CHILDREN OF BODOM Frontman: 'We're Never Afraid Of Anything'

CHILDREN OF BODOM fan site Scythes of Bodom recently conducted an interview with COB guitarist/vocalist Alexi Laiho. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Scythes of Bodom: The Unholy Alliance is the biggest tour you've ever been part of. Were you a little bit afraid if the SLAYER fans would accept you because you're maybe too melodic for them and too much keyboards, etc.?

Alexi: Ah, no. I mean, we're never afraid of anything, you know, especially when it comes to stuff like that. Well, especially on the U.S. tour with SLAYER we were the only sort of melodic band on the whole bill because there was MASTODON instead of IN FLAMES. Our shit is like fucking… "bubblegum pop" compared to the other bands (laughs),so obviously we didn't know how people were gonna react. The thing is that we have been out rolling for fucking almost ten years and we started playing gigs at a very young age so we're pretty confident about the fact that we can fucking go out there and we can rock the house, you know? And so far it's worked out. We only got "slayered" once which means that people started chanting "SLAYER!" in the middle of your songs but you shouldn't even care about that, you know? I was on the stage and I was laughing at these motherfuckers. Whatever dude, I don't fucking care.

Scythes of Bodom: Yeah, what else can you do? It's senseless if you get angry at them.

Alexi: Yeah, that's what I've been told. It's really stupid to react like that when you get "slayered" and start telling them "Shut the fuck up, you motherfuckers!" That just means that you let them win, you know? So instead of that you just have to fucking ignore them.

Scythes of Bodom: Why did it take so long until you finally released a full-length DVD? I think there were already some plans in 2000 or 2001 when you wanted to release a DVD with a gig filmed in Tampere, Finland during the "Follow The Reaper" tour…

Alexi: I don't know man, it was a long time ago. But yeah, it took a long time but the point is that we've been watching DVDs of bands we even like but their DVDs were like totally fucking crap. I won't mention any names but there's just the live show which is mandatory which is fine. That's what you do, you play live and that's cool. But you know, you've got to have fucking good extras in there. When I was watching these DVDs from the other bands I was just being like "That's not gonna be us," man. So instead of putting out something as fast as you can, we wanted to wait until we were fucking ready. And I think we weren't ready until now. We started working on it like last summer and we had at least like 200 hours of footage, just crazy and drunk stuff of us. Me and the boys went to Henkka's appartment every single day and watched it many fucking hours a day. We browsed through all of the tapes and picked the spots that we might use and that was like the whole beginning process. For us it was that we just wanted to make a good one and also we wanted to make an interesting one, something else besides playing and of course it's fun to see us guys being totally drunk and crazy. But if it's only that, then it gets boring after fifteen minutes. That's why there are the interviews that we do and stuff. We really wanted to put effort on that side of the thing. We wanted to have some sort of biography on each guy and showing footage and photos from our childhood. There's for example me playing fucking violin when I'm seven years old. No one has ever seen this shit before so that was exactly what we wanted to do.

Scythes of Bodom: What happened to your original idea of having live clips of your songs from around the world, like bits from here and there which you wanted to mix together for the DVD? As far as I remember, you said you didn't want to have a DVD with only one live show as main gig but various songs from different locations like SKID ROW's "Oh Say Can You Scream".

Alexi: Hmm… I don't know, I mean in my head it was a good idea but I guess it's not. Nowadays you can't do this. I grew up watching PANTERA and SKID ROW home videos and they didn't have whole live shows but single live songs from everywhere. I wanted to have it like that but eventually I started to agree with the fact that you need to have one whole fucking gig. And it turned out to be a good show, it was a good crowd, it was shot with 18 fucking cameras, so it looks pretty good. I'm happy that we did it that way.

Read the entire interview at this location.