Sticking with
the Impericon Never Say Die! 2013 tour and we caught up with I Killed The Prom
Queen’s guitarist Kevin Cameron. We headed down to Manchester, ahead of the
show to chat to him about the reformation of the band, working on new material
and looking back over the past decade of the music scene…
What’s it like being part of big tour
like this with lots of bands?
It’s
good. We’ve toured a lot so it’s pretty second nature to us these days. We had
a fair bit of time off as a band, but all of us did other bands during that
time so it’s been a lot of touring.
I hear that you’re playing a new song
on this tour, taken from the new album. What’s the response been like?
Yeah
it’s been good. The first show we played it was in Russia and we hadn’t played
it as a band yet; we jammed it but a lot of the kinks hadn’t been ironed out
before the show. Annoyingly, I think that’s the only copy on YouTube, where
it’s an absolute mess [laughing], but the other times we’ve played it then it’s
been the most fun song in the set, because it’s not as old as the rest of the
set, we get a bit energised. It’s been getting the best response.
What and when can we expect from the
new album?
Yeah,
I think February. It’s still got our sound; we’re one of a handful of pioneers
of the Swedish melodic metal, so it’s still that but we’ve all become better
musicians. It’s better structured and more mature and busier. It’s good to
finally have fourteen new tracks.
I wanted to talk about the reformation
of the band. You got back together in 2011 and only now are getting ready to
release new material. Does it feel less pressured this time around because
you’ve eased back into it, or still nerve wracking?
None
of us are mentally that caught up on making sure that it’s impressive. I still
have never got out of the mentality that this is a busy hobby [laughing]. If we
were younger and more “deer in the headlights” about things we’d probably be
panicking, but now either way I’m not going to be reading on the internet about
it. We’re happy with it and that’s it.
How long has the comeback music/album
been in the making? Because you’ve all been off doing other projects as well?
My
take on it is, it was always an idea of coming back. We did personally try and
write a fair bit, but it honestly came down to the last month before we recorded;
there were so many half songs. Something clicked in the last two weeks of that
month where suddenly we wrote a song a day. It sounds cheap, but at the crunch
time it came together. That’s probably better than stressing out for nmonths,
which we used to do a fair bit.
You last recorded an album in 2005, the
scene’s changed but you’ve still been in the industry making music; do you feel
that gives you an advantage?
We’ve
definitely all been around it, but there’s so many bands that you never thought
were going to blow up and have done, and even new styles have branched out from
the general metal core. A lot of it I don’t understand why it’s big, but it’s
changed a tonne in the last five or so years. That’s a new challenge to
re-invent ourselves; either fit in, or just go “this is us” and hopefully people
will still dig it.
If you could give your younger selves some
advice, what would it be?
Jona
and I are still the original members from when we first started touring
extensively, and we trialed a lot of things that bands from our country hadn’t
done; going to play other countries and things. We were basically guinea pigs
and passed on it all to a lot of other bands. I dunno, there wouldn’t be
anything I could say to us as youngsters, we had to do it how we did it to get
out there. And that’s not saying we were the first band in Australia to do that
[laughing].
What’s next for you guys?
January
and February we’ve got basically nothing and then we’re flat out for the rest
of the year. There are a few festival runs, and then living in Europe and
America for the rest of the year.
CLICK HERE to read our live review of the show
