With cannons, booty and parrots, is pirate metal just a gimmick? With so many obscure metal genres out there, flying under the Jolly Roger isn’t as strange as you’d think.
Describing what shoegaze sounds like is fucking hard. Usually I just leave it at “It’s shit”, but admittedly that doesn’t quite do the trick. Pirate metal on the other hand, is as straightforward as genre names come.
To be totally fair, it’s not a genre, or even a sub-genre, its more like a really drawn out concept album. They play metal; they dress up as and sing about pirates (you know, looting, rum, scurvy, swashbuckling, monkey butlers, Keira Knightley). Mainly, and thankfully, pirate metal seems geared to having fun. Which is a good thing, because if the bands took singing about colonial-era seafaring mafiosos seriously, then we’d have problems on our hands.
Running Wild, a German band, is credited with the first incarnation – some might say innovation but I’m not willing to go that far – of pirate metal. Frustrated that their politically-minded commentary were being misconstrued as bog-standard Satanic lyrics (sadly all too common), the lads righted that ship with the 1987 release of their third album, Under Jolly Roger.
Complete with appropriate lyrical references, song titles (like Diamonds of the Black Chest) and cannon sounds inserted into the tracks, Under Jolly Roger was quite the success, rather impressively selling one and half million copies. Since then, Running Wild have put out twelve more albums (mainly about pirates), with another one on the way next year.
Lately, pirate metal’s Jolly Roger has been flown by Scotland’s Alestorm (possibly the most popular metal band to come out of the country of Susan Boyle). Unlike Running Wild, Alestorm has been pirate metal through-and-through from day one; their 2008 debut was called Captain Morgan’s Revenge.
Alestorm are fully invested into pirate metal. Their power metal foundation is often joined by a violin and a variety of folk instruments appropriate for renditions of sea shanties, and they seem to love donning a bandana and a shoulder parrot prop. Their (many) music videos keep true as well, featuring the band on a ship, or in one case on a beach with an accordion-playing little person. Also, they have rather amusingly kept in character in their covers of Taio Cruz’s Hangover and The Village People’s In the Navy.
However, rather strangely, Alestorm and their frontman and founder Christopher Bowes seemingly fell into pirate metal. “Oh no, I’m not some weird pirate fanatic”, he told about.com (how’s that for a source eh?), “I didn’t even want to be in a pirate metal band, I just wanted something to sing about”. Bowes interestingly adds that, as a kid, he was interested in steam trains. “You can’t do a steam train metal band. That would be the dumbest thing ever” he claims later in the interview. Well, to be honest, a steam train metal band can’t be that far off.
Another pirate metal act that is making headway analogous to our man Blackbeard was 300 odd years ago, is American thrash metallers Swashbuckle. They’re more or less Alestorm, with the addition of pirate stage names (e.g. frontman and bass player Admiral Nobeard) and the subtraction of keytars. Their more extreme version of metal also makes the whole pirate schtick a bit more humorous too; they seem like they’re taking the piss a bit more than being seriously interested in pirates. Indeed, lead guitarist Commodore RedRum said that the idea of a joke pirate metal band came about in a drunken conversation at 4am with Admiral Nobeard.
There doesn’t seem to seem to be much going around in the pirate metal world – though I’d love if it was there was an underground pirate metal scene – but both Alestorm and Swashbuckle seem to have a pretty healthy following. Swashbuckle has a respectable 24,000 likes on Facebook, along with over a million views of their only music video on YouTube, whilst Alestorm have just over 350,000 followers on Facebook, and several million views on each of their videos on the tube (Keelhauled in particular has nine million).
Germany seems a rather healthy hunting ground – erm, secret cove? – for pirate metal. Not only did the nation spawn Running Wild, but it also gave Alestorm a #26 spot on the charts for their 2014 album Sunset on the Golden Age. The country that made no colonial inroads into the Caribbean is definitely giving a healthy dose of vitality to this mode of music that Admiral Nobeard happily describes as gimmicky.
Indeed, Admiral Nobeard, pirate metal is gimmicky. But while it’s weird, it’s certainly not alone in the metal sphere or the wider music world in having a contrived nature. As the Admiral quite rightly pointed out, black metal (“How many times can you write about Satan and it not be your gimmick?”), GWAR and Alice Cooper all contain gimmickry. Nile, the death metal band that loves to sing about Ancient Egypt, Steel Panther and Kid Rock are all gimmicks too (Kid Rock actually might not be contrived at all, to be honest).
All things considered, pirate metal isn’t even that strange. It’s not a niche neither as it’s not big enough (yet), nor is it attempting to reinvent the wheel. If the same person who asked me “What is shoegaze?” followed that up with “What is pirate metal?”, I’d answer as Admiral Nobeard answered: “My guess would be pirates playing metal”. Exactly what it says on the hidden chest of tin. A steam train metal band though, that’d properly be weird.
