It’s no exaggeration to say that the 2008 documentary film Anvil! The Story Of Anvil brought the veteran Canadian trio a whole new audience. Some would claim it saved the career of the down-at-heel metalheads, whose singer and guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow was delivering school meals at the time.
Prior to this year’s annual visit to Britain and Ireland, when the band will play sets drawn from their first three albums, we check in with Lips.
It’s pretty hard to believe that Anvil! came out almost twenty years ago.
Yeah. That time came and went in the blink of an eye. I mean, what the hell happened? In the movie my son is ten years old, now he’s thirty. I know half a dozen people that are now dead. If I want to see my mother or Lemmy, I watch the movie.
Seven albums later, is there now a significant divide – the ‘real’ fans who are aware of Anvil’s music, and others that are simply curious because of the film?
We’ve become a phenomenon. Come to a show and for two-thirds of the audience it’s their first time seeing us. When I ask whether there are any old Anvil fans out there, few bald heads or grey hair are to be seen. The movie brought us the audience of today. Older fans bring along their kids. But it’s rewarding to know that the music has made it through generations.
The film has been on Netflix and retains its popularity. Are there moments in it that now make you wish you hadn’t allowed director Sacha Gervasi to film them?
Nah, nah, nah. They had access to everything – the good, the bad and the ugly – and I’m glad about that. I have no shame. Show the arguments, show everything. I wanted pure honesty, not the candy-coated garbage that most bands would put out.
I wanted a new band to witness our self-belief, because they will experience most of the things you see in the movie. Some compared it to Spinal Tap. Well, Spinal Tap was based on real events. Harry Shearer [co-creator and portrayer of Derek Smalls] went on the road with Saxon. Those things with the cucumber in silver foil and getting lost backstage really happened.
Anvil come to the play in the UK and Ireland as regular as clockwork, but usually it’s in promotion of a new album.
I wanted to take extra time between the twentieth album [One And Only, 2024] and the twenty-first, which we’re about to begin recording. People come to the shows and say: “I haven’t got the new album, can you sign the last one?” so we’re giving them breathing room. That’s why we’ll be playing all of the old shit. If for no other purpose than to introduce that material to the ‘new people’.
It’s a set based on the first three albums: Metal On Metal, Hard ‘N’ Heavy and Forged In Fire, all of which came out between 1981 and ’83.
[Laughing] Yeah. This isn’t about nostalgia, more letting those that know us from the movie know about those songs. I know it sounds ridiculous. We recently did the same thing in the US. These young kids came along expecting a geriatric show, and it was off the scale.
How did playing slide guitar with a dildo become a part of the act?
We did right from the start. We were racking our brains for something that would make people never forget us, when it dawned on me: the sound of the [vibrator’s] motor coming through the pickups. Nobody had done that before. My original cost three dollars and the results were fantastic, you could rev it up or slow it down. Down the years I developed a section in Mothra [from Metal On Metal] in which I use it musically. It’s not just a gimmick.
Anvil are a band from the clubs…
[Interrupting]: And I’m happy with that. I love being crammed onto a small stage, sweating my balls off in my favourite country in the whole world – the UK. I love that shit, man. That’s where metal really, really thrives. Not in some massive concert arena. If you can’t look your audience in the eye, that isn’t the real deal. People say: “You never got big.” Who gives a shit? Do I want to play places like that? No.
Are you seriously trying to tell us that if Lars Ulrich, who was a ‘talking head’ in your movie, called to offer a support slot with Metallica, you’d really say no?
I’d still be questioning… [pauses]… for me, at seventy years old, is there a point? Am I buying onto this tour for fifty thousand quid that I don’t have? Have I sold a million records? No, I haven’t, and that’s what greases palms for a headline band whose overheads are millions of dollars per night.
To be fair, in 2019 Metallica took out Bokassa, an unknown punk band from Norway, as an opening act.
I don’t know how that works, but don’t think about it all too much because it’s never going to happen. I know that I will never open for Metallica. And I have long since reached peace with that.
Anvil’s 12-date date UK tour begins today (November 4) in Southampton. Support comes from the Belgian band Killer. Find tickets.
