Alexisonfire’s guitarist Wade MacNeil and frontman George Petitt talk about their continuing rise to the top of the pile. Also, get your Alexisonfire tickets here.

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When did the band become a fulltime pursuit?
Wade: “I feel like we had tricked EMI into signing us for publishing. They’d given us enough money to buy a van from the early 80s and buy our first order of merch. But in reality they had tricked us. It was like $6,000 dollars, back in 2001. It was more money than we’d ever seen. We were still playing shows for like $30.”

How did the shows start to change?
George: “I remember us playing a show at the NAC – the Niagra Artists Centre – which was just a room. Hippies would rent it for drum circles. It was cheap. We played one and we filled it, I felt like I was king of the world. And by full I mean, 60 people. I remember the guy from EMI was nooping around us, and he said, ‘that was pretty good, eh? I want you to keep doing it until next time you fill this room and have a queue round the block’. I was like, ‘what a fucking asshole!’ And then three months later that happened. It was the first time I’d actually witnessed the crowds getting bigger.

Wade “Our shows at the beginning were fucking mental. I was booking all our show1s, and I would book everywhere except Toronto. We’d play every single little city and town that was like half an hour from Toronto. We’d just play union halls and church basements or whatever bar would have us. We did that incessantly until kids would travel to see us play.”

Was there a watershed show for you?
Wade: “I think it was the first time we came to the UK, around the time of the second album. We weren’t sure if anyone had heard of us in the UK, but showed up and we were headlining. We were like, ‘does anyone know who we are here?’, they said, ‘yeah’, we were like, ‘are you sure?’.”

Download 2006 was a big show for you?
George: “It was weird. It felt like the biggest show we’d played in England. And in that tent it was people who had really come to us. There was stuff on the mainstage, but we had about 10,000 people packed into that tent, and the The Prodigy were on after us. That was a moment when I was like, ‘wow, this is cool’.

And back home?
Wade: “Around that time we decided to book this big hall for a xmas show. And the show sold out right away so we put on a second night. While we were away in Europe on tour, that sold out and they put on a third night, and that sold out! We’d never played on a stage that big, we had no idea what to do – it blew our minds.”

And your biggest show?
George: “There’s a giant festival in Quebec, Canada for a week – people like ZZ Top, y’know – and we played with Billy Talent to 56,000 people. The second time we did it was closer to 80,000. It was crazy.”

How have your lifestyles changed?
Wade: “With the amount of touring we did on the last album it started to get like VH1 Presents Behind The Music, y’know?! It was like, this is fucking stupid, we’re turning into a rock band cliché: the singer leaves to go do a solo project, the others are all fucked up drinking all the time, having health repercussions because of it. There was a clear reasons why we do this, because we all live for music, not for booze.”
George: “I’m not a vegetarian anymore, I’m married, but in between leaping off stage I lead a normal life.”