VOLBEAT Frontman: 'We Can Easily Pull Around 10,000 People' Per Concert In Europe

Christina Fuoco-Karasinski of Soundspike recently conducted an interview with vocalist/guitarist Michael Poulsen of Danish metal rock 'n' rollers VOLBEAT. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On the band's latest album, "Beyond Hell/Above Heaven", which hit stores in the U.S. in December but was released in Europe a few months earlier:

Poulsen: "It's our new release and stylewise we're doing pretty much the same as we did on the three previous albums, flirting around with a lot of different styles. It's not easy to say what kind of style VOLBEAT actually is. You have so many different elements from punk and metal and rockabilly and country. For us, it's never been important to be 100 percent one genre or one style."

On sounding like a cross between METALLICA and ELVIS PRESLEY:

Poulsen: "Mostly my parents would play all music from the '50s. We were listening to Elvis, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, all the legendary singers from the '50s. They were listening to them all the time. All those kind of melodies, they were always spinning in my head. Even though as a teenager I was really dedicated and hooked on heavy metal, it seems like later on all the melodies form the '50s continually showed up in my mind. So, it was very natural to mix it all up."

On achieving success in Europe with the pre-VOLBEAT heavy metal act DOMINUS:

Poulsen: "[DOMINUS] was straight metal. On the third record, we were starting to flirt around with making a little bit with some rock 'n' roll stuff. What I wanted to do was keep the door wide open and see what happens. I didn't want to paint myself into a corner. If I wanted a song to start like a country song and let it burst into a metal song, that's what I did. Right now it comes very naturally. That's the most important thing — that you don't sit and try too hard to provoke it out of you. It has to come as a normal flow, and that's actually what happened."

On VOLBEAT's start on a small label:

Poulsen: "I'm happy we started on a small record label where we were able to build it up from scratch. We're a big act in Europe. We can easily pull around 10,000 people. The label said, 'There's nothing we can do for you anymore.' We definitely needed to be on a bigger label. We were [talking] with a lot of different labels and Universal came up with a really cool deal. They didn't want us to change anything. They really didn't want to be in command of anything. 'The way you do it is amazing. We're not going to touch that. You tell us what to do and we work around it.' That's the way to do it."

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