A brief history lesson from Lips of Anvil

Victoria Purcell caught up with Lips of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil, at MetalDays Festival 2015, in Slovenia. See the full interview here.

During the interview we were discussing the fact that Anthrax and Megadeath have been recorded a lot over the years (in interviews) saying that Anvil were a band that influenced them. Lips explained “All that happened was that they let the world know who their favorite bands were”. Lips continued “Some of my favorite bands, most people don’t know about.” Well, from there came the obvious follow-on question, Who are your favourite bands?

Lips: Well, a major example would be a band like April Wine. April Wine are a Canadian band that had a huge amount of success in Canada. Everywhere else some people know them, but most people don’t.

They have a very very broad range of music, but it’s going back all the way to the 60’s, so they have an incredible history. I love them a lot more then I like Rush.

Rush are a lot more modern in a certain sense, I have nothing against Rush, but I really like April Wine, they are my Canadian buddies.

Another band from Canada that people don’t know about is Thundermug. They are absolutely and incredibly ahead of their time, since 1970, they are like a cross between The Who, and Jimmy Hendrix, thats the best way to describe them. Really really interesting, very cool band.

Then there is a half English band, Captain Beyond. They are made up of the original singer of Deep Purple, Rod Evans (the guitar player), and bass player form the band Iron Butterfly.

Iron Butterly is the band that was known for (the 1968 hit) ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’.

Their first album in certain sense was massive amoungst musicans. Every rock guitarist and  drummer knows about that stuff. But beyond that the general public always say “whos that, whats that”.

Another prime example is Budgie, look at how big they got!

The thing is that Rock Music and guitar orinated music has been happening for over 50 years now, and there is a lot to it. The is a huge history, a huge amount of bands that didn’t make huge susses, but are massively massively influential.