When we were putting together questions and researching prior to our Streaming For Vengeance interview with Michel “Away” Langevin, it was a bit surprising that if you misspell Voivod as “Vovod” in Google, you get “Showing results for COVID”. Try it!
And Away can relate! “It’s funny, during the peak of COVID, I wanted to turn the classic Voivod logo into COVID at one point. I put it aside because there was already so much going on everywhere!"
It’s all about anniversaries these days as they are celebrating 40 years as a band with their latest, Morgöth Tales. And the day of our chat was the 35th anniversary of their legendary fourth album, Dimension Hatröss, which was a key release worldwide for the Quebecers. In an excerpt from our Streaming For Vengeance video chat which airs this Saturday, July 15th on the BraveWords
Facebook page, we reminisce about the band’s early beginnings.
“Actually, we grew up on Anvil and Exciter, but before that it was Rush, Mahogany Rush, Triumph,” Away talks about early influences that would shape their sound. “In 1974, when we moved to Montreal from northern Quebec ( Jonquière), we had $150 from welfare and the four of us shared one apartment, filled with cockroaches. So we wrote songs about it (laughs)! That was a tough period and that’s where we realize that the metal we were playing was not really happening in town. Everybody was playing a ‘70s styled rock type of music. Like Deep Purple type of music. And some of the bands were really into bands like Mötley Crüe. And there was a big hardcore scene. When we start rehearsing, a couple of bands appeared like Aggression and Damnation. And all of a sudden there was DBC. It was in the ‘90s where I would run into bands while touring the world like Gorguts, Cryptopsy, Kataklysm. Bands that we’re getting very well known around the world and we were touring the same circuit. And that’s when there was a Quebec metal scene really thriving. And it was a Canadian metal identity that was more technical.
We were recording Rrröööaaarrr, we were poor and we didn’t know what to do. So Heart Attack our management, organized the World War III festival with Celtic Frost, Destruction, Possessed, and Nasty Savage. And thousands of people showed up. Which allows us to finish the album, buy some new gear. We actually gave a rough mix of Rrröööaaarrr to Martin Ain, who gave it to Noise Records and that’s when we got a deal for three albums. That’s where it really started internationally with us. We started touring with Celtic Frost in North America, with Possessed in Europe.”
BraveWords: I love that photo that Tom Warrior posted of him with all the members of Voivod and Opeth when you were in Switzerland earlier this year.
Away: “Yes, yes, it was a surprise visit from Tom. And we had a great chat about the crazy old days of the US tour in 1986. When we took a photo of all of us and on the floor in front of the stage somebody wrote Morgöth Tales. And I thought to myself ‘That’s brilliant, I never thought of that.’ So we decided to call the album Morgöth Tales. And this is the new song we were writing for the album and we decided to call it ‘Morgöth Tales’ as well. And I actually wrote to Tom about it, because it’s such a great wink too the classic Morbid Tales EP. When we did the first tour of the United States with Celtic Frost, I just saw that we were part of the avant-garde metal scene, because it was such a great match. But we soon realized after that, when we toured Europe with Possessed and then we toured the world with Kreator on the Killing Technology record, we were kind of an oddball band in the thrash metal scene I think.”
Our Streaming For Vengeance video chat with legendary Voivod drummer Away airs this Saturday, July 15th on the BraveWords
Facebook page.
