In a recent interview with Victor Ruiz of Signals From Mars, Steve “Lips” Kudlow, frontman of Canadian metal legends ANVIL, discussed how his band, despite being musically ahead of their time, never achieved major success due to a combination of poor management, shady record labels, and bad luck.
Lips said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “How do you think it looked to [ANVIL drummer] Robb [Reiner] and I to watch, in 1983, the whole world pick up on what we did and leave us behind? We were doing it before… Metal didn’t exist in North America. They didn’t call it metal. We were doing something that they were doing in England, and we were one of the very first metal bands to play in America. Yeah, you’ve got hard rock, but there was a difference. There was a difference between hard rock and metal because hard rock was still attached to rock and roll. It still used rock and roll progressions. Metal used more of a prog attitude. You had songs that were much more complicated than just rock and roll.
Certainly, IRON MAIDEN‘s ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ and songs like that, or ANVIL‘s ‘Mothra’. It’s not rock and roll. It’s a form of it, but it’s metal, that turned it into metal, what we call metal. And riff rock. That’s what it is. And you can put titles on it, but you can also talk about it in musicality, what things we’re actually doing. So that’s how I kind of see it. So there was a difference. And some of the problems that I’ve been faced with is that I’m kind of the bridge between hard rock and heavy metal, because I was one of the pioneering bands that created that bridge. So I had songs — I still have songs that venture back into the rock and roll world, but at the same time, there are songs that are not rock and roll.”
“We can sit and discuss how hard rock became metal and certainly BLACK SABBATH and DEEP PURPLE and LED ZEPPELIN were the forerunners of all of it, really,” he continued. “Because that’s the biggest influence after [Jimi] Hendrix, the use of distorted guitars and stuff, and all of a sudden, everybody’s doing it. Nothing stays sacred. Everything is stolen by the next generation and regurgitated in a new fashion. And that’s what’s been going on in the music industry for decades now. But I think we might’ve gone the full circle. You certainly can’t go much further with guitar. The guitar’s done its thing, man. It’s done. And that’s part of where the downslide for the interest in it went.
“Once you got to the point where the guitar playing is so phenomenal that everybody starts sounding the same — you can’t tell one guitar player from the next — it’s done. It’s over. The race is finished. You know what I mean? For many, many years in hard rock and metal, it was who had the best guitar player in their band. Everything was revolved around the lead guitar. I mean, otherwise what would VAN HALEN mean without Eddie Van Halen? It’s centered around the guitar, which we all know, obviously. We all know that. But we’re at a point in history that they’ve done everything. Every possible way of playing lead guitar has been done. So what do you do? What is there left to do? Write good songs. That’s all that’s left. It’s not about the guitar solo anymore. It’s about the fricking song. The riffs last forever. The solos are here temporarily. It’s the way it is, man.”
ANVIL released their 20th studio album, One And Only, on June 28 through AFM Records.
Reeder, the visionary behind Metal Addicts, has transformed his lifelong passion for metal into a thriving online community for metal aficionados. As a fervent devotee of black metal, Reeder is captivated by its dark, atmospheric, and often unorthodox soundscapes.