The Ontarion: You guys are about to kick off your Bat Sabbath tour, and I’ve just got to get this question out of the way: are you only going to be playing Sabbath covers on these dates, or will you be doing a set of your own material as well?

Liam Cormier: We’re not planning on doing a Cancer Bats set. We definitely have a tonne of Black Sabbath songs that we’re planning on playing. That being said, if at the end of the Black Sabbath set, you know, I’m sure we could be easily persuaded into playing some Cancer Bats songs. But we don’t have it set up specifically like, ‘OK, we’re gonna play five Black Sabbath songs and then we’re gonna play 15 Cancer Bats songs.’ It’s more like, we’re gonna probably play eleven Black Sabbath songs and then if people are still partying and wasted ¬– which I’m pretty sure they will be – maybe we’ll play some Cancer Bats songs to keep the party going.

The Ontarion: What was it about Sabbath that made you guys decide to play entire sets of their songs?

LC: I mean, definitely they’re one of the bands that everyone in our band loves and has grown up with and, you know, we actually can all agree on eleven songs. I don’t think there’s a lot of bands that all of us can agree on that we love all their songs but then at the same time can play them. I mean, other ideas that we had for doing a cover set were like Pantera and stuff like that. Pantera is a little ambitious I think, them being like a really a amazing metal band, and us being a bit more of like a punk band. And I mean, that’s the thing, we wanted to do something too that everybody knows. Like, whether you’re into hardcore, metal, punk rock, or whatever, you know Black Sabbath, you know AC/DC. You know what I mean? Like stuff like that? So it was like, yeah, let’s do Black Sabbath, like, we all fuckin’ love that band.

The Ontarion: How did you guys prepare for that first Sonisphere concert as Bat Sabbath, and what are you doing to get ready for this tour? Have you put in lots of time watching old tour DVDs?

LC: Yeah, everybody’s been watching a lot of live Sabbath stuff. I mean, fortunately for me, I can just learn the words. ‘Cause all of the live footage of Ozzy, he’s normally forgetting all of the words, so it’s almost better to not look at that as my example. Like, when we were doing the Sonisphere set I couldn’t find a live set of “War Pigs” where Ozzy sang the right words. Like literally does not exist, or at least I couldn’t find it. So that side of things definitely helped my confidence going into it. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not really stepping into that huge of boots here. That makes things easier.’ But yeah, for the other dudes, it was definitely the complete opposite. Where Jay was watching Geezer Butler to figure out what he’s doing on bass, Scott’s watching Tony Iommi, you know. And to a certain degree, you know, you can tell they’re blasted on cocaine, so some of the stuff is a little bit harder to follow, but it’s been rad that way to kind of learn basically the masters of metal and to have that influence over us.

The Ontarion: Besides Ozzy forgetting his words, do you have a favourite Ozzy road/concert story?

LC: I definitely love that old explanation of where Ozzy came up with “Iron Man.” How that was all based on him tripping out and this was this sane vision that he had. I remember even as a young kid hearing that story and just being like, ‘This is cooool.’ You know what I mean? That’s some next level stuff. And I completely believe that that happened, ‘cause learning the words to “Iron Man,” and lots of their songs, I was just like, ‘Man, some of your shit is so crazy,’ but in a very awesome way.

The Ontarion: How about him waking up having forgotten he’s got a concert to play while the concert’s happening. Can you relate to that kind of disorientation at all?

LC: It’s never happened to me, I mean, I have straight edge on my side so that definitely keeps me a little more straight, but I mean, we’re not even like a small percentage of how massive that band was, and when you think about how when you’re in it so hard and you’re touring really hard, you’re waking up and you’re raging and waking up in a different country, different city, you really don’t know what your days off are. I can see where that would get a little confusing. Especially when we don’t tour for…we tour really hard, but at the same time those guys are touring for like a year straight and then on top of that, being insanely fucked up every single day, I can see forgetting some lyrics, I can see not knowing what’s going on.

The Ontarion: Once you’re done this tour is the band still going to play the odd Sabbath cover at concerts, or are you guys just going to pull stunts like you did at Sonisphere every once in a while to keep your fans on their toes?

LC: Yeah, I don’t know! I mean, we still have fun playing [the Beastie Boys’] “Sabotage” all the time. It’s kind of funny how much Sonisphere is like the breeding ground for us doing covers. Like originally we did that “Sabotage” cover at Sonisphere and it kind of blew up into this bigger thing, and then same with Bat Sabbath. The reason why we’re doing this tour is just because the footage from that Sonisphere set got online and tonnes of people were really stoked on us doing that. We’ve even had lots of friends from across the country – like out east and out west – like ‘When’s Bat Sabbath coming to Vancouver?’ and we’re like, ‘cool, maybe we’ll just tour as a Black Sabbath cover band forever”. But, like, I don’t know, I mean, I think it’s one of those things where you maybe throw it into the set, especially in a lot of places that don’t get to see it. And you’ve always gotta play it by ear. Like, sometimes when you’re in Poland and you haven’t been there in a long time or you haven’t played a headline set, you kind of will take a little more requests when people come up to you at the show. And I’m sure we could pull off one of those [Sabbath] songs that everyone’s asking for. ‘Cause a lot of the time we tailor our set to [requests] anyway. It’s like, ‘Should we play “Sabotage” tonight?’ And then you get a bunch of dudes super stoked, or everyone’s like, ‘Oh! Can you play “100 Grand Canyon”?’ and you’re like ‘Oh, I probably know Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” better than our own song that we’ve been playing forever.’ So it’s like ‘OK. We’ll figure out both of those.’ You know what I mean? We always kind of play it by ear. I’m sure we’ll end up doing some of them down the line. We’ll just do like a half hour version of “War Pigs” at the end of our set from now on.

The Ontarion: But you’ll have new material to play soon as well. Before I started recording you mentioned you just finished recording your new album and you’re just waiting around for mixes. What can people look forward to with that record? What kind of direction are you guys taking with it?

LC: For us, this being our fourth record, we just really looked at what we love about the last three albums. Our big thing was, like, not wanting to really throw a curveball or a wrench into what we already love about our band. So for us it was just us trying to be the best Cancer Bats band and make the best record that we possibly can out of everything we love already about our band, ‘cause I feel like we’ve tried a bunch of different things – or I shouldn’t say tried. We’ve definitely pushed ourselves as musicians so it’s like, again, looking at those ideas that we really like. Like, where we do stoner songs or we do thrash songs or we do hardcore songs or we do punk songs, it’s like, ‘Yeah. Let’s really try and crush this idea.’ I love what we started on Hail Destroyer and I love what we started on Bears[, Mayors, Scraps & Bones] and I love what we started on Birthing [the Giant].

The Ontarion: Does the new album have a name?

LC: Dead Set on Living.

The Ontarion: Alright, thanks for speaking with me Liam. Before we go do you have anything you want to add either about the tour or the album?

LC: Just that I’m stoked for both. I think Black Sabbath is going to be really fun. I can’t wait for people to come out and party. And [the Bat Sabbath tour] is basically just because we can’t party on our new Cancer Bats stuff. We’ve gotta keep that on the hush for a little while. It’s more our way of getting out our love of tour, and with the fact that we have so many friends in Southern Ontario, this is the way we get to hang out. So we were like ‘If we do this, we can party in all of our favourite cities.’ At the same time, our record’s not gonna come out until April. But I can’t wait for everybody to hear it.

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