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Music

Original Pirate Metal Material

Meet Christopher Bowes, the keytar-playing leader of the pirate-metal band Alestorm.

You should quit your job right now and start a pirate-metal band. That’s the lesson I learned when I recently spoke with Christopher Bowes, singer and keytar player for veteran pirate-metal outfit Alestorm. Hailing from the United Kingdom, this five-man crew has spent nearly a decade getting paid to travel across the globe and sing songs about walking the plank, gallivanting with wenches, and doing all sorts of other crazy pirate shit. What keeps Bowes going? “I just love seeing the world,” he says. “I’ve been to every continent in the world. Driven around the U.S.A. seven or eight times. Traveled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles, and that’s all because of starting a stupid band that sings about pirates.”

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I first found out about Alestorm when my roommate and I stumbled across the music video for their song “Keelhauled.” The song and the video are thoroughly, shamelessly, wonderfully over the top, and since their release Alestorm’s productions have only gotten crazier and more ambitious. Alas, Bowes says he isn’t rolling in the pirate booty just yet. But he’s managed to make Alestorm a full-time gig with a near-constant lineup of international tour dates. They’ve even gotten a taste of 17th-century pirate life by playing the 7000Tons of Metal festival aboard a cruise ship sailing through the Caribbean. “We’re a band who sings about pirates drinking alcohol in the Caribbean on ships,” he says, “and there we were on a ship in the Caribbean, drinking alcohol.”

Alestorm has released three studio albums of salty, rum-soaked riffage, and they’re putting out their fourth, Sunset on the Golden Age, in early August via Napalm Records. I recently parleyed with Bowes via Skype from his home in Bristol, England, to discuss the ins and outs of being in a pirate-metal band and the hardships of being an actual pirate. We also invented a new musical genre, “pirate emo.”

Noisey: I can’t help but notice that, in the music video for your song “Keelhauled,” you’re playing the fiddle part on a keytar.
Christopher Bowes: Yes.

Is that your instrument? You do vocals and keytar?
Yep. That’s what I do. That’s my thing. Originally I was just a keyboard player, but you can’t go onstage and rock out behind a keyboard. You’re stuck in the corner somewhere. Unless you’re Elton John or something. So I pick up a keytar, run around onstage doing backflips and screaming into microphones—sounds like a lot more fun.

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Do you just not have a fiddle player or something, so you have keytar instead?
We didn’t want to make ourselves become one of these lah-de-dah folky bands with lots of silly traditional instruments. It’s a mess. So we thought, “We’re gonna stick to modern stuff.” I play the keytar. I’ve also got a second keyboard player. I think we’re the only metal band with two keyboard players. He stands at the back doing all the epics and fun stuff, and I’m up at the front playing the silly accordion and violin melodies.

How seriously do you take this band?
Musically, when it comes to the actual music and songwriting and stuff, I take it very seriously. I think it’s genuinely good music that we put a lot of effort into. Lyrically, and the whole pirate thing, I mean, it’s a pile of nonsense, I’ll admit that. We’re just singing about cool, goofy shit. We don’t pretend we’re pirates. We don’t even dress up that much when we play.

You don’t?
I mean, I wear a kilt and a raggedy old shirt, but we don’t wear eyepatches. The thing is, the eye patches, they just mess with your depth perception and you end up missing your guitar and stuff.

Have you ever played a show with an eyepatch on and you’re just like, “Fuck this eyepatch?”
Sometimes when we play, some random fan will throw an eye patch and a hat on the stage, and I’ll be like, “Aw, fuck it.” So I put them on and you realize, “This is really difficult.” It’s so hard doing anything in that sort of environment. Those times I’m glad we don’t dress up in these ridiculous, over-the-top costumes. It’s hard enough merely playing, never mind doing it with a frilly shirt getting in your guitar strings.

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So, why pirates?
That whole thing was basically a complete accident. One day I just wrote some song. It was about pirates. Could’ve been about anything, but I chose pirates. And then I took it along to our band rehearsal. We all loved it. So I thought, “I know, I’ll write another song about pirates!” That was probably the worst decision of my life, because now every song I’ve written for the past 10 years has been about pirates.

When you write songs exclusively about pirates, do you ever run out of material? Or is there enough to go on?
I think we’ve pretty much scraped the barrel when it comes to traditional pirate things. We’ve done digging for treasure. We’ve done walking the plank. I don’t know, what else did pirates do? All that stuff. Cannon battles and whoring with wenches in taverns. We’re going a bit more left field these days. The influences are getting weird. There’s songs on our newest album that’s coming out about pirates traveling to the future to defeat an undead army of space squid—you know, to save the world. There’s songs about going underwater and finding this army of underwater bees, and stealing them all to make some alcohol. I mean, obviously you still listen to it and on the surface you go, “Yeah, this song is about pirates!” But when you think about it, you go, “What the hell are they talking about?”

Have you ever written a totally genuine pirate song, about the intimate, sad aspects of being a pirate? Just taking it completely seriously?

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I mean, I think that’s really depressing. We have done songs that strip away all the silliness and they’re about pirates being really kind of dark and nasty and crappy. It’s a pretty awful life. You lose limbs. You die. You get arrested. Everything’s stacked against you. We have a couple of songs that certainly explore the darker side of it, but nothing so emo.

I’d like to hear some pirate emo.
Oh, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to hear that at all.

How historically accurate do you think your music is, as far as the history of pirate music goes?
Definitely not at all. I’ll admit, I’ve got very, very little idea about historical piracy or even what people would’ve listened to. Let’s say, like, 17th century—I suppose it’s just a lot of crappy folk tunes back then. We do have a folky element to our stuff, but we do it in a very pop music, Disney kind of way that’s not really authentic to any particular culture. It’s all just, you know, silly accordions going oompah-oompah, oompah-oompah. I don’t think that has much in common with the kind of melodies that you’d find 300 years ago.

To what extent have you studied pirate history?
I played this video game called Sid Meier’s Pirates!, it was this pirate RPG game and I used to love that when I was a kid. I learned a lot from that. It was a pretty decent game. It had a lot of historical facts in it. But, of course, it also went towards the Hollywood side of piracy.

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How long have Alestorm been around?
I suppose we played our first-ever show and released our first-ever demo in about summer of 2006. We played literally three shows in a pub in our hometown, then we forgot about it for a year, did other things, then we sort of said, “You know what? Let’s see if we could do this band.” So we sent a little email to Napalm Records, our record label, and said, “Hey! This is our band. We sing about pirates. Do you think maybe you’d like to give us a record deal?” They literally wrote back in an hour saying, “Yes, here you go.” They obviously smelled money or something.

Typically, who do you play with when you play shows?
We usually get lumped together with a lot of these sort of Scandinavian Viking sort of bands. It’s the whole history thing. Occasionally there’ll be traditional instruments and stuff. We’re actually doing our own tour this fall, and it’s only pirate bands. It’s us and a bunch of bands we know and we like who sing about pirates. That’s going to be cool. It’s not been done before yet, so we’ll see how that one goes.

I noticed you have a song, “Back Through Time,” that’s about going back in time and pillaging Vikings.
Yes! We just love messing with people so much, and of course there’s a massive crossover with our fans and all these people who dress up as Vikings, coming to shows with their Thor’s hammers on and their big Viking beards and their chain male. So we thought, you know what? Let’s piss off a few people by having a song about killing Vikings. And it’s true. We’ve had people standing in the front row with their back turned to us, just giving us the middle finger. But I love it. I think it’s hilarious.

So there are people who’re like, “Yeah, you guys are good, but that Viking song…”
Yep, this happens. I’ve seen people who say, “I used to like Alestorm—until they released that song. Now I refuse to listen to them.” Lighten up, dude!

It’s like, “Dude, come on, it’s Viking metal.”
You’re wearing chain mail! How can anyone take you seriously?

I have one last question for you: Do you ever wish that you were a real-life pirate?
Um, no. Not for one second. It just sounds like the most miserable life—on a rat-infested ship for months on end, eating nothing but dried biscuits, missing limbs and stuff. Nope, no thanks. I’ll stick to my band. That sounds good to me.

Peter Holslin loves pirates, metal, and pirate metal. He's on Twitter - @PeterHolslin