Helmet

A LEADING FORCE IN THE RISE OF ALT-METAL, HELMET HAVE BEEN SHREDDING UP A STORM SINCE 1989. THIS YEAR, THEY’RE TAKING THEIR JAW-DROPPING ANNIVERSARY SET DOWN UNDER.

Whether it be for their unique collision of jazz guitar stylings and blistering metal, their pioneering use of Drop D tuning or the simple fact that most of their tracks go as hard today as they did three decades ago, there’s a good chance you’re either a Helmet fan (you are reading an article about them, after all), or you would be if you gave one of their records a spin.

Since 1989, frontman (and noted ESP Horizon fanboy) Page Hamilton has been steering the ship in one of the world’s most revered alt-metal acts, delivering consistently crushing onslaughts of floor-shaking riffs and fist-pumping beats – and though their lineup has never been all too sturdy, Helmet have always rebuilt themselves to be stronger and more savage with each incarnation.

Now, they’re in celebration mode, travelling the world with a 30-track setlist diving deep into every corner of the Helmet story, from 1990’s rough and rabid StrapItOn to 2016’s sharp and sizzling Dead

ToTheWorld. To say we can’t wait for the tour to reach our shores would be the understatement of a lifetime – but if there’s one Helmet fan who’s

seriously over the moon with their 30th anniversary tour, it’s Hamilton himself. Have you found it especially gratifying to be able to show equal love to all chapters of the Helmet story, and not have to focus on any one particular record?

Yeah, definitely. It’s fun to do stuff like this – we’re doing a lot of songs that had either never been performed live before, or hadn’t been performed since 1990, ’91, ’92. We’ve pulled out a lot of the cover songs that we’ve done for tribute albums, like Music

ForOurMotherOcean and the JerkyBoys movie, and those have been great to dust off. Those had never been played live before, which is crazy because they’re really fun to do. And then we’ve been doing a couple of really old Helmet songs from back in the first years of the band. We hadn’t done “Your Head” since, like, ‘91 or ‘92. I think the last time we did it was at the Big Day Out in ‘93. I actually just mixed that show, by the way – we’re going to release it this year.

Bombshell alert!

Yeah man, we’ve got CBGBs from 1990 and the Big Day Out from the Meantime tour, which were both pretty funny because we were just so raw and so spastic. And my first time in Australia was just complete mayhem. We loved it so much – I think we had a bottle of Coopers in our hand the entire time we were there. We just had such a fun time, and we ended up getting super close with the Mudhoney guys because we were on the Big Day Out tour together; there was six or seven of us that were just inseparable. What would you say has kept Helmet relevant in an industry that can often be so callous in cycling through bands and trends?

I’ve always thought it was the ‘no bullshit’ aspect of the music and the band. We’re not really much to look at, and there’s no show, but we put our all into the music. Once I kind of got on this path and decided to form my own band – after my great experience with Band Of Susans and playing with Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham and all these amazing people in New York – I kind of had an idea what was lacking in heavy music for me. And John and Henry and Peter, we were all on the same page. I think I’ve always taken that approach to it – I just write the songs that I want to hear, and don’t worry about what the current flavour of the month is.

I’ve had conversations with bands where they were like, “Yeah, we got on a major label and we tried to do X, Y, and Z, and it didn’t work for us”. And Victor from Prong said to me recently, “Man, I really admire the way you never got knocked off your course. You just stuck to your guns.” I guess maybe we could have been bigger if we tried to do whatever was trendy at whatever point in time, but I’m not really worried about that. I’m happy with the music that we play! Almost synonymous with Helmet itself is your classic red ESP Horizon. Is that still your go-to axe today?

It is! Unfortunately the original model doesn’t travel out of the country with me, because it got lost by my tech. About ten years ago, we were in Mexico City, and he had to fly it over to Minneapolis because we were starting a tour somewhere in the Midwest after we got back from Mexico. And he never told me – his wife told him not to tell me that the guitar got lost by Air Mexicana for ten days. He didn’t tell me for a year or two after that, and I just decided that it wasn’t worth it to me to risk losing it.

I know it’s pathetic, but as a single pathetic loser who lives for the guitar, that specific guitar is very special to me. But the good news is that ESP did their Relic. They copied it perfectly, and I have about six of those and they all sound incredible. They have the exact same pickups, the exact same bangs and scuffs – everything.

What is it about the Horizon that roped you in and made a lifelong lover out of you?

Henry Bogdan, our bass player, was friends with a guy named Baker Rorick, who was at ESP, and he was very hip to all the new underground bands in New York. And he was like, “Man, your band is so cool, you should consider coming over and working with us”. I didn’t know anything about them. They were just a little shop on 48th Street and York, and they had maybe 50 guitars on sale. They let me go in and play as many as I wanted, and they were all really nice, but I just loved the feel of this one.

You can pick up an electric guitar and tell how it’s going to sound, kind of, by playing it acoustically – just by the resonance and the feel of the fretboard – and so I tried it out like that I was just like, “This is a really great guitar.” They sold it to me for, like, $600. That was the artist’s deal at the time. I didn’t even know my band was going to do as well as we did, but I’ve never paid ESP for another guitar since then – and I probably have 30 guitars from them. I use the shit out of them. I just did a guitar track on one of the movies I’m scoring with an LTD that they set up for me. They’re great tools. And Matt [Masciandaro, CEO] is sort of like my big brother, I just love him.