"I hope everybody knows we're presenting lyrics that have nothing to do with our personal lives."

Around 5 p.m. on March 5, 2007, exactly three hours before their first ever show in Sofia, Bulgaria, Alex Webster - founder and bass player of America's death metal masters Cannibal Corpse - entered the halls of Tangra Mega Rock...

Vassil Varbanov: Hey, Alex, how are you doing?

Ales Webster: Good, man, how are you?

V. V.: It's good to have you with us today! Perfect weather, huh?

A. W.: Yes, it is.

V. V.: A perfect day for a Cannibal Corpse concert in Bulgaria - actually the first one. How has your current tour been so far?

A. W.: Everything's been pretty good. This is actually still the beginning of the tour - we're having the 11th show tonight, and we have another 17 to go, so we're not even half-way finished yet. So far it's been great. We've gone through France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, and now we're here. We're in a groove and we feel like the shows are going very smoothly, and we expect to do a really good and tight performance tonight. We never thought we'll finally get here, but now we are. We're so happy.

V. V.: Are all the metalheads around the world looking the same? Most ofВ your fans probablyВ wear Cannibal Corpse t-shirts, but besides that?

A. W.: There are little differences, like in Europe we find more people wearing coats with patches of the band names, especially in Germany, while in America you don't see that as much - there are just a few people who do it there, and they used to do it more when I was young. When I was a teenager I had patches and everyhting... As for Bulgaria - this is our first time here and I still haven't really seen how the fans look like. However, it seems like metal is pretty universal and there's a sort of a uniform that we all have, ha-ha!

V. V.: Obviously, when you were a kid you couldn't wear patches of Cannibal Corpse, but what bands were on you?

A. W.: I had Metallica on the back, I had Accept... I think I had a Slayer one, but it was just a logo, and a "Pleasure to Kill" patch by Kreator. I also had some pins. Besides, if I couldn't find some patch, I'd write the name of the band, like I had Morbid Angel written with magic marker on the back of my jacket... Ah, and I took a Possessed t-shirt, just cut out a part of it and turned it into a patch. I think it's normal to do that sort of thing, because you wanna support the bands you like.

V. V.: You passed through the most dramatic change in your line-up with Chris Barnes (Cannibal Corpse's first vocalist; now dealing with Six Feet Under) leaving the band in the mid-90's - or you kicking him out? - and George Fisher (Cannibal Corpse's current singer) joining you...

A. W.: It was our choice to ask Chris to leave the band. Replacing a singer is always one of the most difficult things to do, but we knew that if we got a really excellent replacement, it won't be a problem. We had to choose someone that we felt was better for the job, so the four of us wanted George Fisher as a singer. Of course, we made good albums with Chris, but we're much happier with the work we've done with George.

V. V.: I believe some of your fans have "followed" Chris and Six Feet Under after his departure? Any band should have this problem when changing vocalists, as it was the case with Sepultura and Soulfly, for example... This is natural, after all, but do you give a fuck?

A. W.: Not really. We're really interested just in improving the quality of the music we're making, and we knew - even if we lost fans - that our music is going to be more brutal and faster, as we could do things we could never do before - George can sing a lot more rapidly and stuff... Somethimes you just have to do what's gonna be best for the band's music. Now that we've done six studio albums with George, people see that we're quite capable of continuing with a different singer.

V. V.: Is the air conditioning system killing your back, by the way?

A. W.: Oh, no. What's killing my back is some headbanging from the past 15-20 years, ha-ha!

V. V.: Alright then. Do you have kids?

A. W.: I'm married, but I don't have any kids, we just have a couple of dogs. George has two children and Paul (Mazurkiewicz - drums) has one daughter, the other guys aren't married.

V. V.: Do other kids' parents prevent them from playing with George's and Paul's children, because they're in a band like Cannibal Corpse?

A. W.: They're both so young and their kids are still babies, so they haven't had any problems like that, but I kinda doubt it. First of all, the parents aren't gonna know, so I can't foresee that being a problem... but you never know. There could be some radical Christian families that wouldn't want their children to play with the kids of a person in an extreme band...

V. V.: Now a question-cliche: What do you prefer - playing live or in the studio?

A. W.: They both are good. In the studio you have time to make sure everything's just perfect, so that eventually the album becomes the right representation of your songs. Of course, it's not gonna be always perfect live, because you're headbanging, but there's this craziness and a lot of energy and it's deffinitely more exciting.

V. V.: You know, lots of people do not pay credit to the fact that guys in extreme bands are sometimes brilliant musicians, like Napalm Death and you, Cannibal Corpse. How often do you practise?

A. W.: Especially when you start out, you go through a point when you practise all the time, like maybe for 2-3 years. I myself used to practise for 6 to 8 hours a day in the beginning. After you've done that for a while, you don't need to do it anymore, because if you play for 6 to 8 hours a day for 20 years, eventually you're gonna hate your instrument. You have to have some balance in life. Anyway, we still practice 4 or 5 days a week, 3 hours a day.

V. V.: What about Paul - the other surviving member from Cannibal Corpse's original line-up next to you? Is he a good guy?

A. W.: Oh, yes, he is. We've known each other for quite a long time, since we got the band together. Paul works hard, he's very responsible, always at practice, and I really enjoy the kind of beats he plays.

V. V.: Is he your best friend in the band?

A. W.: No, we're all pretty much equally friends, but most of all we're bandmates, which is a different kind of friendship. When we're home we hang out with some different friends. Of course, sometimes we go get some dinner together, but not all the time, because we see each other any day when we practice. We're very close, like a family, but we all have separate friends.

V. V.: As you mentioned dinner - are there any vegetarians in the band?

A. W.: Just Paul. He's been vegetarian for 3 or 4 years now.

V. V.: Being vegetarian and playing in a band called Cannibal Corpse - isn't that weird?

A. W.: Yeah, a little, but it was the same thing with Carcass - all of them were vegetarians, although they had a lot of gory lyrics, with plenty of slicing and dicing going on, but that's not really contradictory. I hope everybody knows we're presenting lyrics that have nothing to do with our personal lives. It's just something we do for entertainment.

V. V.: Yeah, it should be obvious for everyone that you don't eat corpses, but what would you say about those idiots - mainly in the States, to be honest - who go into a mall or a supermarket, kill people with machine guns and then shoot themsleves? Why the hell these things happen exclusively in the USA?

A. W.: I have no idea. Probably some people who are much more intelligent than me could talk about this for hours and still not know the answer... I really don't know, but it's possible that these things happen more often in America because of the easier access to fire arms, who knows...

V. V.: Well, our conversation is going to its end, as you have to go to the hall to do soundcheck for tonight. Let's finish with the usual question: What's next for Cannibal Corpse?

A. W.: We'd like to do a live DVD, and probably - instead of being all one concert, like for "Live Cannibalism" - it's going to be a couple of songs from one city, some more from another... I even believe tonight someone might be filming, so if the footage turns out good we could use it. We're also gonna film some shows in America and some other places. We're gonna go to South America and Mexico, we'll try to get to Japan... You see, we wanna do a lot more touring until about the middle of October, then we'll take a little break, and in November we start writing the next album.

Copyright: Tangra Mega Rock