THE DEFIANTS
They came out of the shoulda-been-big-but-weren’t Danger Danger, and this year released ‘one of the great melodic rock records of modern times’.
Legendary rock critic Nick Kent once described Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous as “an album made by heroes”. The same could be said of The Defiants’ Zokusho, the feelgood album of the year, from guys whose dreams went up in smoke in the grunge explosion of the early 90s but who never stopped believing in the life-affirming power of rock’n’roll.
With The Defiants, every song is an anthem. “That is our default setting,” says bassist Bruno Ravel. And if Zokusho sounds like their heads are still stuck in the 80s, Ravel takes that as a compliment. “We try to blend that eighties feeling with some more current production elements,” he explains. “And I think we succeeded with that.”
The roots of The Defiants lie in Danger Danger, the band that Ravel co-founded in New York City in 1987 and in which he still plays. In those early days, it seemed that Danger Danger could be the next big thing in hair metal. Their self-titled debut album, released in 1989, had a couple of great tunes in Naughty Naughty and Bang Bang, and on 1991’s follow-up Screw It! the power ballad I Still Think About You could have been their Every Rose Has Its Thorn. “We thought that too,” Ravel says. “We had many songs that we felt could have been hits. We had all the ingredients a band needed to break big.”
But they didn’t, for a number of reasons. According to Ravel: “Bad management, stupid decisions by our record company and some bad judgement by us.” There was also the issue of timing; Screw It! came out in the same year as Nirvana’s Nevermind. “We saw what was happening with grunge,” he recalls, “but we never thought that our genre was in trouble. We just thought we could all coexist.”
They were wrong, but Danger Danger kept going in the 90s, with a new singer, AOR cult hero Paul Laine, replacing Ted Poley. In 2014, Laine left the band and Poley rejoined. But since then they’ve made just one album, Revolve, released in 2009. “As of now,” Ravel says, “there are no plans for any new Danger Danger material. That’s not to say it could never happen, but it’d be a long shot at this point.” And so, as he puts it, “I moved on.”
It was Serafino Perugino at Frontiers Records who brokered a reunion between Ravel and Laine. “He reached out to Paul and myself separately,” Ravel explains, “and through a series of discussions The Defiants were born.” The band also includes current Danger Danger guitarist Rob Marcello. And after an acclaimed debut album in 2016, titled simply The Defiants, with this year’s Zokusho they’ve created one of the great melodic rock records of modern times.
Paul Laine is a large-than-life character. As Ravel says, laughing: “Don’t piss him off or else ‘The Bull’ will come out!” He’s also phenomenal singer, who really lights up every one of this album’s anthems, from Hollywood In Headlights to Ravel’s favourite, It Goes Fast, “the message of which”, he says, “is to enjoy life while you can. Which resonates very strongly with me these days.” And what next for The Defiants? “Hopefully we’ll do some shows next year,” Ravel says. “And one more record? Time will tell.”