DRAGONFORCE

On the road with the hairiest, hippest, and horniest band in the history of power metal.

By Jon Wiederhorn
Photos by Justin Borucki

DragonForce have a major problem. No one has recruited any hot babes to jump on their two stage trampolines before the band’s sold-out show in Worcester, Massachusetts, and with just two hours until set time, it seems like tonight’s concert will be regrettably chick-free. Until, that is, there’s a knock on the door of DragonForce’s bus and, as if ordained by Oden himself, a blond in a tight Hooters outfit and a brunette in a black corset and stretch pants enter the vehicle. Without much arm-twisting, guitarist Sam Totman persuades the ladies to open the show. Minutes later, the house lights dim, the blond strips down to her bra, and she and her friend scamper onto the mini trampolines. As soon as they start to bounce, the audience erupts as if Iron Maiden had just dropped in for a surprise set.

“It’s such a great way to begin the show,” beams Totman, watching from stage right, guitar in hand. “I always want to ask the girls to get their knockers out, but my manager tells me it’s not a good idea.”

Maybe that’s because clothed lasses on trampolines are already a tough enough act to follow—though when DragonForce finally take the stage, it’s clear that they’re up to the challenge. Their opening number, “Revelations,” is from their relatively unknown 2003 debut, Valley of the Damned, but based on the raucous response, you’d think it was a Top 10 single. Of course, the crowd’s enthusiasm probably has less to do with the song than with the insane gusto of DragonForce’s performance. Totman and coguitarist Herman Li are leaping off the drum riser onto the trampolines, springboarding through the air and back to the stage without flubbing a lick. Keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov, meanwhile, rocks maniacally from side to side while peeling off flashy neoclassical runs on a keytar, and vocalist ZP Theart swings his mic stand like a battleaxe, whipping his raven locks—and the audience—into a frenzy.

It’s an amazing show, all the more mind-boggling because the style of music that DragonForce play is power metal, that most gloriously geeky, absurdly shred-headed, endlessly derided subgenre, and they’ve managed to make it seem totally awesome. With trampoline dancers, beer holders attached to their mic stands, and a bandmate-to-bandmate collision record that rivals that of NASCAR’s drivers, DragonForce are more cartoonish than Deathklok, the stars of the Cartoon Network show Metalocalypse; they’ve not only embraced metal’s inherent bombast—they’ve taken it over the top. And in doing so, they have audiences laughing with them, not at them, and their legions are growing at an impressive rate. DragonForce’s first U.S. club tour, since they turned heads on the main stage at last summer’s Ozzfest, is virtually sold out, and their third disc, Inhuman Rampage (their first to receive proper distribution in the U.S.), has sold more than 60,000 copies and counting. With such success, almost any band would be having a good time, but none more so than DragonForce, for whom having fun—even if that means sometimes looking ridiculous and oftentimes getting hurt—is what it’s all about.

“It’s no fun for us if we don’t make it fun for the crowd,” Totman explains earlier in the day. He’s resting on a black couch in the band’s dressing room, nursing a toothache and a hangover. “If that means risking our lives, that’s what we have to do. I know one day I’m going to stick my foot down wrong when I’m jumping on the trampoline and break my ankle—especially because I start drinking three hours before the show. If I go onstage and I’m not drunk, I’ll just stand there and look bored, and that’s no fun for anybody.”

“People might laugh at us for banging into each other and falling on the stage from time to time,” says Li, “but you know what? We take 100 times more risks than most bands, and it makes the show that much more fun to see. When we make an album, I’m a total perfectionist and everything has to be great. But when we’re on tour, we just have fun and get drunk and try to get laid.”

That may be another reason why DragonForce have suddenly made power metal palatable to the hesher masses: While their peers seem preoccupied with practicing guitar technique and playing D&D, the ’Force enjoy good old-fashioned red-blooded interests: liquor and ladies. And even less like their peers, getting the latter doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem for them. In fact, on Ozzfest, there was so much love to go around that Totman, Pruzhanov, and bassist Frédéric Leclercq had a contest to see who could get more road action. “You got a certain amount of points for different sexual acts, and we added it all up at the end,” Totman explains. “We went, ‘Well, I got more blowjobs than you, but you fingered more birds.’ At the end of the day, me and Fred tied.”

“Not a chance,” counters Leclercq later. “I was better than Sam. See, I’ve got this trick that really works. I’m from France, and I play up the accent when I’m trying to pick up a girl, and they love it.”

Li and Theart stayed out of the competition. They weren’t opposed to it in principle; they just didn’t like the guidelines. “It was all about quantity,” Li argues. “I’m a quality-control guy.”

“Well, I guess I’m not really picky,” acknowledges Totman with a yawn. “Sometimes you get lucky and you get a hot one, and other times there’s not much around, and you have to go for a fatso. I don’t really care. I love all our fans. Why should a fat chick who likes our band not get fucked by me? That wouldn’t be fair. You just drink enough, and it doesn’t really matter.”

A few hours later, at a little preshow party in DragonForce’s dressing room, Totman seems to demonstrate a bit more selectivity than he lets on. He, Leclercq, and Li circle an attractive woman in her 30s, while her friend, a spiky-haired blond 10 or so years her senior, jealously looks on. But as Totman will reveal, this is not so much a display of standards as an attempt to forge new ground: A couple of months ago, DragonForce were in town for a festival, and the elder woman, who Totman calls “power-metal mum,” was there with her 12-year-old son. “At one point, she disappeared for a few minutes,” Totman recalls. “I turned to the kid and said, ‘You know I’m gonna have sex with your mom.’”

As much as DragonForce’s killer show and debauched lifestyle have contributed to their appeal, their music hasn’t hurt. Totman may seem consumed with rock-and-roll indulgence—and he is—but he’s also an incredibly focused and skilled artist. He wrote most of the music and lyrics for each of the band’s three albums, and he’s only improved as a songwriter over time. Inhuman Rampage is by far DragonForce’s best work, an adrenalized opus of Xbox-generation power metal, charged with elements of black and death metal, thrash, and pop.

“When I’m writing a vocal line, I’m trying to think of the catchiest thing ever,” says Totman. “And with the drums, we want them to be as fast as anything. Some people have called us extremists, but I usually think of an extreme person as some Satanist who likes cutting himself up or something. I’m not like that at all—unless you call wanking six times a day self-mutilation.”

Most of the members of DragonForce have played in death and black-metal bands, but they eventually grew tired of the anger and negativity of extreme metal. “When I’m writing, I always try to focus on the happiest, most uplifting thing I can think of,” Totman explains. “I mean, what do I have to be mad about? I’m traveling the world and having lots of sex.”

What keeps DragonForce sounding particularly uplifting and accessible is Theart, whose voice is a cross between Journey’s Steve Perry and Europe’s Joey Tempest. As dramatic as he is on record and onstage, the singer is soft-spoken, aloof, and private in person. “No one told me I was going to have to do an interview,” he says when Revolver tries to sit him down for a quick conversation. Finally, after a bit of coaxing, he admits, “Some people say I’m enigmatic. I don’t know. I just know I like to do shit when I want to do it and how I want to do it.” But there’s nothing mysterious about his favorite drinking game, Balls in Beer, which DragonForce invented on tour in Japan. “It’s hilarious,” he says with rare enthusiasm. “There really aren’t any rules. Someone just says, ‘balls in beer,’ and then you just put your balls in your beer and drink it.”

Theart has the most exotic background of anyone in DragonForce, a band that cumulatively holds passports from the U.K., Hong Kong, France, New Zealand, the Ukraine, and the singer’s homeland, South Africa, making them something akin to the United Nations of metal. Theart was born on a banana farm in Kruger National Park, where he was surrounded by monkeys and small antelopes. “It was paradise,” he smiles. “When other kids were 15 and went clubbing and all that shit, I was sleeping in the jungle and looking up at starry skies.”

Totman, meanwhile, the son of a lawyer and a nurse, was born in England but moved to New Zealand at age 4. At 10, he was given the option of playing sports or learning an instrument, so he began classical guitar. He discovered Iron Maiden when he was 15, then gravitated to heavier bands. A few years later, he formed the black-metal group Demoniac. After releasing 1994’s Prepare for War and 1996’s Stormblade, Demoniac relocated to England to pursue greater visibility. Once there, they placed an ad for a second guitarist.

Enter Li. Born in Hong Kong, the guitarist lived there for 11 years until he moved to Paris with his family. A year later, he moved again, this time to London. While he didn’t start playing guitar until age 16, the self-taught axman learned quickly and was an impressive shredder by the time he responded to Demoniac’s ad.

“I remember seeing this guitarist holding a soft guitar case with a pointy part coming out, and he was dragging it on the floor like he was walking a dog,” recalls Li of his first meeting with Totman. “He had a bag full of booze, and he drank through the whole rehearsal. I thought, What the hell’s going on? I’m not gonna play with this guy.”

Demoniac’s only album with Li was The Fire and the Wind, which came out in 1999. But by then, Totman was tired of black-metal vocals, so he and Li agreed to form a new band with a different singer. They discovered Theart, who had moved to London in 1998, and placed “band wanted” flyers in Demoniac’s practice studio. Together they formed DragonHeart, though they soon changed the moniker to avoid confusion with a Brazilian outfit with the same name.

DragonForce recorded a five-song demo in mid-’99, and Li, who had a background in computers, posted the songs on MP3.com. “It was right at the same time the MP3 explosion was happening,” says the guitarist. “We were No. 1 on the power-metal chart on MP3.com for two years. We had half a million downloads from that alone, and that really helped generate interest.”

In 2001, following a number of lineup shakeups, Pruzhanov stepped onboard. Born in the Ukraine, the keyboardist started playing piano at age 8 and moved to England at 14 to go to school. Stifled by the language barrier and inspired by his dad’s Yngwie Malmsteen collection, he delved into guitar but switched to synth after meeting Li at a Halford show and discovering DragonForce needed a keyboardist.

“I didn’t really want to play keyboards, but I had classical training in it and I wasn’t doing anything else,” Pruzhanov says. “I didn’t really expect to be in a band full time. I thought I’d just help them out with gigs while I’m in college. But we all got along, so I joined.”

DragonForce signed with Noise/Sanctuary Records in 2000 and finished writing Valley of the Damned in February 2001, but it took the company another two years to release the disc. By that time, the band had hooked up with drummer Dave Mackintosh, a native Englishman who played with progressive black-metal band Bal-Sagoth for seven years before finding an ad Li placed on the Web.

“In all the time I was with Bal-Sagoth, I did less than four weeks of touring,” Mackintosh says. “They didn’t work hard enough for me, so I auditioned for these guys, and three weeks later, we were in Japan.”

In 2004, DragonForce released Sonic Firestorm, which featured euphoric speed marathons like “My Spirit Will Go On,” and “Fury of the Storm,” both of which the band still play live. But DragonForce received little support from their label. Realizing they needed a new home, they signed to metal powerhouse Roadrunner Records. Despite the band’s good fortune, bassist Adrian Lambert quit after recording Inhuman Rampage to spend more time with his wife and son, and in came Leclercq (ex-Heavenly), who still lives in France but commutes frequently to London.

The most black-metal dude in DragonForce, Leclercq wears spiked stage garb and a pentagram dangling from a chain on his neck. You can still see the inverted cross he carved into his arm when he was 16, the same year he sacrificed a live rabbit to Satan. “I still can’t believe I did that because rabbits are cute,” he says. “I’m not into the real devil shit anymore, but I still like to stand there and look evil while everyone else jumps around.”

For all their ethnic and cultural differences, the members of DragonForce are proof that, well, we all can just get along. Not that the band’s internal harmony is always so apparent. “When someone says something stupid, we laugh at them and we don’t hold back,” Theart says. “We go, ‘Fuck you, you fucking gook!’ or ‘You kiwi cunt!’ We’re so politically incorrect, it’s funny. Vadim is ‘the Chernobylator,’ and I’m ‘Tarzan’ or ‘jungle bunny.’ If anybody thinks we’re racist, we either completely are or are not—it’s however you want to look at it. We talk lots of shit, but we’re six different races getting together famously.”

The next morning at 11, after a late night of partying and a bumpy, high-speed bus ride from Massachusetts to the site of the next show, New York City, the members of DragonForce are all hung over, bleary, and very cranky at the relatively early hour. It turned out the only parking for the bus is in New Jersey, so everyone had to get up.

Trying to avoid just this sort of premature wake-up call almost led the band to turn down Ozzfest, the gig that ultimately broke DragonForce to U.S. fans. Initially, they were offered a slot on the second stage after event organizers attended a one-off show at Los Angeles’ Whisky a Go Go. “The audience was going mental, even though we hadn’t done anything in America before,” Totman recalls. “So, afterwards, they invited us to play the Ozzfest small stage, but I said, ‘No, I can’t be bothered to wake up at 9 A.M. in the morning every day.’ The next day, the guy got back to us and said, ‘Well, you can play the main stage if you want.’”

Unfortunately, things are not working out nearly as smoothly today, especially for Totman, whose tooth is threatening to burst. DragonForce’s tour manager books an emergency appointment with his New York dentist; the rest of the band members, meanwhile, try to clear their heads, but there’s no time to rest. There are work visas to pick up, interviews to conduct, a soundcheck to do, and the ever-important trampoline-girl search. “I don’t know how I’m gonna make it to the show,” Leclercq groans, cradling his head in his hands. “Last night, I got really stoned, and then all these fans wanted me to come out and sign things, but I was too high to leave. So I leaned out the window and apologized every two seconds. They all wanted to talk to me, but when I’m really fucked up, I only want to speak my native language, and it freaks me out to speak English. I’m still kind of freaked out.”

Still, come showtime, Leclercq and his bandmates are pumped and ready to destroy—which they do. While their stage show is way more balls-out and kinetic than almost any other bands’, DragonForce can clearly deliver the goods even when they’re feeling less than 100 percent, which raises the question: How will they up the ante next tour to keep things challenging and exciting for both themselves and the fans?

“We want to get rigging to fly up in the air,” Totman proposes post-show as he heads to the dressing room, a towel draped around his head, “and attach skateboard rails onto the stage set.”

He’s about to close the bathroom door when he concludes. “We have really short attention spans, so we always have to change things around. If we lose interest in something, it’s over.”