The Deadly Romantics Interview 28/04/2026
MM:When you hit the road this year FOR THE FINAL TIME, what’s the mission statement of The Deadly Romantics chaos, communion, or complete cultural vandalism?
The Deadly Romantics are all about keeping the spirit of pure, unfiltered hard rock alive. Our mission is to deliver bang for the buck. We love the music of the 80’s Sunset Strip, but we are not looking to replicate that, we’re looking to bring that sense of tongue-in-cheek humour back into today’s rock and roll. A huge part of our identity is a total commitment to original music, something which is dying in small town North America right now. There is very little mainstream coverage, no rock and roll magazines, no MTV playing rock and roll. There are thousands of up and coming rock and roll bands, but you need to dig hard to find them. You used to sit in front of MTV with a pad of paper and a pencil and write down the bands that interested you, or you would spend hours in a record shop browsing and buy whatever record cover tweaked your interest. That was how I got into bands like Enuff Z’Nuff, The Quireboys, The Dogs D’Amour, The D’Molls, Dirty Looks etc. There just isn’t that venue anymore. I really appreciate some of the newer bands like The Warning, coming out of Mexico, they’re fantastic, and unlike a lot of new female led bands, they’re not flashing their tits to get noticed.
We’re not trying to say anything important, we’re not fucking REM or U2, we’re more like KISS or Alice Cooper, you don’t look for any depth in the songs by those bands, you spend your money to get entertained, and that’s what we deliver. We don’t play gigs, we play shows. We want you to get your £10 worth, or whatever the price of the ticket is. We’re saying this is the Final Time we’re visiting the UK because we can’t afford to come back. With the rising cost of everything, this tour is costing us the best part of $20,000. That’s a lot of money for a band with no management, no label and no support. This will be our third tour to the UK in 6 years, and don’t get me wrong, we love the UK, it is the best country in the world right now for live rock and roll music, but, financially, it just no longer makes sense for us to tour as a band. We’re not looking to be rockstars, we’re far to old for that, we all have full time jobs here in Canada and The Deadly Romantics is a hobby for us, a serious one, but a hobby none the less. I don’t know, we could be stamp collecting or playing sports or something, but each one of us has music running through our veins, and before I would rather end it all on a high, than be some sad fuck playing in a covers band at 65!
So what is our Mission Statement? Rock and Roll some nights and party once in a while!
MM:Bad Actress, Liberty Slaves, and Holyrude Vault on various dates.
The first time we toured in 2022 we were supposed to tour with a band called The Big Dirty, but they self imploded about two weeks before we were leaving Toronto for the UK, so we ended up with a band called Kontrol Freaks, who were absolutely brilliant. We also had that air guitar guy, Sven Smith, who was on Britain’s Got Talent or something, he had a band called Dirty Rose, I think they were called. He was great as well. So when it came time to tour in 2024, Kontrol Freaks were supposed to do the whole tour with us, but again, the band imploded about 2 weeks before we were leaving and we had to get a quick replacement in a band called Dead Demons and a band called Circus 66. Both excellent, and both unavailable for this jaunt. I wanted to find a couple of bands that were young and hungry and I think Bad Actress fit the bill perfectly. I love their new record and they seem like a nice bunch of guys. They are playing the first run of shows with us as they were already booked on the same night of the Hard Rock Hell: Sleaze festival that we’re on. I’m good mates with JJ from The City Kids and The Main Grains, and he recommended Liberty Slaves, and they have been really cool and are doing most of the other shows with us. Holyrude Vault is a band that Christian Kimmett moonlights with, as well as playing with Warrior Soul and Love/Hate, and as he used to be in The Deadly Romantics, he obviously has good taste in music, so he is jumping on the bill with us up in Edinburgh.
MM:What’s the one song in the setlist that turns the crowd from “rowdy” to “feral”?
The whole set is about crowd participation. It’s all singing the songs back to us, or hand clapping, all off that sort of shit that we stole from Slade. Again, it’s not a gig it’s a show that you have to participate in. Let it all hang out for a few hours. Have a drink, have a sing-a-long. I think we have gotten better at being songwriters, but the majority of our set is still taken up with songs from our first record, 2013’s Sexploitation. We have a song called “This One’s For You”, which was written at a time when I was getting a lot of hate mail from people. I didn’t mind people not liking the music, but I was getting a lot of personal attacks and being accused of things I never did. I was being accused of being sexist and misogynistic, which I most certainly am not, and people were taking the persona’s in the band much to literally, so I wrote the song, which basically says “it’s not up to me if you don’t like what you see”, and then has a resounding chorus of “fuck you!” So that song was written about me, in 2014, but we recently, last year, played a gig in Barrie, Ontario, which is a small town about 2 hours north of Toronto, and we played the song. There were two people right at the front of the stage, going crazy during that song, and I noticed one of them had a tail attached to their trousers. After the show, Ryan (our bass player) was telling me that the two people were with their friends and that they we “furries!” I guess at that point I realized that the song was for anyone who had been persecuted for what they believe in, goths, rockers, LGBGT, even “furries!” Everyone, every now and then, needs to yell “Fuck You!”
MM: What’s the strangest, funniest, or most unhinged thing you’ve seen from the stage recently and did it make the show better or worse?
Aside from the furries? Shit happens with this band on a daily basis. Put it this way, we coming over to the UK with drummer number 22! I don’t think there are many bands that have had that many drummers, not even Spinal Tap! We did this show in 2024 at Bannerman’s in Edinburgh, and there were these two girls, dancing rather, umm, provocatively in front of the crowd, and I asked the audience if the two girls should come up on stage and dance for the band. They came up on stage, and it was a close as you can get to a live sex show and still be legal, to be fair, I don’t know the laws in Scotland, so maybe it wasn’t legal. Another time we were playing a gig and a girl was in front of the stage and kept motioning me to give her the microphone. I had no idea what she wanted to say, but after a couple of songs, I gave in and handed her my microphone, to which she proceeded to put it under her skirt and wipe it over her, umm, most private parts, and hand the microphone back to me! Again, I was playing a gig at Ivory Blacks in Glasgow and I walked out into the audience, and to my right, was a group of girls, and to my left, was a group of lads. I went over to the girls, and put my microphone out in front of them to sing the backing vocals, I then turned to the guys, where one of them was busy with his phone, I walked up to him and he showed me the phone, where he had written “you’re a cunt!” on it, I smiled and went back to the girls for the next chorus, I then turned back to the guys where the one guy punched me square in the face! I just kept singing, but when I got back up on stage, Gary, who was our guitar player at the time, asked me what had happened as I had blood streaming down my face! I’ve already mentioned Christian Kimmett, well, when he was in the band, again, in Glasgow, at a bar called The Vale, Christian was so drunk, he vomited behind is amplifier and kept on playing, up until the point that he climbed up on the bar and promptly tripped and crashed on the other side. So, you never know what is going to happen at one of our shows.
MM: If this tour had a warning label, what would it say?
Well, we’ve already named the tour the “It’s Getting Harder” tour, but if you needed a warning label it would probably say “"Enjoy while supplies last” or "Party at your own risk."
MM: If your band were a movie genre this year, what would it be grindhouse, outlaw comedy, neon‑drenched noir, or something even stranger?
Well, I’m quite legendary for my taste in movies. I’ve put movies on in the tour van that the other guys simply refuse to watch. I guess if you need a genre, I would go with Exploitation!
MM: What do you want fans to walk away saying after seeing you on this tour?
I want them to go away being fans! I always find it quite funny that people come to a show, or look us up on youtube and we have these songs like “Fucked By Rock And Roll” or “Anal Annie”, and they are initially quite shocked, but then they can’t get the songs out of their heads. A lot of people leave a show not quite sure what they have just seen. We play gigs that are either free entry or a nominal ticket price, yet we put on a show that people would expect from a much more established band, so people leave feeling entertained, and that makes me warm and fuzzy inside!!
MM: If the year ahead had a soundtrack, what’s the opening track — and what’s the closing credits song after all the chaos?
Well, we have opened every gig, since 2005 with “Do You Wanna Rock and Roll”, so that’s where I would start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagZBSloye0&list=RDcagZBSloye0&start_radio=1
As for the closing credits, well, I think it would have to be “One More For The Road”, which is a song I’m really proud to have written. I often tell people that my influences are bands like The Dogs D’Amour and The Quireboys, but you can’t really hear that in most of our material. You normally hear a lot of Zodiac Mindwarp in what we do, although recently we have started adding a lot more piano to our stuff, in fact, this UK Tour will be the first time we actually bring a keyboard with us. “One More For The Road” was supposed to be single off of the 2019 “Dirty, Sleazy Rock and Roll” record, but COVID hit and fucked everything up for the next couple of years. We released that record on Cargo Records, managed to get a video done for “Drink This Party Dry”, then everything went to shit. Took us four years to get back on track, for all sorts of reasons, not just COVID, but by that time, the “Dirty, Sleazy Rock and Roll” record was dead in the water, which is a pity because I think it’s the best sounding record we’ve done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cBV2hHVbfg&list=RD-cBV2hHVbfg&start_radio=1
MM:What’s the one thing you always forget to pack for tour, no matter how many times you swear you won’t?
To be honest with you, I’ve been on the road with bands since the late 80’s and I’ve gotten pretty good at packing. Plus I also have the mentality that if I do forget anything, I can stop somewhere and buy it. I fucking love those Chinese sites like AliExpress and Temu, I buy all of the band shit there. All the jewelry and stage clothes. I think my entire wardrobe is work about $3.78! Also, it’s not the forgetting to pack something, it’s the leaving shit at the last place we were. That’s the problem. In 2022 we played a bar in Manchester and stayed at a Travelodge in Stockport. Then we drove up to Scotland and spent about 4 days in Edinburgh before heading down to Blackpool. I have these really expensive cowboy boots made by New Rock in Spain, all black, orange and yellow flames and shit, and by the time we got to Blackpool, I couldn’t find them anywhere. When I finally phoned the Travelodge in Stockport they told me that they had been waiting for me to call, as all of the staff at the hotel wanted to know who would wear such a crazy pair of boots. In 2024, we toured with a drummer who lost something at every venue we played, drumsticks, glasses, phones, every morning we would ask him if he had all of his shit and he would tell us that he did, then, at some point later, we’d hear him in the back of the van, “shit!”
MM:If you could manifest one absurdly unrealistic achievement for 2026 — something totally over the top what would it be?
Unrealistic achievement? I don’t know that they are “unrealistic”, but when you play in a band like The Deadly Romantics and you are the age that we are, and bear in mind that the band was formed in 2005, so we’ve been going for 21 years now. We don’t play for the sake of playing, any opportunity that comes our way, we sit and ask ourselves if the opportunity is going to be an experience or not. Are we going to have fun doing it? For example, we’ve been hired to play at a wedding in August, I mean, The Deadly Romantics playing a wedding! WTF! We do turn down a lot of opportunities, for example, we have no real desire to play in our hometown of Hamilton. We’re not part of the clique that exists there and most of the other musicians and bands resent what we stand for and what we have achieved. The best way to describe the Hamilton music scene is to envision a great big wall surrounding the city and no one knows what goes on in there, and anyone inside the wall has no idea what is going on outside of the wall. We’re not and never have been, interested in that. If we play a show in Hamilton, it’s a rehearsal. We’ve played festivals in Canada, we’re playing a festival in the UK in September. You’re never going to see us in an arena or a stadium, we’re just not that type of band. So what would be an achievement? We don’t want a record deal, we’ve been there. So to be honest with you, that’s the first question I’ve been asked in a long time that I have no answer for.
MM:What’s the “big stupid dream” you all joke about but secretly want to make real?
I don’t know about the rest of the guys. I’ve never had the dream of being a rock star. I knew guys that packed up all of their shit in the 90’s and got a Greyhound bus out to Los Angeles and spent a couple of years living in someone’s garage or basement, hoping to find stardom. That was never me, I always wanted to know where I was sleeping and where the shower was. I worked in the “real” music industry in 90’s, with the Record Companies and TV Stations. I used to have the expense account and hung out with the guys from EMI and Warner Music, and in the end I hated it. My love of music died and it all became product. I would go see a band and it didn’t matter if they were good or bad, it was, could I sell them or not. I would get comp tickets for Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones or Garth Brooks and would be pissed off if the seats were not in the first 5 rows. The music industry needed to die. So, my “big stupid dream”? Be successful as a song writer? Get a song on a soundtrack somewhere?
MM:Describe Deadly Romantics in four words
Well, my favourite lyric from a song I’ve written is the beginning of a song called “Scream My Name; I’m Jesus Christ in dark sunglasses, bringing rock and roll back to the masses.” But in four words: Visceral, Dangerous, Humorous, Obnoxious.
MM: Final words?
I guess this is where I’m supposed to do some promo right? So, here goers; September 3rd to 12th, The Deadly Romantics “It’s Getting’ Harder” UK Tour. The Final Sleaze.
September 3 Thursday Birmingham Subside
September 4 Friday Sheffield HRH Sleaze
September 5 Saturday Nottingham Billy Bootleggers
September 9 Wednesday Edinburgh Bannermans
September 10 Thursday Barnsley The Garrison
September 11 Friday Wolverhampton The Giffard Arms
September 12 Saturday Cambridge Six Six
And I just want to thank you Seb for giving us the opportunity of this interview….. not many people actually want to speak to us…
