Metalcore Titans Return: The Ghost Inside’s ‘Going Down Under’ Tour Hits Australia
Next month, The Ghost Inside return to Australian shores not long after their support run on the gargantuan Parkway Drive tour. This time they are headlining across the country and bring with them Scottish metallers Bleed From Within. Historically, these Americans have always had an affinity with down under as drummer Andrew Tkaczyk explains
‘For whatever reason, and I think the rest of the guys would agree with me, that Australia has always felt like our second home. The band’s been coming there since before I was even in the band in 2008. There’s some very deep connection with your country and receiving The Ghost Inside music so well. It’s so beloved there and it’s noticeable as we love playing for the Australian people, but we also just love to be there, always crossing our fingers for some days off because it’s one of our collective favourite spots to go on tour simply because it’s beautiful.’
Last year the band had a standard support slot that means squeezing in as many bangers as you can with some not always making the cut. As a headliner, the extra time means extra freedom to load up the list with all killer-no filler blasters.
‘You’re going to get, we actually just put it together, and by we, I mean Jim is usually the curator of our set list and he always does such a good job with that. He just sent us a proposed set list for this run coming up and it is overwhelmingly just banger after banger, after banger after banger. There’s no lull in the set. It’s going to be an absolute classic Ghost Inside headline set. I forget how long exactly, but it’s definitely over an hour. It’s going to be a mixed bag of the discography like it always is, but we promise everyone’s going to love it.’
Smashing away on the tubs for over an hour can be physical exerting for fully abled drummers, so how does one prepare with one leg?
‘The biggest thing is when you’re working out, you’re doing reps, it’s repetitions, you’re doing it over and over. The more you’re out there playing shows, the more naturally it comes. I don’t really find myself having to do a whole lot of preparation. I usually change into my stage clothes a half hour before we go on. I like to go up behind the stage, put my ears in, do some stretches. That’s about it. I’m more of getting in a mental head space to do it and I just try to get myself pumped up mentally. The rest just works itself out for me.’
Andrew is in a unique group of drummers, of which I can only count one other in Def Leppard’s Rick Allen, who still shines on a kit despite a missing limb. In fact, that missing limb has not stopped Tkaczyk dropping beats like a pneumatic hammer as he finds novel ways around it.
‘I tried at first, because I’m above knee on the right leg amputee, to play with my prosthesis on with that attached but I found that you had to keep the prosthetic foot bound to the pedal, otherwise you have no ankle dexterity. It would drift off and it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t feeling right. The legs heavy. My dad was the one who thought I needed a device that I can play without that on, with what residual limb I have left. He designed something for me that worked really well. It’s a device that essentially there’s a pad that I hit with my limb that is connected with a bar to the actual kick drum pedal. So that pedal is my snare drum, it’s right by my snare drum and it acts as an extra extension to my existing pedal to play without the prosthesis. That completely changed the game for me and with a lot of practice, it’s gotten me back to playing at the level we’re playing at confidently. Some ingenuity from my father and myself, and a lot of trial and error, and we figured it out.’
Mighty impressive dedication to the craft, which brings us to nearly two years since last music was dropped, are the band dabbling away in the background with more to come?
‘Oh yeah, we haven’t stopped. We honestly started writing for the next album last summer officially. If there’s time off, I’m in my home studio right now, I am in here every day trying to get demos done and ideas out and we have a huge pile already. The goal is that we want to have too much to pick from. That’s a good problem to have. So we have been working for a while on the next record and we’re pretty deep in it and we are not stopping until we have a perfect next record. So it’s on its way!’
Bleed From Within toured with the band over in the states not too long ago and are the main support in Australia. As Scott Kennedy advised on these pages a few months ago, BFW have never been here so what is the connection like between the bands that they’ll bring them all the way over here.
‘They’re just the exact same type of personalities as we are. Their sense of humour, it’s nonstop, just absolute ridiculousness when we’re together. I believe that a lot of people would call The Ghost Inside a hardcore band. I personally have always thought even before I was in the band that it was a metal core band. Either way, it’s this metal hardcore adjacent thing. They have that too as well. They have a lot more traditional Swedish metal influence, but they also have big breakdowns and they have big catchy choruses as well. They’re just a perfect fit for us and they also happen to be some of our best mates. So it just made sense when we were talking to them before, we told them how much we love Australia and they said, we’ve never been. ‘WHAT!? You guys have never been to Australia?’ We told them we were going to bring them and we are so excited to see how they go over there. I know they’re going to crush it. They’re an insanely good band and insanely good dudes.’
Interview By Iain McCallum
Catch The Ghost Inside with Bleed From Within On The Following Dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
