“I like that description, even though I didn’t write it,” he chuckles. “I know for a fact that our Wikipedia page hasn’t been written in an impartial or academic fashion. There’s been a lot of people that have wanted to take that down, but I kind of like it,” he continues, still amused. “I’d say it’s factual but we haven’t had Chuck Norris in the same room as us while we were writing and recording, under scientific conditions, checking and measuring the actual…” he trails off before laughing again. He’s not taking the whole thing too seriously, and rightfully so. After all, now 20 years and nine studio releases into their career, it takes a lot to shock Trotsky and Nancy Vandal.
So when the band was faced with the task of looking for funding for Flogging A Dead Phoenix, he turned to the goodwill of the band’s legions of fans and set up a crowd-sourcing operation. His expectations were modest at best. Yet in a matter of weeks, the band managed to raise the necessary $5,000 (and then some) to record and produce Flogging A Dead Phoenix. I ask Trotsky about how the gratuitous outpouring of love and dollars affected him. Then and only then, does surprise register with him.
“I was totally surprised,” he says. “The whole crowd-sourcing thing is great for us. We’ve always had a very bizarre relationship with our hardcore fanbase. We’ve always sent our newsletters to the people that bought our records and that sort of thing in the ‘90s. And this is kind of an extension of that. We made sure the project had unique rewards instead of just asking people to help pay for the record. We wanted to make sure that people weren’t being rewarded in a conventional manner.” Some of these rewards include private dinners cooked by band members, exclusive merchandise and house shows. It’s a continuation of the unique approach Nancy Vandal has always taken towards their fans, the recording process and the record industry itself.
It was nine years between 2000’s 50 Faves From Beyond The Grave and 2009’s Quite Partial To Rock yet their fanbase has not waned in the slightest. The demand for quirky but catchy punk and ska is still strong and the band has managed to maintain the bombastic levels of intensity they brought on their debut EP, Return Of The Zombie Skate Poets From Planet Sex way back in 1994.
Flogging A Dead Phoenix is a concise listen and maintains both a grimy intimacy ready for the country’s pubs, but with enough sky-reaching riffs to work in large stages. It’s fitting then that the band will be playing both pubs and the Soundwave Festival in 2013/14. “We used to play the stinkier, sweatier venues. But the big ones can be pretty fun. When we first organized the reunion stuff, it was just going to be the small stuff; Soundwave came after. We were just going to be in the pubs, that sort of thing. We’re not exactly stadium-friendly,” he jokes.
Nancy Vandal will likely have no problem adapting to the larger Soundwave stages, as they’ve had little problem adapting to the changing music industry in the last 20 years. It’s been a long time coming for Trotsky and the band and it’s an opportunity they’re going to make the most of. “We’re definitely one of the smaller bands on the bill. We’d been chasing that festival for a while, but this sort of just fell into our laps,” he says.
Now that the band has checked Soundwave Festival off their ‘to-do’ list, is the actual shrinking of Chuck Norris’s balls next on the menu? Trotsky laughs some more. “I don’t want to say it’s a fact, but I’m thinking the new record probably would have that effect.”
BY JOSHUA KLOKE
