1. What inspired the name of the band and what are your influences?
Steven Campbell (lead vocals/bass): My dad, Adrian Campbell was actually in a band called Avalanche in the 70s and the 80s, they used to belong to the same management company as AC/DC, they have even played with them before and some other major bands at that time, we thought it was an awesome sounding name and wanted to keep the rock and roll family tradition going so after going through a lot of other names, we decided to name our band Avalanche.
Veronica (Guitars): Our influences, as a band, is definitely 70s/80s Aussie rock bands like AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, the Angels, Stevie Wright, the Easybeats, and my dad’s band Avalanche. We’re also inspired by all the big rock and metal bands like Guns n Roses, Led Zep, Metallica, Sabbath, Motörhead, as well as the Rolling Stones, The Who, Chuck Berry, and we also have a lot of blues influences as well.
2. How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?
Steven: Generally we all come together and have a talk about what the general theme of the song should be, and usually it comes form life experience, or an emotion we want to share and we express that through sort of archetypical rock themes. For instance, we have songs about sex, drugs, good times, bad times, anger, being down on your luck, being told to turn it down, telling someone to fuck off, etc. We each contribute to our songs, anyone can contribute an idea, often Veronica will come up with the title and a few lyrics or me or Ryan, our drummer will come up with the main riff, and once we have the basic idea we kind of all go off and work on it then bring it back to the band and bring it all together until the song is ready to play to a live audience.
3. Why do you write the sort of music that you do?
Veronica: We’ve only ever wanted to play rock n’ roll. With our latest release ‘Sent From Hell’, we wanted to write an album centred around themes of hell, sin, sex and rock and roll. We wanted to create the most massive sound possible through sheer volume and force rather than distortion and effects, and strip things back to its bare bones. I think it was Slash or someone who said that a good rock song has either gotta make you want to fight or fuck, so our music sort of encapsulate those two feelings from start to finish. We just want to write music you can loose your mind too.
4. How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?
Ryan (Drums): Well when we first started gigging it was a show-to-show sort of thing where we’d sit down beforehand and discuss what we wanted on the setlist and then play it at that show and do it again for the next, but recently we decided when we were going to be playing different areas of the city that we should work out one main sort of setlist that is just polished off and then have one or two songs that we switch out and I feel that gives a much tighter and hard hitting live show.
5. What are your plans for the future?
Steven: We’ll be gigging non-stop all over Sydney over the next few months to promote the EP, we’re already booked out until the end of July and are constantly booking more shows and working as hard as possible to make em our best shows yet. We’re working very hard with several promotion companies and advertisers as well to just push this EP as far as it can go. Veronica just bought a beautiful new Gibson SG as well, she has 2 now, as well as a Marshall JCM2000 stack that she got last year that she can wait to play the shit out off live. Arthur had to buy a stack as well just to compete with her! So if you’re in Sydney anytime soon, be sure to come along! Apart from that, we’re already working on a new release for towards the end of the year, stay tuned!