, hes the one who got me into you guys. That’s just the vibe, its something people want to do. There are those people who still go to shows, but there is a point in Canadian culture where people are like, you have to grow up now. I don’t understand, but it seems like that’s the pressure. 

Do you ever get that yourself, being in a band? Are people like, what are you going to do when you grow up? 

There’s a lot of band dudes who are like that. I feel like the only place that is different from that is Vancouver. They have a lot of old band bros who are still giving ‘er. They are more European in that sense, with old dudes who don’t give a shit.

In the French Immersion video you are riding a bike and I know you skate. Do you still do both? Do you prefer one over the other?

I don’t ride BMX really anymore because I don’t have the time. I skateboard a lot on tour. I got into riding fixed gear in the city because a lot of my friends are messengers. It is a lot faster as opposed to hitching onto cars which is kind of sketchy. My friends actually built me a bike out of friend’s parts and gave it to me when I got back from tour. It was kind of like, I cannot not ride this after you built it for me, so that was my graceful exit from BMX. It’s easier to have a skateboard in the van. 

I remember reading this article when I was a teenager about the guys from Rancid. It was around the time that they released …And Out Come the Wolves and they were almost a household name alongside Green Day and the Offspring. I remember reading about one of the guys coming home to his furniture on the street when they returned from tour because he had been evicted from his shabby apartment because he couldn’t afford to pay rent. This is when they were huge. It made me think about the perception of musicians as rockstars and the reality of a touring musician. 

That is funny. People will see that you have a music video on TV and they will assume that you have lots of money, when the opposite is normally true. You look at these million dollar rap videos, but none of those artists have a million dollars. No one makes any money off of music videos. The only person in our band that has an apartment is Mikey. Everyone else lives with friends and I live with my girlfriend. We are never home. When you are on tour 10 months of the year, it’s like there’s no point. That’s what affords us the ability to tour as much as we do; you change your lifestyle to be able to do that. You get rid of your apartment and all of your things and you are ready to go. We were conscious of that. In 2007, we were like we will tour the shit out of this and just kept going. 

When I was doing some pre-interview research, I put your name into Google and under the top searches, I got Liam Cormier girlfriend. Do you have a ton of curious groupies? 

I wonder. Someone pointed that out to me before. I’ve had the same girlfriend for the past 4 years and I think people always find that interesting because it’s not normal within this world. I have a bunch of songs on the last record about having a girlfriend, so that’s why it maybe comes up too. I think Scared to Death almost reads as wedding vows. That question always comes up on the last record. It wasn’t really asking her to marry me; it was more about who is the most important person in your life. 

Did she take it as wedding vows?

She’s the average girlfriend. Girlfriends of band guys are always just rolling their eyes; they don’t want to stroke your ego. She was like whatever. We’d get married if you were ever home. 

Anything else you’d like to say?

Stay tuned for our next record. I want to write the best record ever!