Forbidden Dimension releases fresh album to celebrate 30 years of horror rock
They've been around for three decades and are considered pioneers of the horror-rock genre by many. Calgary's Forbidden Dimension is celebrating 30 years with an album release at a downtown pub this Saturday.
The band consists of Tom Bagley, who's stage name is Jackson Phibes, and Virginia Dentata and P.T. Bonham — both of whom prefer to use only their stage names.
Bagley and Bonham sat down with The Homestretch for a look back.
This interview has been edited and paraphrased for clarity and length.
Q: Describe your movement for us? What is horror rock?
P.T.: It is rock and roll music with a bit of a theme.
Our theme is horror and other unsavoury activities. It's not limited to horror, but our music does seem to have a high percentage of early or untimely deaths.
Q: Why horror rock as opposed to mainstream rock?
Tom: I was always obsessed with monsters, horror movies and scary stuff when I was a little kid.
There were monster models and things like that that were big. My mom used to go to see horror movies at the Crescent Theatre on Centre Street and would tell me about it.
That was a gateway and it went into other stuff after that. Then Kiss happened, Alice Cooper, punk rock had a lot of horror imagery in it.
Q: What about you, P.T., what attracted you to the genre?
P.T.: It is great imagery. Thematically it never gets old.
The good intentions go awry and other things of this nature. It is [Jackson's] long-running project, I am technically only a recent addition.
You can't really go wrong with a werewolf playing bongos, can you?
Q: Can you give us an example of a song and the story behind it?
Tom: On the current album, Muchas Moscas, there's a song called Sweet Cheryl Kermit.
It's about a farm girl who gets a mysterious coin of Etruscan origin and it turns her into a living mummy that rises to power in the social circles, with various sacrifices along the way.
She maintains her youthful visage and one day it all ends, it comes crashing down.
They find her withered, mummified body and they didn't realize how old she actually was. It is sort of political-ish but not really, current state of affairs.
We try and cram it all into, like, two minutes.
Q: You have been around for 30 years, were you the only guys doing this back in the day?
Tom: It was a pretty lonely field.
Shortly after we got going, we got signed to a record company, Cargo Records out of Montreal, and that perpetuated it longer than we had planned.
When that era started dying out, all these other bands started coming out of the woodwork and now it is almost a crowded market.
It's very competitive, it's hard to get noticed. Everyone is wearing the corpse makeup.
Q: The band has this niche following all over the world. Why do you think that is?
P.T.: I'd like to think there are tiny groups of people all over the world that recognize our genius.
It's always reassuring to know that if they like it, they seem to like it a lot.
There might be larger groups of people that don't check it out because they might have a preconceived notion of what it is, whereas the band, musically, covers a lot of ground.
Without being a funny band, there is a good sense of humour to it.
Q: Why has the band lasted so long?
Tom: It's an art or cartooning project.
Even if I am by myself I can still pull it off because I write the songs and I can draw the pictures.
What else is there? What else have I got to do with my life?
Q: What else are you doing, Tom?
Tom: I teach cartooning through the City of Calgary at North Mount Pleasant Arts Centre.
A friend used to say, 'You have that rock and roll career in case that cartooning career doesn't pan out, you can fall back on.'
Q: What else do you do, P.T.?
P.T.: I work in menswear.
I have tried other things, but usually there are complaints from the human resource department.
Q: What are your musical influences?
P.T.: We share a love of a lot of groups: The Damned, Blue Öyster Cult, Kiss, Status Quo. All the top groups.
Tom: A bunch of genres influence the music.
I also really love stuff like Henry Mancini, that kind of Italian soundtrack music, Spaghetti Western music. Weird lounge stuff is in there too.
Q: What's your schedule like right now?
Tom: It's a weird year, this year.
We are playing every weekend, which we don't usually do. It feels like work. We try to play once a month just to keep our hands in it, but we have seven shows this month.
Forbidden Dimension celebrates 30 years of doing what they do, while releasing their latest album, Muchas Moscas, this Saturday at Palomino Smokehouse with lots of musical friends. Doors to this adult-only show open at 7 p.m.
With files from The Homestretch
