Chris Jericho is a name you probably know with a face you probably recognise. Since he strode out into the WWF arena thirteen years ago, he’s been a regular in the Saturday morning (that’s when wrestling is still on over here, right?) schedule for millions of children. He was the first Undisputed WWF Champion and has a finishing move – the Walls of Jericho – often attempted on ill-suspecting friends by boys and drunken men alike.
Did you know that he is also in a heavy metal band? He has been the lead singer with Fozzy – a name that is a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne (they were called Fozzy Osbourne to begin with) and not the bear from the Muppets – for as long as he has been appearing on our television screens. This Saturday, he takes Fozzy back to Ireland for the third time.
“We always love to come to Ireland,” he told Goldenplec when we spoke to him recently. “ We’ve always had great shows there. The crowds there have always been completely insane. There’s always a lot of fun… We’ve been waiting to come back for a long time.” Indeed, he doesn’t feel they get to Ireland as often as they like. “I would say that Ireland is harder to get to sometimes if we’re doing UK tours, so we don’t get to come to Ireland every time.”
They arrive over, on the back of their fifth album (though the first two were mostly cover versions) ‘Sin and Bone’. It’s a more personal album for Jericho. “There are certain songs on their where you have some personal experience: She’s My Addiction, Inside My Head. Dark Passenger is more a fantasy type, more telling a story. It’s nice to use your words for storytelling sometimes, but others it’s about harnessing your emotions lyrically. That’s how you write those songs, especially the singer. You have to really get those emotions across. If it means something to you, if it’s closer to home, you can sell it a bit more.”
But other than these emotional and story-lined songs, what can you expect from Fozzy? Well, “I think we’ve honed in on what we do best,” he said, “very heavy music with very melodic choruses. If Metallica and Journey had a bastard child it would be Fozzy… Now that we’ve got to five [albums], we’ve really focused in on that template that will be the sound of Fozzy from now on. It’s what we do best and it’s not what a lot of other bands do. Once we figured out who we are and what we do, it’s easy to stick within those guidelines.”
Wrestler to rockstar – two things Jericho dreamed of being as a child: “I’m living my dreams” he said – is not too big a career leap; not for Jericho anyway. “I wanted to be the Paul Stanley (lead singer of Kiss) of wrestling. I used a lot of the same tricks that you would see someone like Paul Stanley or any great front man use. Then when we started Fozzy I kept using the same qualities I was using in wrestling that I had taken from Paul Stanley in the first place…. A live performance is a live performance, whether it’s wrestling, whether it’s rock n roll, whether it’s putting on a Shakespearean play, you have to get people engaged and involved with what you’re doing and make sure they have a great time.”
The shows are usually quite tolling too. “Our shows are very energetic and very physical anyway. You get just as many pulled and strained muscles in Fozzy as you do wrestling.” I say ‘usually’ because after the Dublin show Jericho travels to London for a spoken word show. Yes, you read that right.
“Yeah, I’m really excited about that as well. It’s something I’ve never done before. It’s been something I’ve always wanted to do. We came up with the idea of doing a spoken word show as a package with Scotty from Anthrax and Duff McKagan from Guns N Roses and then me doing three separate performances that are all kind of linked. It’s something I’d like to do a lot more of in the future. I’ve got a lot of stories to tell. If it’s something that goes well, it’s something that I’d like to do more of.”
Jericho isn’t ruling out a return to WWE, but it’s not likely in the near future. Fozzy, a band he’s been in longer than he’s been married, is his priority. While he would “consider going back to wrestling, for sure, the days of me being a fulltime WWE guy for years and years and years are over. “
Fozzy play Cyprus Avenue, Cork on Friday the 23rd of November and the Academy, Dublin on Saturday 24th of November. Tickets are available here.