BLACK VEIL BRIDES Singer Reflects On His Angry 'Revolver Golden Gods' Acceptance Speech: You Have To 'Stand Up For Yourself'

During an appearance on the latest episode of the "Lipps Service With Scott Lipps" podcast, BLACK VEIL BRIDES singer Andy Biersack spoke about how artists feel judged and fear being blamed in cultures regulated by political correctness. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "People feel like they need to be infallible and they need to be perfect and without fault and they need to have a stance on everything that's the exact right stance and they need to have the exact right thing to say when something happens in the world or whatever else, because if they don't, then their whole audience will leave them. And that has made it so — generally speaking, everyone is really sort of anodyne and boring because nobody can say anything for fear of upsetting everybody… And you can't even acknowledge that something makes you laugh, because the person that made you laugh may have, at one time, been in a podcast with somebody who was on a podcast that said something that you don't agree with. And how could you?"

He continued: "I've been screaming since 2013, I am incredibly insecure and fucked up and I try my best and I would love more than anything to be a good person and positive and ethical and moral and I try really hard but there are gonna be some times where I'm wrong about something or I said something wrong. I was a huge asshole when we first got popular. You can't give a 19-year-old a world where you're successful in rock music and you're constantly told that you're attractive and you're constantly told that you have the microphone and you're constantly cheered for everywhere you go. That's the recipe to create one of the worst people in the whole world. And I lived up to that for some time. And it took a lot of my life. It took a lot of experience and time. I would give my wife [Juliet Simms, a.k.a. Lilith Czar] a tremendous amount of credit in terms of helping me to find myself the version of me that is more true to me, the version of me that just loves to buy action figures and watch the Bengals. And I mention her in particular because we're both lead singers, and we were both crazy people when we got together. And our growth happened at the same time where we were both, like, 'We need to become the best versions of ourselves.' And so we moved past it. But there was a whole period in my life when I'm sure I was mean or shitty to half the people in a day. But right now in my life, I wanna be nice, and I wanna be nice to people that come to the shows, and I'm going to try my hardest, but I'm not always gonna know what to do or say."

Biersack also reflected on his acceptance speech at the 2013 Revolver Golden Gods where he called out people in the audience who were booing his band. After BLACK VEIL BRIDES was honored with the "Song Of The Year" award for the band's "In The End" track, Biersack went into full-rant mode, flipping the audience off and throwing the f-bombs all over the place (see video below).

"Here's the thing — you motherfuckers should have voted for somebody because BLACK VEIL BRIDES won three years in a row," Biersack shouted. He then called out individual members of the audience, saying: "I know that you fat motherfucker and you right there, you hate us, but I'm holding a heavy-as-shit award so fuck with me right now motherfuckers!"

He added: "Here's the thing — BLACK VEIL BRIDES have a song on the radio, you have a fucking fat ass, fuck me, come on! I don't care about what any of you fat bearded motherfuckers say, BLACK VEIL BRIDES won the 'Best Song Of The Year', 'In The End'. This one goes out to Urban Flanders [Andy's grandfather]. Fuck you!"

Asked by host Scott Lipps if he regrets his Revolver Golden Gods speech now or if he feels like what he said made sense at the moment, Andy said: "I regret the contents being about somebody's body and weight. But three things: when you wrote a song about your grandfather's death and then that song wins an award and you're gonna give a speech that you wrote about his death and you're so excited to honor him, and then you get really drunk beforehand, and then everyone in the whole crowd boos you and spits on you before the cameras pick it up. Because what people don't realize is we had to stand at the barricade for 20 minutes while the changeover happened to the commercial break and then they brought up Sebastian [Bach] to present the award. And at that time the audience already knows that we're winning the award, and the audience is people who have been waiting around all day to watch METALLICA and could give a shit about what's happening at this award show. And now they've gotta sit through this band that they hate give some big speech about their song. So they were already spitting, throwing, booing. All of a sudden, I come up on stage and it looks like I've just heel turned out of nowhere, but it was years of — it was kids putting raw fish in my lockers and it was people making fun of us or bands ripping on us, the singer of FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH using the 'F' slur about us on Facebook every other day or whatever band is saying some terrible thing about us every day. And it was all those things built together to where my cup had run over with anger and I turned into — as Chris Jericho described — a professional wrestler heel turn. And I don't regret doing that because if you're not gonna stand up for yourself, who is going to? And that's the thing, beyond anything else, that I want people to understand about what our message is."

Biersack continued: "In this world today, we exist in the capacity where there are a lot of people who really honestly want to be the person that they are. And I believe that they should be, but I also want everyone that listens to me to know that you need to stand up for yourself and insist on the person that you are. You cannot let other people take away from the way in which you see yourself, the things you like, the way you wanna dress, the things you listen to. You can't let them take that away from you. And you cannot assume that they are going to agree with who you are. When I was a kid, I was told that by my dad: 'You can't assume that people are gonna love your 'Clockwork Orange' outfit.' But if you're a kid that wears a BLACK VEIL shirt to school, you cannot assume that you're never gonna get fucked with. And I'm sorry about that, but that's just the way the world is. What you should do is know that you love this band, and don't let those people tell you that you shouldn't listen to this band."

Last month, BLACK VEIL BRIDES released the title track from their new EP, "Bleeders", inspired by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's "Sweeney Todd". The band paid tribute to the classic musical with a music video for the title track that is inspired by the musical's 2007 Tim Burton-directed film adaptation.

Due on June 21, the three-track EP, which will include "Bleeders", a cover of "My Friends" from the Sondheim classic, and a cover of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday", will be BLACK VEIL BRIDES' first release for Spinefarm.