Dragonforce
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 “There’s always an accident ready to happen anyway,” Dragonforce’s Herman Li smiles. “You just see the guitar where it drops and smashes. There’s always going to be something happening like accidents, I think. We always take the risk. It’s more fun. It’s boring to be standing still when you’re just going . . ." He mimes playing hunched over a guitar.
"The fans don’t want to see it, we don’t want to do it. We can’t do it anyway. We tried once while playing a new song, 'cuz we were trying to control ourselves to not fuck up, but we just ran everywhere anyway.”
Li is one-half of the twin guitar attack that makes up probably the most exciting band to get onstage in recent memory. He works alongside fellow super-fast, super-technical six-stringer Sam Totman, mad scientist keyboardist/keytarist Vadim Pruzhanov, former Bal Sagoth drummer Dave Mackintosh and new guy Frederic Leclercq on bass. Master of ceremonies ZP Theart—easily the most natural, engaging and impressive frontman this scribe has ever witnessed—fills out the lineup with his vocal talents.
Since forming in 1999, Dragonforce (originally called Dragonheart) have built a formidable reputation for its gloriously over-the-top live performances, where the band dashes all over the stage so fast that transfixed audiences get neck strain trying to keep everyone in view, because you never know who’s going to do what next. Having released debut disc "Valley Of The Damned" and follow-up "Sonic Firestorm," Dragonforce then signed to Roadrunner Records for "Inhuman Rampage," which hit stores in January. The group's profile was already rising, but since its Roadrunner debut arrived, Dragonforce's celebrity has jumped a couple of notches.
“It’s great [getting popular], because we never changed our style,” an excited Li exclaims. “I think there was a lot of people listening, but it was really underground. The magazines weren’t pushing it, but some music fans always go looking for music. The people who went looking for it got into it, but a lot of people don’t have time to go on the Internet and check out all the bands, the MP3s. They need someone to summarize what they think they need to listen to. What we’ve gotten from the press . . . it wasn’t like, ‘Dragonforce, Dragonforce!’ They [the fans] had a choice; they had lots of other bands on the [sampler] CDs [that rock magazines sometimes include on their covers]. They had variety, so the great thing was we weren’t fielded as the coolest thing you could listen to, so they made the choice of what they wanted to hear.
“I think a lot of people don’t think this album is much better than the other two,” he says of "Inhuman Rampage." “It’s just they never heard the band, or they’d heard about it and they probably thought it was like every other power metal band from Germany or Sweden, so they had that kind of idea of us.”
Ah, power metal. Often considered to be the feeblest form of metal with it’s usually whimsical lyrical themes wrapped up in tunes that are rarely heavy. It’s bombastic, though. Surely the mighty, furiously entertaining Dragonforce doesn't fit this mold. “No, we got influences from power metal, but we definitely have took it beyond the typical power metal genre that we used to listen to,” the guitarist says. “There’s as much influence from Megadeth, Slayer, Metallica [and] Pantera than from Helloween. Just because the singing is kind of classified that way, the guitars are more influenced by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani than power metal.”
Dragonforce may be musically brilliant, but it’s the way the band re-creates its sound live that has captured the hearts and imaginations of metal fans and substantially increase its standing as a touring band. For example, when it first played Dublin in late 2005 at Temple Bar Music Centre, the act sold 400-plus tickets in advance. When Dragonforce returned this past March for its Ambassador Theatre performance (a venue that has recently hosted such heavyweights as Slayer and Dio), it sold more than 1,000 tickets. Since March it has put in a heavy summer of touring, hitting many of Europe’s big festivals, including an appearance at England’s Download Festival in Donnington.
Herman puts this growth down to word-of-mouth from people who attend Dragonforce's shows. Comparing the two Dublin concerts, he says, “There wasn’t many young fans. Most of the fans [at the TBMC show] were converted already. That time in the Ambassador we were converting; many of them had never heard this kind of music. I think it’s cool, 'cuz you can always play to the converted the rest of your life, but you always need to bring in each generation. Otherwise they’re going to start listening to . . . I don’t know, maybe start listening to pop music, rap, whatever, but we’re taking them before they can.”
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