Band Interview: Leper Messiah
Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life are pleased to bring you an interview with rockers Leper Messiah!
1. How did you get started as a band?
Hey, head-banging horror gamers! Thanks for inviting us on!
LEPER MESSIAH actually began as a David Bowie tribute act, touring a grand Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars show throughout Norway back in 2012-2013, celebrating the then 40th anniversary of Bowie’s legendary glam rock extravaganza. When those happy days were done, we transitioned into an original-music rock band and kept touring and making music. In 2015 we went from 4 to 5 members to build up our sound. This year (2021), we dropped our first record.
2. How would you describe your sound?
We enjoy playing with a variety of rock sub-genres, so you’ll find a lot of different stuff on our debut album – FELL CREATURES – ‘cause ain’t it just too boring when every song on a record sound exactly the same? But mostly, I guess we fit somewhere on the glam rock to hard rock spectrum. A little bit of theatre, a fair bit of darkness, and a whole lot of rock.
3. What bands/artists would you say have influenced your style of music?
That depends on which of us wrote the particular song, but Bowie, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Kiss, and Foo Fighters are all pretty obvious influences, I believe.
4. Has the rise of YouTube & music streaming helped or hindered you as a band?
For new, up and coming acts like ourselves, the convenience of streaming makes it easier to get your stuff into new ears, so in that respect it’s a boon for us. But you have to sacrifice revenue for convenience, of course; like with Spotify, the majority of our streaming revenues goes to fund the Tailor Swifts and AC/DCs and Ed Sheerans and their top tier artists ilk, while a small percentage is pooled for bands at our own level and redistributed according to a monthly listener algorithm. So yeah, most artists on there pays the big acts for the privilege of being on the same platform as them, which makes it hard for all but the big names to earn any kind of money on streaming. Giging is the only way of earning a buck these days, well, that and merch.
5. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making music?
Personally, I write, pen-&-paper roleplaying game stuff as a hobby and fantasy fiction that I hope to sell to a publishing house pretty soon and become an established author by day and rock god by night. That, and I play a lot of boardgames and RPGs, not so much video games, though. The other guys in the band are more into sports, I guess; one’s a dirt-bike racer and another an amateur runner, and then there’s the following football, of course, something that I myself isn’t the least bit interested in! *laughs* Oh, and it goes without saying that we’re all majorly into consuming music, too.
6. What are your future plans musically? Tours?
We released our debut album this year and will start touring majorly as soon as the plague allows, starting this fall with some local gigs here in Bergen, Norway. Next year, we also plan a to do a mini-UK tour and a Poland tour, and we’ve also got our sights set on Florida, so it’ll be exciting times, coming out of the pandemic!
Thanks for featuring LEPER MESSIAH, GBHBL! We’d love to come back and talk with you more.
Thanks y’all, and rock on hard!
PS: Dude, stop nibbling on my brain, will you? I need that to make music!
