Hard Rock Magazine - France, Aug/Sept 1995. Strapping Young Lad By Hervé SK GEWGAW. Translation by Roger Billerey

An accomplished musician with eclectic tastes, or a lonely mercenary ready to work for anyone? It's not easy to understand a character who debuted with Steve Vai and is currently screaming like a banshee with super-brutal industrial-metal band. Hard Rock led the investigation...

A complete unknown until 1993, when Steve Vai pulled him out of his hat and enlisted him to sing on Sex and Religion, Devin Townsend, a Canadian gifted with a tremendous voice, quickly made himself a place in the sun. That's why the upcoming release of his solo album was greeted with great interest.

However, many were the casualties, for listening to Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing when one is expecting sweet, meditation-inducing melodies amounts to drinking pure acid instead of mineral water. Yet Steve had warned us that Devin was into extreme bands. But nobody paid attention. Besides, fans of Heavy-era Devin will inevitably wonder what the hell he was doing with Steve Vai.

"I'm an artist and I grab any musically valid opportunity that may arise, be it new age, jazz or metal", replies the fellow. "It has nothing to do with my career plans. I just do what I like when I want to. That's the only thing that leads me," he adds, sweeping suspicion aside. "I didn't do it to become rich or famous. If I was money-minded I'd have become a lawyer. And it was no easy job working with Steve. The press in the US just killed me. I did it because it was a dream come true for me: I was playing in small local bands,

I was a student, I was making a living broiling burgers in a restaurant, and I don't think that any 19 year-old kid would say no to an offer to record an album and tour Australia and Japan with Aerosmith. Basically, I was shopping for a deal for one of my old projects, Noisescapes, which is just as violent as SYL, and I had sent a tape to Steve's label, which signed me. Two weeks later, Relativity called me back to tell me Steve had listened to my tape and wanted me to sing for him. A bit after that Relativity nicely scrapped Noisescapes, and I have a hunch they only offered me a deal to get me to sing with Steve. "

Since then, Devin has been working with a bunch of people, from the Wildhearts to Front Line Assembly to IR8, Jason Newsted's secret side-project.

DT: "I don't care if people are put off because I do so many things. I'm happy to have proved that I'm able to be succesful in various fields. But I want to set things straight about IR8: it's true that Jason and I jammed and recorded a few songs together; people heard about it and thought we wanted to put out a CD, which is absolutely not true."

- Not very convincing! Why the hell would you find a name for a project unless you want to sell it?

DT: "It doesn't make any difference. Jason found that name for fun, just as he called his project with members of Sepultura and Exodus 'Sepultallica'. People took this project way too seriously. Among the people I've worked with, Jason is certainly the one who needs the least publicity!"

- An interesting detail: Heavy features a cover of "Exciter" followed by a few bars from "Running Wild", just as on Unleashed in the East!

DT: "Congratulations! Everybody's been asking me why I'd covered a Judas Priest song, but you're the only one that noticed the sequence. I'm a huge fan of Judas Priest and when I recorded 'Exciter' I simply carried on, like on their live album that I know backward and forward. Then I added a recording of a Japanese audience -- from the Vai tour, by the way -- to make it sound like a live recording. I even wanted to put a live inter but I thought that would be a bit too much!"