Sebastian Bach - Skid Row - 2006

WHERE AND WHEN WERE YOU BORN?

“I was born Sebastian Bierk in 1968 in Freeport, Bahamas where my Dad was teaching art. He was in a car crash and my mum was the nurse who picked the rocks out of his face. I was born about nine months later.”

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST FORAY INTO MUSIC?

“My first was probably when I was about five or six. I used to jump up in front of my mom and her friends and sing Donny Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’ [sings] And they call it… puppy lo-o-ove. The first proper thing was when I was about eight my buddy Dixon Davidson said to me, ‘Sebastian, if you join the church choir I get three bucks, and you get three bucks a month to sing in church’. I thought, ‘somebody’s gonna fuckin’ pay me to sing?! No fuckin’ way’. The most glorious feeling I ever had was one Christmas night in the late 70s, when I was singing the high harmony of ‘Gloria In Excelsis Deo’ Glor-or-or-ooor- ria, in excelsis deo. I was just wailing and it felt incredible.”

WHAT WERE YOU LIKE IN SCHOOL?

“I skipped eighth grade and went straight into the ninth at Lakefield College School, the private school where Prince Andrew had been. That’s when I really got into music, and when I started to get into trouble. It wasn’t the languages or history that was hard, it was the maths. I couldn’t even do it with the calculator. That made me sing even better. Then I was ‘asked to leave’ the school. Not ‘kicked out’ but asked not to come back - same fuckin’ thing”

WHO WERE YOUR FIRST FAVOURITE ROCK BANDS?

“I saw pictures of Kiss, and I thought they were disgusting. I didn’t know how anyone could listen to a band that looked like that, even though I’d never even heard them. Then my buddy asked me if I liked Kiss, I said I didn’t know, so we went to his house and he played me ‘Rock n’ Roll Night’ – which was my favourite song on the radio. I was like, ‘that’s not those guys!’ I couldn’t believe that it was the fire-breathing demons from hell singing aaaaah, wanna rock and roll.”

TELL US ABOUT THE BANDS YOU’VE BEEN IN, AND HOW YOU CAME TO JOIN SKID ROW.

“The first band I was in was called Anthem when I was about 12 or 13. I was singing The Police and Rush in the shower at school. These 18 year old guys heard me, and asked me, ‘Was that you singing in the shower?’ And they invited me to join their band. When I left Lakefield I went to a normal school and sang in a band called Bloody Mary. I was hanging out with some older kids who would hang out with this band, Kid Wikkid, in Toronto two hours away. These guys said I should try out for them as they needed a singer, so I got in my car without telling my parents and drove to this basement in Toronto. I sang ‘Bloodstone’ by Judas Priest and they said ‘You’re the fucking guy’, so I had to tell my parents that I was moving to Toronto to be a rock star with all these older guys. There was a magazine in Toronto called Metallion, and they put my face in the magazine as a full page pin-up. [The band] Madame X saw this magazine and asked me to join them. [The famous photographer] Mark Weiss knew Skid Row, and he took pictures of Madame X. Mark was hanging out with Skid Row and Bon Jovi – who’d grown up together – and they were looking for a singer for [Skid Row guitarist Dave ‘The Snake’] Sabo’s band. Mark suggested me. And the rest is Skid-stry.”

WHAT WAS JON BON JOVI’S INVOLVEMENT IN SKID ROW, AND WHY DID YOU FALL OUT?

“Snake went to school with Jon, and they had this pact where whoever made it first would help the other one. I had just had a baby boy, Paris, and Jon put my wife and baby up in his house for a month and a half when they came down from Toronto with nowhere to stay. Bon Jovi also took us on some big tours. Then there was the huge falling out. It was a publishing dispute that Snake and Jon had obviously set up in school. I’m not a businessman at all. I’m not like Gene Simmons, it just doesn’t interest me. I hate nickel-and-diming people. If you write a great song you’re set up for life, but if you just sing it, you’re fucked. I don’t have control over the first Skid Row album, because I signed it away. It makes me fucking nuts dude. But as time goes by the good memories outweigh the bad. We’re friends again now.”

WHAT WAS THE MEDIA REACTION TO YOU WEARING THE T SHIRT THAT SAID ‘AIDS KILLS FAGS DEAD’ IN 1989?

“I never usually talk about this but I read so much misinformation about it that I’m gonna set the record straight. There’s a book called ‘The Encyclopaedia Of Heavy Metal’ and it says ‘only an idiot would wear an anti-gay t-shirt to an MTV press conference’. I NEVER WORE NO FUCKING ANTI-GAY T-SHIRT TO AN MTV PRESS CONFERENCE. It’s. Not. True. I wore that shirt once in my life. I came off stage at Irvine Meadows in California after Pantera had opened up for us. When we finished I was totally hot and sweaty. The guys from LA Guns were all backstage, so I say ‘gimme a fuckin’ shirt to put on’. Jerry Miller from Metal Edge Magazine is there asking for a picture of all of us, so I just pick up this hideous fuckin’ shirt that some fan had thrown up onto stage and put it on. We all knew it was the worst shirt of all time. It wasn’t some campaign that I went on. Kurt Loader from MTV, who’s gay - I don’t think I’m outing him – got hold of the picture and put it on MTV as a news piece with all the other guys cut out: “In the land of homophobia, if Axl Rose owns the restaurant and Public Enemy are the diners, we have a new bus boy.’ It was like I was the anti-Christ. Then Revolver magazine in the States said, ‘The most appalling moments in rock: even though Axl Rose got more press, generally Sebastian Bach behaved worse’. Then they said I wore this t-shirt to a press conference on TV. That’s way different to being back stage with LA Guns all drunk and shit and sticking this hideous t-shirt on. It’s complete bullshit.”  

WHY DID SKID ROW FIRE YOU?

“When it came to the mid 90s, rock was totally at the bottom of the barrel and Snake wanted to change Skid Row’s image. He wanted us to cut our fucking hair and shit. [After ‘Subhuman Race’ in 1996] I spent all this time on the phone calling them saying, ‘let’s fucking do something’. I was fucking bored with the two or three year gaps between records. They didn’t want me to be a songwriter anymore, so they sent me a demo they’d written and it sucked balls. I called them and said, ‘I’m not singing this’, and they said ‘well that’s a drag because you’re gonna have to quit the band’. So I says ‘I’ll never quit this fuckin’ band. Let’s just go into the basement and write a good album’. So he screams yurghyurghyurghyurgh… click - I put the phone down. Then Kiss asked us to open up for them in New Jersey on their reunion tour. Rachel had a side-project with the road crew – the pyrotechs and stuff - called Prunella Scales, and he said he couldn’t do the Kiss show because he had a gig with his side project. I lost my fuckin’ mind. I rang him up and said ‘let’s fight’ and ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’. Then I did the same thing to Snake. I just wanted to play with fucking Kiss dude, excuse me!”

TELL US ABOUT THE TIME YOU GOT ON STAGE WITH MEMBERS OF METALLICA AND GUNS 'N' ROSES IN A ONE-OFF PERFORMANCE AS 'THE GAK' IN 1990.

“That was RIP magazine’s fourth birthday party. The Gak was Duff McKagan, Axl Rose, Slash, Me, Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield doing ‘Whiplash’. We were all buddies out in LA, and decided to get a band together for RIP’s anniversary. It’s a legendary bootleg; you can download it off the internet for nothing.”

YOU’VE BEEN IN THE MUSICALS JEKYLL & HYDE, THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW AND PLAYED JESUS IN JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. WHY DID YOU LEAVE?

“If you know one thing about me it’s the way that I walk: I have this Sebastian Bach walk. It’s like ‘Hello-oo I’m here motherfucker’. [The director], was telling me, ‘Jesus definitely wouldn’t walk like that’. I was like, ‘Were you fuckin there?’ Judas and me would come out at the end and sing [to the theme tune of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’] nah-nah-naaah, nah-nah-nahh, 2, 3, 4, nah-nah-naaah, and the whole place would clap along. That was good for the first four months, but by the fifth month the cast started hating it. They said ‘look, you shouldn’t get the audience going like that’. I was like, ‘If that’s what you want, then you got the wrong fucking guy’. They said, ‘Well Jesus wouldn’t do that’. I’m like ‘How the fuck do you know that Jesus didn’t want people having fun’. They kept saying, ‘At the curtain call, you’re not Sebatian, you’re Jesus’. I says, ‘Well that’s where you’re fucking wrong’. It was so pretentious. I can take only take so much Broadway before I’m like, ‘get me back to rock n’ roll’.”

YOU MADE SOME NEW FRIENDS ON THE SET OF VH1 REALITY SHOW ‘SUPERGROUP’ – NOTABLY GIVING UP DRINKING UNDER TED NUGENT’S WING. WOULD YOU EVER DO ANOTHER SERIES?

“You know that episode where I said I’d stopped drinking? Well I lied. Ted is so militant in his views. I lived with him for 12 days and it’s hard to imagine ever doing anything truly good in his eyes. Also he said some stuff online about Dimebag which I thought was really not cool. I’m not going to repeat it, but you can check it out online [Nugent went on an offensive and misinformed tirade against Pantera and Dimebag on his official messageboard]. But Scott [Ian] and Evan [Seinfeld] are awesome dudes. I don’t know if there’ll be another series; I think Scott would be into it and I know I’m well up for it.”