Skyclad - Folked-Up And Metal Thrashing Mad Page 4
by Martin Popoff

"Not really, because we're still going to do that. Our deal with Nuclear Blast has got the option to do two unplugged albums in there, unplugged or alternative or completely off-the-wall, on top of the four heavy albums weÕve signed for. Because we're a strange little band, Skyclad, we're like a band of two halves. We're all old rockers and we're full-on into our metal, it's what we grew up with, but we also like listening to a bit of traditional music, folk music, and we like the atmosphere of that. And when we discovered that we can actually take some of the heavier songs we'd done off all our albums really, and completely rewrite them in a folk style and play them on acoustic guitars around Irish pubs and bars and places like that, well, we've done that around Europe. And we've actually developed two sounds, or possibly three. We've got the heavy, the totally acoustic, where we sound like The Pogues, and then in the middle you've got this kind of folk rock band. It's an odd situation to be in. What we're trying to get towards is the days when, like, Judas Priest would have a really really heavy ripping song and then an acoustic ballad next to it, and the kinds of things that Queen used to do back in the early days. You bought an album by a band and it took you on a musical journey. It's not like, you know you're getting 50 minutes of pure Norwegian black metal or you're getting this and that. When you buy a Skyclad album you don't really know what you're going to get. Bands used to be able to do that and I think it's a very positive and healthy thing. Today people always want to put you in a pigeonhole and categorize you, and I think you can't do that with a band like Skyclad."

Plans now call for the most press the band has ever done, followed by European tour dates in February and March. As well, Walkyier has thrown his minstrel hat into the concert promotion business. The barbed bard explains: "My friends and I are organizing a British metal festival which will be happening on the 28th of May, 2001in a city called Derby, at the Derby Assembly Rooms, and the festival will be called Bloodstock. If anybody wants to know about it, they can go to www.bloodstock.uk.com (ed. or www.skyclad.co.uk). It will be a day of raw British beef, British metal bands only. There might be a small reformation of my old band Sabbat, with myself and Fraser, the bass player and some other people. Skyclad will be playing, and there are about seven bands confirmed already, including Shadow Keep, Dirty Deeds and Evoke. There's going to be about 18 bands, two stages, a metal fair, so if anybody fancies taking a little journey over the Atlantic and come for a good day out in the U.K., that would be quite groovy."