ANVIL frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow spoke to Edmonton's Vueweekly.com recently about a number of topics including their documentary film, Anvil! The Story Of Anvil. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Vue Weekly: You’ve been doing this for a lot of years now. With any band, there are always people involved whose priorities change and they stop given everything they have to music. What makes the struggle worth it for you?

Steve “Lips” Kudlow: "From my perspective it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter whether people think I’m crazy or not. I’ve got to live with myself. I’m the only one who has to, and in a certain sense with the results, if they’re good or bad. And the job will always remain the same no matter whether you’ve sold a million records or whether you’ve sold 10 records: you’ve still got to write another song. That’s the way I look at it. To me it’s been one long album and that’s the way I look at it. Honestly, it’s been completely and utterly non-stop. As soon as I’m finished writing one song I’m beginning to write another one, and it’s been like that for 30 years.

Ultimately, for Robb (Reiner) and I, what it really is, how many songs can we write, how many albums and how many gigs. That’s what it is. It’s not how much money. It never has been and it probably never will be. Our measurement of success is simply how many songs and how many gigs we can play. No matter how big the gig or how little, it’s still a gig, it’s still a song."

VW: Are you happy with the finished film Anvil! The Story Of Anvil?

SK: "Some things I’m still bewildered with, because there are parts of my personality, just like everybody, that I don’t particularly care for. But I can live with it. I have to—it’s me. It’s a depiction of myself, and when you see a depiction of yourself you see things that you sometimes don’t like seeing. There’s a certain part of me that’s aggressive, no doubt about it: the emotional part. I’ll snap if I get pushed the wrong way. I have a temper, but it’s not that I always have a bad temper—they just happened to capture it a couple of times. They got lucky."

VW: At the end of the film, there’s a mention of a 14th album. Is that in the works now?

SK: "All the songs are done, so that’s not really the problem. The problem is catch up. We’ve got a serious backlog, especially with the United States—it’s out of control. I mean, the people in the States, they don’t know, they’ve never heard the song 'Metal On Metal' before. They’ve never heard of us. The only way that you could find our albums—and still to this day, if you can find them—would be in independent mom-and-pop shops. Record stores that carry obscure records, which are hard record stores to find, and on top of it where are you going to find the album? There’s no distribution there, so the only way those records ended up down there were on import, and that’s fractional sales. In its day, I think Metal on Metal, there might have been maybe 20,000 copies in the United States.

VW: There have been a number of high-profile musicians who have spoken out in support of Anvil, though. The film features testimonials from the likes of Slash, Lemmy, METALLICA’s Lars Ulrich and ANTHRAX' Scott Ian.

SK: "The only people that bought those albums were musicians, to a great degree. Because they’re the only ones who’d go that far to find the mom-and-pop shops and look for the obscure albums, because the true heart of heavy metal is obscurity. It’s kind of a conundrum in a way. If you’re underground you’re cool, but you’ve got to be good underground and then you’re really cool, but if everybody finds out about you, then all of a sudden now you’ve sold out. So then you’re not as palatable to this hard core following.

This is quite true about bands like Metallica. It’s something that there’s been a lot of controversy about—how they sort of evolved and went through this 'let’s sound like what’s current,' and that really bothers a lot of people, particularly in the metal genre because they like their bands to be like brand names. When you go to McDonald’s and you order a Big Mac, you want a Big Mac, you don’t want a Big Mac with tomatoes on it, you know what I mean?

The bottom line is you’ve gotta know who and what you are and stick to your guns and keep fighting. You can experiment with a number of different things, but you know who you are. There’s music that’s OK for yourself in your living room, but you don’t want to publicize it. Sell it to somebody else or something that would be more appropriate. But it’s being able to draw the line and understand what is expected of you and what you expect of yourself. I’ve been going on that most of all, because going on what people expect, for every Anvil song there’s a fan and it can be extremely and utterly confusing because some of my least favourite songs are the most loved songs and the most loved songs by me are the least favourites of the fans. But it’s not to say that they’re not all good songs. Really it says volumes about the diversity that the band actually possesses, which is sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative. It depends on who’s listening to the album—it becomes quite subjective.

Read more here.

Anvil performing 'Metal On Metal' live at Wacken: