Mike: It's a comic book - Slain The Berzerker. Not the gay Simon Bisley, but the graphic novels, the comic books on Eagle Comics in 1986, I think. I read them in the late eighties and saw Lord Weird Slough Feg and thought "what on earth? That's kind of stupid." Then I saw Irish mythology; I saw the Toyance(?) and books like that and I got interested in Irish mythology. The way they described the violence was very comic bookish even in the myths and translated, so I figured it was a cool thing to call a band Slough Feg. It sounded weird. (laughter)

Mike: It never was shortened, really. "The Lord Weird" was this thing we used to say. "The Lord Weird" because it was in the comic book and when Dragonheart Records put our record out, they put that in big letters on there and we didn't like that. So on the next album, they said "well, they know you, you go under L, The Lord Weird," so we had to use it. We didn't want to, really, and everyone just called us Slough Feg before that, so we didn't really change that; we just changed the way it was written, not the way it was said.

Mike: Well, we're not selling as many records 'cause no one's selling as many records because of internet pirating. But that doesn't really matter because we never made any money off of record sales really anyway… well, maybe a little bit, but not enough to make a difference. Cruz Del Sur is better…it's not as good for them, I guess, 'cause they don't make shit, but they pay for plane tickets and stuff like that, they support us on the road, a little bit more promotion in America. We sell way less in Europe with Cruz Del Sur. But it doesn't matter 'cause we already did Europe five times; we're more interested in America now to some extent. Sick of flying; I feel like a human being right now to some extent. I just got up early and drove from San Francisco, but still, if I was in Europe and Germany… see this is amazing right here (referring to Phil's patch covered jacket); you wouldn't see that here five years ago when we first started touring Europe… seven years ago, actually... we started seeing this kind of shit and thought it'll never happen in America, now it's common to see a guy with a jacket like that.

Mike: No, but still, it's really nice of you to wear that.

Mike: Yep, it's really nice; I really appreciate that.

Mike: Fifteen years, sixteen years, yeah. But what do you mean "what is it like?" Look at my gray hairs. It's who I am. It's not just slaving away in the underground for me as a musician, like a lot of people do. It's having moved to the West Coast and lived in these shitty neighborhoods. You didn't have to do that to be me, but to get the kind of musicians I want to and live in neighborhoods where I can practice… eh, well… that's maybe just my choice. What's it like? It's a pain in the ass, you know? But now it's finally paying off; we're getting some recognition and we're getting some good tours and some appreciation. People hated us in the nineties. Before we had records out, up 'til '96, people just hated us in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Now we're getting appreciated more - it's nice. But it's been really shitty for a long time, it's been really rough and we've been able to do two decent tours; we did some really, really bad ones and ate shit, really just lived in conditions no one would want to on the road and stuff. A lot of people wouldn't do it, but we did, so now we get some kind of payback for it.

Mike: I don't know why people don't just do a search. They say "I can't find it, I can't find it," but you search on the internet, you can find it. You do a Google search for "Twilight of the Idols" and you can find it. Really, we hope to have Dragonheart Records distributed better in the United States. I don't know, are they going to repress the records? I guess, maybe. I hope so. They can be found; people can order them from us, they can order them from Dragonheart directly. There's people that have them, but I know, it sucks that they're hard to get, it really does. But we're going to do more albums, so is it easier to get the Cruz Del Sur album?

Mike: Okay, well, we'll be doing more with them. (laughs)

Mike: Our old drummer was going to do it, but it fell off. It's not in the works. I have footage… I can do a DVD, but I just need to have time. Maybe in July I'll sit down and sort that out, but we're so busy as people and as a band… which is good. We're not just busy as people; none of us are hobbyists at this point, which is very good. I mean, I've had a lot of different members, but now because I'm not a hobbyist I want to do this as full-time as I can, you know, then everybody in the band is that way. We're very busy with the band; we're going to record again in September, we've been recording for seven inches and compilations and stuff all year. There will be one eventually. There's a DVD of the festival we just played, Keep It True… not just played, played in November, there's some stuff on there. But we want to make a DVD. I don't know how to do it myself; I'll just have to take a bunch of videotapes and DVD's to somebody who knows how to do it and sit down and do it with them, but nobody has the time to do that right now. We should, though, you're absolutely right, 'cause we have a lot of live footage and a lot of silly stuff, us sitting around being silly. So yeah…

Mike: I haven't had any thoughts about it at all. We're going to play it. (laughs) It's going to be fun, a lot of friends of mine will be there. What can you say? I'm sure some people will show up and it'll be fine. (laughs) I mean, I don't know what to say about it. (yelling) Metal!!! Yeah!!! (laughs)

Mike: You talk to John Cobbet about that. (laughs) It was done a year and a half ago, I didn't write any of it, really; I sang some songs on it, I played some guitar on it, but not much. Wanna hear it? We've got it. (laughs) It's alright, it's pretty good. (laughs) I don't have much to say about it, sorry.

Mike: For Hammers?

Mike: A possible one, yeah, but not a probable one. I mean, there isn't even a lineup right now. So that album was done, that was the last thing that the old lineup did. It's up to John; I told him a long time ago, I f you have some shows or something set up call me to come in, but I'm not going to sit around. I don't write songs for that band anymore, really; it's just a solo project pretty much, you know what I mean?

Mike: It has to do with something, otherwise…

Mike: Yeah. Yes it is. I don't know what the relevancy of that question is, but like you said, it's not about anything. Yeah, I guess it would be.

Mike: Well of course it would be; necrophilia, you fuck a dead thing. (laughter) I never had sex with a zombie. Actually, I had sex with some girls who might as well be zombies… actually recently I did one of those. But yeah, I'd say that would be necrophilia.

(later on in the evening…)

Mike: But to continue that question about what it was like to struggle for ten, fifteen years underground… it's really interesting for us now because people hated us. I mean, some people hate a lot in San Francisco. We had people who liked us… the eccentric weirdo people like us who are now into metal or whatever, in 1992, '93, '94. But in San Francisco and up here, actually; we played up here three or four times back then, and the kids hated us; really hated us around '94, '95, '96. We played Satyricon and everybody hated us here because in this town particularly, and in San Francisco, because grunge was big and punk was getting big again and there was still this backlash from Glam metal and they associated, for some weird reason, us with that. Everyone hated Maiden and Priest; now everybody loves that shit, so it's weird all that time that we struggled and remained totally unknown with no records out, demos that never got distributed because we didn't know anything about underground metal back then. Now, like I said, you see people wearing jackets like yours, we've put five records out and all that… this is this first time Slough Feg's been in Portland since '96. Last time we were here, it was like at Satyricon; people didn't like us… so it's weird to see how like now, you said that band, Last Empire, now there's a band in every town that has a dragon on the cover of their record.

Back in the nineties we were striving for that… I mean, we didn't want dragons on the cover, but if we would have found one band in America like that back in '95, '96, we would have been "oh my god!" In fact, when we did, we found Twisted Tower Dire, it was like "holy shit." And now there's people in every town who know us, who know them and there's so much metal, you've got it all over you and in Europe, everybody's got a dragon on their album cover, everybody's got the imagery about King Arthur, all this stuff we were doing in the nineties. We feel like we were ahead of our time. But maybe again, there's a lot of people in obscurity doing that back then, maybe, all over the world. I mean, it's a big trend now. We were doing Viking metal and all that shit back then and nobody in America that we knew of was making that kind of music back then. Especially people who were young at that time, in their twenties at that time. So it's weird to think about ten years ago and to see what's happened and be like "Jesus." I take it for granted at this point, "oh yeah, another stupid band with a dragon on their album cover, another bunch of kids with jean jackets with patches on them." I would have… ten, seven, six, whatever years ago, five years ago in America, I would have been, "holy shit, I gotta go hang out with those guys, what's going on?" And now I'm spoiled by it. (laughter) So it's pretty weird.

I guess we've reached a level where I can relax a little bit, which is really cool. I can sit back and say "okay, I don't have to move a muscle, I don't have to try to get us on tour, I don't have to try to put records out," I can just accept. We've turned down tours; we turned down a European last Spring, fully paid, because it wasn't going to get us anywhere and that's a pretty good feeling at this point to be able to have people come to you after back then we couldn't even get a show half the time because people hated us... see, we were doing the same thing the whole time. We just went from 1990, with the sound that we wanted to have, like the eighties, early eighties sound, and just kept going with it. I think we figured out it was cool to do that style again in 1990 and took everybody else about fifteen years to catch up. (laughs) Or maybe that's not true, but I feel like it was, 'cause I was into hardcore and stuff after I was into metal in the eighties and weird and different kinds of music and stuff, then I got back into the purest form in about 1990, when we started this band, back into the purest form of what I thought was heavy music, which was like super, like '79 "Unleashed In The East" type shit and I think that's the same feeling people eventually got in 2000, 2005, whatever, but they just sort of moved slower or something. I don't know. (laughs) So that's the answer to that question.