Dead Rhetoric: What’s funny about that is, I feel like in America people are finally starting to come around and realize that real singing, hooks, and solid songs are great. There were so many years in the 90’s and early 2000’s where that was not being accepted…
Gallagher: No, there has been a tradition of that in Europe for many years. That has its own set of problems with everybody wanting to be a fourteenth rate Rainbow. I remember when Hammerfall came out in the 1990’s, acclaimed and journalists over there were saying that the only reason why people were praising them because they were Swedish – if they were German, they wouldn’t have gotten off the starting blocks. Bands like that are a dime a dozen- but what they were doing was good. There are so many bands copying that, but at least it’s got melody, and they have songs. Some of the older music just has better intrinsic value.
Dead Rhetoric: Do you find as you get older it’s been harder to keep up with this fast paced, instant communication world we seem to live in?
Gallagher: That has probably been the biggest game changer. I have real time communication now with our fans, with Facebook and the website. If you play a show, the next night there is video or photographs for people to see. There was a period when we did The Pack Is Back where we were almost divorced from our fans completely. You find out, ‘I didn’t know that’. We tried from the get go to answer letters, it’s amazing to find out that Marty Friedman used to write me letters when we did the first album, Bill Steer from Carcass, hopefully we have influenced those guys to do what they ended up doing. The process is so instant, so we make it a point when we play shows to meet the fans, sign stuff, and talk to them. It’s a big part of what we do, and it’s hard to believe it was different years ago. It’s so much more a part of what we do nowadays.
Dead Rhetoric: Is it unbelievable to you how many years that you’ve been able to play in the same band with your brother – and not killed each other?
Gallagher: (laughs) We used to make fun of that when we were kids, we would beat the crap out of each other before we started the band and then we would beat on our guitars. A lot more cathartic I think, we get along pretty well and have a similar point of view. If there’s an argument it’s usually forgotten about 10 minutes later, that’s the good thing about it. When you see the other wonderful siblings like the Davies brothers from the Kinks, or the Gallagher brothers in Oasis, you look at them and go… crazy. I’ve heard some great stories about the Kinks, they definitely give Liam and Noel a run for their money.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s the craziest stage experience that has happened to Raven, either weather related or something malfunctioning?
Gallagher: Well there was an early one, when we were kids we played for the Hells Angels in a field 15 miles south of Newcastle. It was the same Hells Angels that you would see in the Tommy movie by The Who. All these characters out in the field and it starts raining with plastic sheets, they want us to play “Born to Be Wild” so we play it. They want us to play it again, so we play it, and then they want us to play it again, the rain is getting heavier and all of a sudden my brother goes spastic, he falls on the field shaking. We all stop, took the guitar away from him. They said ‘what’s wrong- play “Born to Be Wild”…’. We were done playing, he just got an electric shock. We picked him up, put in the van, he starts giggling and we got out of there. What’s great about that is there was a girl who was there at that very show, who sent me photographs. Black and white, contact sheets of the actual show.
Weather related… we were in a 6.2 rated earthquake in Bogota, Columbia a few weeks ago. On the 9th floor of a hotel, I was sitting on a computer and everything starts going sideways feeling like we were on jelly. We run downstairs like crazy people, I thought it was the end but nothing fell over. We played two gigs in Columbia which were awesome, crazy fans and really young. It was a throwback to the early 80’s when we used to play in Holland, nobody older than 25. They are also knowledgeable and so passionate about metal. We had to hang the promoter upside down to get the money he promised us for the shows, and then we went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Nice decent club there… that was the South American thing. We did some shows after that in Europe, and I just came back a week ago from that. We played Helsinki for the first time, we played our set, the crowd was insane and crazy. We smashed everything off, left, toweling down and the crowd was chanting for more. 15 minutes of chanting and we went back up to put all the drums back together, fix the mic stands to do another song. We played a festival in Belgium with a noise ordinance, which is always a challenge.
Dead Rhetoric: What are the plans for the rest of 2015 for Raven as far as touring and promotion?
Gallagher: We have Japan in July, and then we’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of dates in the United States in July, and then we are doing Europe in September through October, and that’s for starters as we are still looking at other opportunities in between.