CHILDREN OF BODOM Frontman Talks Covers Album - Aug. 28, 2009
U.K.'s Terrorizer magazine recently conducted an interview with CHILDREN OF BODOM guitarist/vocalist Alexi Laiho. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
Terrorizer: OK, so Spinefarm have just collected all the covers you've ever recorded for a kinda "best-of" collection, including songs by IRON MAIDEN, SLAYER, W.A.S.P., BILLY IDOL and, erm, BRITNEY SPEARS. Of all the songs on that album, which are your favorites.
Alexi: Well my favorite is, for example, we just recorded two extra songs for the album about two months ago so one of them is a PAT BENATAR song, "Hell Is For Children". It's one of my favorites and I don't know, I guess you have to love the BRITNEY SPEARS cover.
Terrorizer: PAT BENATAR is a surprising choice. She's criminally underrated outside of North America, are you sure you wouldn't have rather done something by LITA FORD?
Alexi: I've been a fan of PAT BENATAR for a long time, she has so many awesome songs and she's a great singer and actually a lot of her songs have potential to be bad-ass metal songs; well, that's what I hear anyway. Like the first time when I heard "Hell Is For Children", it was like man we have to cover this as a metal version. It's weird, no one talks about PAT BENATAR. I guess she just wasn't that popular outside the U.S. I've been a fan of her for a long time.
Terrorizer: When you cover a song, do you always try to add that tradmark BODOM touch, to change them slightly and make them more metal?
Alexi: Yeah, I mean that's kind of the whole point, we want to make it different. There are a couple of exceptions, like for example the SUICIDAL TENDENCIES cover; there's nothing much we can do about it. It's pretty much like the original version but we added stuff here and there but usually we like to throw in stuff that wasn't on the original and fuck around with it as well, just make it sound like CHILDREN OF BODOM.
Terrorizer: But metal is a serious business Alexi. Some fans will say there is no room for "comedy" covers albums in metal!
Alex: Well, I'm saying, "Chill the fuck out." We not taking it all too seriously, obviously I take metal seriously but metal is about fun too so there are definitely covers on there that are just for a laugh you know. But yeah, it's just who we are, we like to have fun, we like to have a laugh, we're not afraid to show that to anybody.
I know it must hurt and it's gotta be annoying, but from an outsider point of view it's always the same thing.
