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Bring Me The Horizon dropped out of a 2006 festival after being threatened by another artist on the lineup.
Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, singer Oli Sykes looks back on the controversy the Yorkshire metalcore icons attracted with their 2006 debut, Count Your Blessings, ahead of the release of a re-recorded version, Count Your Blessings Repented, on July 10.
“We said we were sick [when we dropped out of the festival], because there were another band there that said when we got there, they were going to shave all our hair off and beat us up. It were mental at first,” the frontman recalls.
“It were that era, when people latched onto something, like, ‘We hate this band, we hate My Chemical Romance.’ It were everyone.”
Not only were Bring Me one of the first metal bands to make a name for themselves through social media, fostering their early fanbase via MySpace, but their early deathcore sound and ‘scene' image – with hairsprayed fringes and studded belts – also rubbed purists the wrong way.
In 2007, at a show supporting Killswitch Engage, the audience turned their backs on the band out of protest.
“It was very hostile. We didn’t go looking for it whatsoever,” Sykes remembers. “We just had to tread that line between getting on with the gig and looking like it didn’t hurt us, but, you know, backstage after gigs, it did affect us a lot.”
Bring Me are currently touring the European festival circuit, with the next show scheduled for Tuesday (June 9) at Tauron Arena in Krakow, Poland. On July 10, the same day that the Repented re-recording comes out, they’ll play Count Your Blessings in full at B.E.C. Arena in Manchester. Static Dress, Rolo Tomassi, Heriot, Dying Wish, Car Underwater and Still In Love will support.
Read the full interview with Sykes in an upcoming issue of Metal Hammer, on sale next month.
