Horror metal band Gwar prepares to drench its fans at Midway show
Singer Blothar the Executioner admits it's getting more difficult to shock people
He's a terrifying figure — half-demon and half-alien musician draped in the pelt of a spectral moon moose killed eons ago — but even Blothar the Berserker is struggling to stay ahead of the insanity of the modern world.
He's the leader and lead singer of Gwar, the hardcore rock group infamous for horrific on-stage personalities and grotesque live shows. Currently in Canada on their Age of Befuddlement Tour, the band will be in Edmonton Sunday to play Midway Music Hall.
Blothar admits it's increasingly difficult for his group of intergalactic miscreants to stay ahead of the madness that is humankind and the horrendous things we do to one another.
“If anything, it's gotten harder for us to keep up with the incessant depravity of humanity,” he says. “We have created a race of self-destructive dimwitted children that seem absolutely insatiable when it comes to death, destruction and killing one another. That's the biggest challenge in Gwar right now, coming up with stuff that will actually surprise and shock people.”
This criticism of everyday life on Earth in the 21st century is coming from a group with a back catalogue of songs that includes Let us Slay, Saddam a Go- Go and War is All We Know.
Blothar has been the lead singer for the shock troupe of rockers for almost a decade now, an impressive run for a group that's been around for four decades. With the sudden death of former lead singer Oderus Urungus in 2014, Blothar stepped up to the front of the stage.
“I was asleep in our Antarctica fortress where we were banished, along with the rest of the scumdogs,” says Blothar. “One day, Odderus went to another dimension. I found myself suddenly, with no preparation, in front of 25,000 people with not a lot of preparation. They just kind of threw me out there.”
It's not exactly true to say Blothar had zero experience with Gwar. His real name is Michael Bishop, a bass guitarist who has a long history with the band. He joined back in 1988 under the name Beefcake the Mighty, leaving and coming back twice before making a permanent return in 2014. That was the year Bishop took over for Dave Brockie, a.k.a. Oderus Urungus, the original lead singer who helped to form Gwar in 1984.
Each member of the group puts on a personality, much like KISS and their intergalactic alter egos, but with a heavy shellac of gore, guts, pus and viscera. They top it off with just enough juvenile imagination to bring the whole thing together, coming up with a complex backstory for their characters that fit into the Scumdoggia universe.
“I don't really conform to the norms of gender that humans are, in this binary, non-binary opposition. I have four udders, which are actually my penises. Four weiner udders on a dickbag,” says Blothar.
While he has fun with the persona of Blothar, Bishop takes music and the place of Gwar seriously. He has a PhD in music from the University of Virginia and taught writing and topics in American music history at the university. He understands the band from both an academic and first-hand perspective, having lived through the punk revolution Gwar pushed forward.
Asked about the group's place in the American music pantheon, he speaks easily and eloquently for almost 20 minutes about how the group came to be in the early '80s.
“Gwar emerged from that as a parody of metal that was made by a bunch of arts students that were coming together to work on a film. Over time, the rather small plot point of the aliens starting a band became central to the existence of the band.”
Blothar, Oderus, Beefcake, Sexecutioner, Balsac the Jaws of Death; the performers' names were secondary to the group dynamic, of Gwar as an entity taking centre stage.
Evolving naturally out of those personalities of intergalactic space aliens sent to Earth to rock is a stage show that's almost as famous as the unconventional group's 40 years of making music. The previously mentioned fluids spraying down the audience are an integral part of the show; if you're standing in the first few rows, you will get wet.
“The way that it goes is we would have meetings that are very much like writers' room meetings where we come up with ideas, where we talk through the practicality of the ideas and the limitations. There are very specific limitations on what we can do in as far as space and money.”
With environmental concerns playing a bigger role in every decision and 40 years of props at their disposal, the members are often looking at how they can re-implement some of their old material.
“If we are going to go out and kill a celebrity, we say, `Let's make this celebrity look more like that celebrity,'” says Bishop. “We have gotten better at reusing things.”