LIPS On ANVIL's Influence On Bigger Bands: 'We're All Inspiration To Others'

In a recent interview with Australia's Music Feeds, ANVIL frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow was asked about the fact that his band has been cited as a musical inspiration by some of the biggest acts in the world. "You know what? Everybody's an inspiration to everybody else," he responded. "It comes down to a conversation with Lemmy in 1983 in a hotel room in Birmingham, England. I'm sitting across the table from him drinking vodka and we're talking away, and I look at him and go, 'You are a legend. Do you realize the impact you've had on the music industry and on heavy metal and everything that it's about?' And he just looks me straight in the eye and goes, [imitates Lemmy's voice] 'In 10 years, there's going to be some other bloke sitting across the table from you, saying exactly the same thing.' That's what his answer was to it. So what do you say to that?

"We all love each other's music. We're all inspiration to others," he continued. "There's nothing really new or innovative. For musicians, it has nothing to do with money, ultimately, it has to do with what you brought to the table that's inspiring me. That's what it's about. It's not about how much money you made from that song. Because many times — and you know it as well, everyone knows this — in some of the biggest-selling songs, there's no integrity, there's nothing great about the musicianship or anything, so is it an influence to musicians that are trying to learn how to play? Probably not. So what I'm saying is musicians find inspiration in music that's much more obscure. It's just the way it works [laughs], and I'm just one of those obscure bands that other bands listen to, to get inspired by. That's fine, I've got mine — I can talk about the '70s and talk about certain bands like CAPTAIN BEYOND. CAPTAIN BEYOND was a phenomenal band that, yeah, the musicians knew about it, but did the actual public know about it? No. But were they an influence on me? Absolutely. Much more so than any of the commercial music that might have been on the radio.

"There are very very distinctly a number of roads you can take in a musical field. You can go for the commercial aspect, and what comes with that generally is [that] you're not going to get the accolades from fellow musicians. You'll get a lot of jealousy, a lot of envy — that's what happens with that — and integrity-wise, only if there's something really unique and individual that they can grasp on to, steal it and use it better. I mean, no one's really done it to METALLICA yet, they tried to do it to LED ZEPPELIN but they didn't really manage to do that either. So there's a certain uniqueness to these ultra bands that make it so big that you really can't duplicate it."

ANVIL will release its new album, "Pounding The Pavement", on January 19, 2018 via SPV/Steamhammer as a digipak version (including one bonus track and poster),two-LP gatefold colored version, digital download and stream. The disc was produced at the Soundlodge studios in Rhauderfehn in the northwest of Germany.