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The Cover Story
Black Veil Brides: “I’ve always been obsessed with revenge, in a way that’s maybe not particularly healthy”
Having grown up as the figure of derision amongst certain rock fans, Andy Biersack could quite rightly have a chip on his shoulder. But rather than seek to get back at those who doubted him, he’s spent his life in Black Veil Brides proving them wrong as loudly as possible. It’s this vindication that has brought our anti-hero to album number seven, and why he’ll continue to win on his own terms…
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Jenn Five
Vengeance can be sweet. A dish often said to be at its best served cold, it’s one Andy Biersack has found to be just as good done piping hot as well. Rubbing it in someone’s face when you prove them wrong a year later, or telling them to go fuck themselves immediately, either is good.
“I’ve always been obsessed with revenge, in a way that is maybe not particularly healthy,” he grins, recalling how, as a kid, “I kind of felt like this outcast person. It became useful to tell myself, ‘Well, fuck these people.’”
Andy has often had people to give the 'fuck off' treatment to. Whenever Black Veil Brides have come up against it (and there’s a slight gleam of pride when he says that at one point a Google search for his band would turn up more hater results about how he was “the worst thing to happen to rock” than anything a fan might find useful), this served them well. Gave them backbone. Put hairs on their chest. Had Andy sticking up for himself rather than be beat.
“I started the band when I was 15, and immediately we became this very divisive thing. Marmite, as you say in the UK,” he says. “But you have to understand, at that time, I'm an actual teenager, and I'm having people say that I'm the worst thing that's ever happened to the world of music. You go one of two ways – you can either fall apart and allow it to ruin you, or you go the way I went, which was all piss and vinegar, and, ‘Fuck you,’ and, ‘I'm going to get revenge on you.’”
Andy got very, very good at hitting back. The first time Black Veil Brides played Download, he ended up getting his arse out in response to a shower of bottles. This is when he was only just out of his teens. If he hit back hard, it’s because if he didn’t, he’d probably get squashed. Such is youth.
It's a mentality he’s had since he was a kid, playing sports. Today, Andy has a tattoo of the words ‘Be a warrior’ on his hand, the motto his coach dad would write on his kit before games, usually with the firm instruction, “Get out there and show them what you’ve got.”
“I liked that ‘me against the world’ mentality,” he admits today. “It served me as a kid, because I was kind of a weirder kid. I wasn't particularly social. I didn't have a lot of friends. But it felt good to feel like I had something that I can prove. I have something that's worth something in the world.”
What Andy’s realised over the past couple of years, though, is that revenge “is actually pretty hollow and uninteresting and empty”. He freely admits he can’t help getting wound up about people talking shit, and that he screengrabs the really good ones “to catalogue it in my mind”. But his perspective has changed. What he finally understood is it’s an ultimately futile forever-war.
“I came to find that revenge actually isn't what it is, because there's no victory.”
“Revenge actually isn’t what it is, because there’s no victory”
Instead, the framework for Black Veil Brides’ new album is the flipside of revenge: vindication. Because, as became clear for a man in his mid-30s rather than a teenager suddenly finding himself in the world’s spotlights and crosshairs, this is a much better term for what Black Veil Brides’ success has actually been.
We’re talking during a break in rehearsals in Los Angeles for their imminent North American headline tour. It's a jaunt that has, Andy tells us with pride, the highest presale of any they’ve ever done on home soil. It’s also one where they've had to think long and hard about fitting everything in, lest the show go on for three hours. “As it turns out, unless you're a 78-year-old man in a football stadium, you're not allowed to play a long set.”
Everything is all smiles, though. He's a busy bee, but a happy one. Talking with a mix of knowing wisdom and 'would-you-believe-it?' chuckles about parts of the past, he also unpacks BVB's forthcoming seventh LP Vindicate with the same confidence and conviction that he had when we first encountered him 15 years ago.
Though holding your head high and sticking up for yourself and forging on remains central, the difference is what winning actually looks like. And it doesn’t have to include getting back at someone.
Example: at the beginning, when Andy was pretty much still a schoolboy, Black Veil Brides were trying to get a booking agent, sending around the clip for Knives And Pens. An email came in from “a huge agency”, informing the band that “this sucks” and that “nobody is ever going to watch this”.
“I read that as a 17-year-old, and it was really upsetting,” he admits. “Well, as you know, that video went on to become one of the most successful rock videos of all time on YouTube. It's got hundreds and hundreds of millions of views.
“But I didn't get revenge on that booking agent by succeeding. His life wasn't made worse by the fact that I succeeded. So it's not as if your winning ever does anything against someone else. It's a personal victory. I started thinking more, ‘Well, it's actually vindication…’”
It’s actually a very good word for it. Not only have Black Veil Brides succeeded and lasted, they occupy their own little pocket within music, “siloed off”, as the singer puts it. With apt vindication, Andy reveals they’re drawing in more fans. Even, he says, changing people’s minds about them.
“People are going, ‘Man, I never knew these guys were so heavy,’” he laughs. “Dude, you just haven’t listened to anything other than Fallen Angels! But it’s a great feeling that people are finding something in us like that.”
Self-produced, and done very much on their own timeline, with lead single Bleeders having come out two years ago, Vindicate is also quite a liberated album. Heavier than usual (“There’s seven-string guitars all over it”) and with moments of fierce bite, it’s also Black Veil Brides at a point where their flamboyance is just part of the deal. Shades of Sweeney Todd flounce through, while elsewhere there’s a full-on orchestra and gospel choir.
“It's very hard for us to do anything that isn't ‘theatrical’,” Andy hoots. “That's baked into our DNA. It's definitely not a conscious conversation at this point to be like, ‘Let's make it dramatic.’ I just think that's the way we do things.
“Someone was talking about the gospel choir and all that. They asked me, ‘Was that an interesting conversation, deciding to do that?’ I just laughed, because I realised that we never had a conversation about it. ‘Oh, yeah, of course you would want an orchestra and a choir.’ There was never a decision made. It’s more like, ‘That opportunity’s there. Of course we're going to do that.”
The bridge between ideas on voice notes and a hall of classically-trained musicians was guitarist Jinxx. A violinist himself, it was he who scored the arrangements and brought the understanding of just how an orchestra works. The band had used strings before, of course, but on a level like this, Andy says the thrill of hearing it all come alive like that was immense.
“Jinxx is such a talented multi-instrumentalist, and it’s amazing to watch him work in that capacity,” Andy beams. “He wrote the charts. He's holding the baton, being the guy who's in front of them. Seeing that is a thrill in itself. And then there’s the secondary thrill when you hear it and go, ‘This is our music that they're playing.’”
“It’s very hard for us to do anything that isn’t ‘theatrical’”
Elsewhere, there’s a cameo from Machine Head’s Robb Flynn, on the brawling Revenger. From an artistic perspective, Andy finds the idea of such things “for the sake of numbers to be pretty hollow”, even if he gets the maths on it. But in this case, there’s a deeper connection.
“Robb was one of the first people in a respected metal band to go, ‘Hey, this band's fucking awesome, and you guys are wrong about them,’” says Andy. “That was really revelatory for us, because all of a sudden we started getting kind of shit on in the U.S. press, and Robb would come out and go, ‘Hey, this band's really fucking great. You should listen. Their guitar players are insane. You're wrong about this.’ He was the first person with that kind of respect in the metal world to talk about us like that.”
This has actually, finally, gone somewhere, as well, as Andy notes that, “For better, for worse, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the ‘metal community’ over the years. But the acceptance of the metal community, particularly on this record, has been really cool.”
Within their own community, 15 years in, Black Veil Brides have become a cult thing of their own. What brushes with the mainstream there have been, Andy says have been cool and good, but he draws comparison – somewhat unexpectedly – to Insane Clown Posse, in that his band’s fanbase have their own foundations, rather than being in a wider pool.
“It's really been a grassroots thing. The band has stayed afloat and grown in size and scale because of a sincere connection with the audience and people who have propped us up and allowed us these opportunities time and time again.
“I know every band says that, but the difference is that most bands, if you search their name on the internet, you don't tend to find people whose entire life is about hating this band more than anything in the world.”
Again, vindication. What this means is that, other than being less exposed to the ups and downs of the rest of the music industry, within their lane, BVB have earned the freedom to do what they like.
“Most of my friends in bands are constantly bitching about, ‘Oh, I wish I could do this or that.’ I feel really fortunate that we've gotten to a point because of our audience, that people go, ‘Yeah, go do what you want to do.’”
Didn’t you always do that? You always talked very big, like a man out to conquer the world.
“Well, it's very hard for a lot of artists to express to the 'suits' what they're trying to do,” he ponders. “Now, this is going to sound pretty braggadocious, but there's really no way around saying it this way. I'm pretty smart, and I know how to talk. I know how to talk to people about my ideas, and I find that that is one of the hardest hills for people to climb creatively.
“I'm not a used-car salesman,” he laughs, almost like he’s hearing himself. “I'm trying to use my gift of gab to allow us to make really cool, genuine shit.”
Isn’t there also part of you that just wants to be different and an outsider?
“I think so,” he nods. “Otherwise, I would have sang in a little whiny emo voice in 2010 when we came out, instead of in my, you know, raspy baritone.
“We've always been wildly different than everyone around us, and it's certainly a point of pride. It's made it more difficult for us at times, but the proof is that over time, that distinct difference has been a huge advantage for us.”
“We’ve always been wildly different than everyone around us, and it’s a point of pride”
Case in point: in the earlier days, Black Veil Brides, with their big hair, leather trousers and extravagant guitar work, would spend summer on Warped Tour, with its big shorts and big reflection of the sound du jour. A fertile proving ground for some – My Chem, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Bring Me The Horizon – it could also become a blur of identical bands all doing the same thing in pursuit of the same goal.
“I love Warped Tour, but you'd walk around and there was no way to tell what band was playing. Every single band were Verb-The-Noun bands. They all sounded the same. There was a clean singer and a screamer. The clean singer sang in a sort of high, whiny voice, and the screamer had a very big scream. And the guitars all did that one continuous riff and then chugs. It was exactly the same across the board.
“We just didn't sound like that. Which was a hindrance for us in those days, because everyone wanted everyone to sound like that.”
As with everything else, though, the man sitting talking to us may have taken a few bottles for his troubles, but he’s having the last laugh.
“I think it's really proven to be a huge benefit as time has progressed,” he laughs, “because no-one gives a fuck about most of those bands.”
At 35, and with a decade-and-a-half in the game under his belt, Vindicate shows Andy and Black Veil Brides enlarging their creative world, but also being more comfortable in it. As we chat, he laughs about the idea of battling against the world, as much as he does nod that it had its uses, and is what it is.
In some ways he’s a different Andy to the back-combed lad just out of his teens who first appeared on the cover of Kerrang! in early 2011. He’s not called Andy Six anymore, for one. The coverline asked if he was ‘The New God Of Rock?’ Certainly, he talked a good game about it. He had big answers to the smallest questions, and a take-over-the-world ambition you could smell on him.
Asked today what the differences are between then and now, you can still smell it, although he also points out that, “I’d have to be pretty crazy to be exactly the same in terms of the way I view anything, as when I was 15 years old. There's only so much arrested development that would be acceptable!”
But the years and experience have brought certain things into focus. Just as vengeance is actually better tasted as vindication, taking over your world is way more satisfying than endlessly trying to take over the world.
“Maybe I didn't have words for that when I was a kid, saying in Kerrang! that I wanted to take over the world,” he muses. “What I have come to find as I've gotten older is that what I want, in terms of taking over the world, is for the world to let me do whatever the fuck I want with my art.
“It sounds funny to say, but success is freedom, creative freedom. Success means that you can produce your own record in Florida with your own everything. I want to be in a position where any fucking grandiose dream I have can be done. And I think that what I have learned over the years is that the only way to get the keys to that kingdom is to have success. And so I hustle and I push and I work really fucking hard so that I can make the artistic things I want to make a reality.”
This means “getting up at 6am to get assets ready for a single release” before he talks with K! today. But Andy is jazzed about it all. Within the band, things are rosy as well, with everyone “in better, different positions than we were back then. Now we have more fun. Now we enjoy it more.”
Dare we say ‘vindication’ again? Andy laughs.
“Probably. I just think we appreciate it more now. I know I do.”
Vindicate is released May 8 via Spinefarm. Get your copy on super-limited-edition glow-in-the-dark vinyl with a hand-signed art card now.
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