Protest The Hero - Interview - 2008

Rody Walker is the kid you’d love as a brother but hate as a son. He’s hyperactive, noisy and lewd; he drinks, smokes and does drugs; he’s daring, offensive and completely unpredictable; he’s self-destructive, self-deprecating and funnier than a kid falling off a climbing frame.

Rody is the frontman of Canadian progressive post-hardcore metal quintet, Protest The Hero. Despite being on their second album, and having been going since 1999 (though under the moniker, Happy Go Lucky), every member is still only 21. Which goes some way to explaining their short-attention-span racket: informed, mature and precise; yet fresh, raw and uncontrived.

The band’s story reads just like any other school band that survived the college draft to go on and play shows outside their hometown and sign a record deal. The year was 2005, the school was Dr Robert Thornton in Burlington, Canada and the record label was Underground Operations. The band signed to Vagrant Records in 2006 and released their debut, ‘Kezia’; and now, two years later comes their second offering, ‘Fortress’: another hectic collection of songs made out of what seems like trillions of tiny pieces all intricately welded together; dozens of rhythm changes, a thousand melodies and a million fret-tapped notes – all played at breakneck speed. 

As Rody went through the motions of relaying this information, we realised that the most interesting thing about this band - completed by guitarists Tim Millar and Luke Hoskin, drummer Morgan Carlson and bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi - wasn’t their back story, not even their progressive music. To paint a picture of Rody, is to paint a picture of their sound. Jackson Pollock tossing paint around and finding that he’s painted the The Last Supper. Beauty from chaos.

“We just wrote the album for kids with ADD [attention deficit disorder].” 

“Bands are so safe nowadays,” blurts Rody who’s just swallowed a Benzedrine inhaler. “There are all these obligatory rules that you have to follow: You have to shake hands and kiss babies, tell every band you play with that you think they’re great and say you’re having a great time even if you’re not. It’s a load of bullshit.”

Rody has a reputation for being outspoken. Not like Avenged Sevenfold, like Trent Reznor. Anyone can brag about money, drugs and ‘pussy’ like it’s sooo 1987. But few people are prepared to bite the hand that feeds quite like PTH. Not only has Rody admitted that their music is purposefully awkward but openly ridiculed fans, refused to write ‘singles’ and risked offending the guys who write the cheques. How can a band hope to succeed if they are constantly burning their bridges?

“There’s got to be an element of fun in this,” he says, laughing mischievously. “We write pretty damn serious music so we’ve got to find some way to have a good time with it. If making fun of our fans is the only way to do it, then…” he lets out a goofy chuckle. “It’s not about seriously blazing them but it’s just about being an asshole at all times. Some people get it, some people don’t. We got a message on our MySpace last week that said, ‘Rody’s a real asshole. When are you going to kick him out of the band?’ and I replied, ‘soon’.” He cackles under his breath.

“For the new album, one of our managers requested that we write a single!” he says adopting a sarcastic dumb-ass voice. “We were like, ‘hahaha’. It was hil-ar-ious. We’re never doing anything like that. A lot of people cut on us for not having any direction in our songs. Which is hilarious. Because it’s true to some degree.”

Really?

“There’s definitely an element of that,” he says surprisingly reflectively. “There are parts on the record that we write that we’re just like, ‘let’s confuse people’.” 

It seems foolish, but hearing the glee, mischief and conviction in the young singer’s voice is so utterly convincing. Why do anything other than exactly what you want to do? The answer may not be, ‘because we don’t want to compromise ourselves to become big’, but more, ‘because the kid cannot fucking help himself’.

To exemplify the breadth of Rody’s impulsive auto-destructive nature, he relates another tale like a criminally insane sadomasochist who’s standing in front of you holding his own severed penis in an open palm, just grinning a Lithium grin. 

“We played this family even in Burlington,” he says before saying, “I don’t do well at family events: I’ve got a filthy mouth. They flew us in by helicopter,” he adds quickly as his mind flits in a hundred directions all at once, a non-linear narrative like a spider’s web of anecdotal facts. “At one point I said, ‘you wanna look like me kids? Well, it’s a regular diet of cigarettes, booze and Burger King’. You can see it on YouTube. This girl just flipped on me. She sent me this ‘nasty letter’,” he says sarcastically, before spoofing a whinging teenager’s voice. “‘We used to respect you, but now…’ All this hilarious shit. So I just cut and pasted it onto our MySpace and showed everyone. She was 16; just idealistic and clueless. She didn’t realise I was making a joke about how malnourished I am.”

There is plenty of further evidence of this band’s self-destructive behaviour that can be viewed on various YouTube videos, MySpace pages and blogs – both venomous and celebratory. From Rody’s own  hilarious ‘Protest Blog’ (like a cross between Wayne’s World and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) to phone-filmed videos of him admitting he takes drugs and got a 17 year old girl drunk and thrown out of a venue, it’s all there. He is unrelenting and unabashed – finding that he’s already done/said things before he’s even aware he’s doing them. It’s spontaneous, impulsive and often unconscious.

Rody seems like the child who builds a huge sandcastle, but can’t fight the urge to smash it up. Who can’t pet a rabbit without crushing it to death. Who can’t just play nicely with the other children, he has to pull the girl’s hair and poo in the sandpit.

“I’m the kind of guy that sees two kids laughing in the street and wishes them a catastrophic event,” he laughs at what he’s about to say. “The death of a mother of father,” he says with a knowing laugh. 

“Other bands want to be huge and we just don’t give a fuck.”

But why? Why would you want to alienate your fans, risk being dropped by your label, and offend people who pay you? Why would you do that?  

“There’s a certain sadism to humanity,” he says not missing a beat. “Everyone has it. Some people are just more prepared to admit it. Everyone likes seeing Two Girls One Cup and The Pain Olympics where that guy’s cutting his dick off. People love shit. And I love it too!” he laughs like kid who’s just put a whoopee cushion under his frail grandmother.

“We’re not being rebellious just to be rebellious,” he says. “It’s just saying whatever I want to say and doing whatever I want to do. We’re not like Gallows: I don’t come out and spit on kids or try and hit them. Which I respect,” he chuckles under his breath.

You get the feeling that Rody is thinking so fast that his mind isn’t even on what he’s saying anymore. It’s moved on.

“Honestly,” he offers before cracking up. “I think it’s because everyone wants to be huge and we don’t give a fuck.”

Really? Really, really? But why would you not want to be big? Who doesn’t want to be big?

“I think I want people to get into the band for the right reasons. As opposed to all these fake little industry bands. Not that they’re put together by labels, but they’re ‘directed’ by labels who know what will sell and fill a slot in the market and be good on TV or radio. They’re told what to say and do, and their publicist gives them advice on how to do interviews.”

With this bloody-minded devil-may-care attitude comes an incongruous self-deprecation. The band don’t care what you think, but that’s not because they’re arrogant. For every glib and honest disclosure is a self-applied insult.

“I don’t know why we’re like that,” he sniggers. “It just comes from the people we are: Fucking. Losers. There’s nothing good about us as people.”

Which is clearly bollocks: from the band’s awesome second album to this adolescent’s instant rapport, upbeat demeanour and endearing wit, they seem to have a lot going for them. 

You look like a bunch of fun dudes hanging out having fun, not a bunch of pretentious fashion-concerned posers.

“Well,” he says switching from a sardonic tone to normal locution within sentences. “Pretentious is a word that gets thrown at us a lot. Everyone in Canada who doesn’t like our album says it’s because it’s ‘pretentious’ or because it’s too erratic. We just wrote it for kids with ADD [attention deficit disorder].” 

Like our Tigger-like interviewee, we respond without thinking: do you have ADD?

“I think so,” he hoots with an ironic tone suggesting he genuinely isn’t sure. “I never did well at school. I never did well at anything except singing really. And I’m not sure that I’ve done well at that. I just can’t pay attention long enough to know if I’ve done good or bad.”

So if the screamo and metalcore doesn’t cut it anymore, the Atomoxetine isn’t working and you’re looking for something new to hold your attention: self-medicate with Protest The Hero.