Billy Hopeless, frontman for Vancouver’s Black Halos, has a knack for picking interview locations. The last time I spoke to him about the release of the Black Halos’ superlative comeback album, 2022’s How the Darkness Doubled, he had us meet at the Cottage Deli, a delightfully European hole-in-the-wall in Gastown, which closed this past October. I’m grateful to have experienced its old-world charm and tasty soup at least once.
Prior to that, when he first reunited with Black Halos co-founder and guitarist Rich Jones for a 2016 tour of Spain, he had us playing a Godzilla-themed game of pinball at a Library Square pub. I was stunned I even managed to beat him once.
But none of that remotely measures up to sitting down to talk with Billy about the upcoming reissues of the first two Black Halos’ albums at LanaLou’s Rock n’ Roll Eatery last December, when the Dwarves frontman Blag Dahlia was doing a solo set as Ralph Champagne after the previous evening’s Dwarves concert.
The afternoon had several surprises, the first of which was that Billy came at all. Billy had avoided the Dwarves’ show at the Waldorf the night before because of an ominous, possibly premonitory dream wherein his late mother appeared and warned him not to go for fear of getting a bad case of COVID. He woke up echoing her words to his beloved pooch, Bean, a tiny, adorable rat terrier chihuahua who has been a frequent guest star on Billy’s Facebook page: “Please don’t go.” Sadly, Bean would pass a couple of weeks later, as a crushed Hopeless would announce to his social media followers.
Billy and Bean. Photo courtesy of Billy Hopeless.
Having heard about his dream, I hadn’t expected to see Billy coming down Powell Street the next day, let alone that Blag, peeking his head out of LanaLou’s, would see Billy coming and smile—“Hey, Billy!”—and fall to chatting with him.
The two of them go way back, it turns out.
Interviewing Billy Hopeless is always a pleasure—he bubbles over with sincere enthusiasm for music, performance, and life—but it was added fun that Blag joined us at the table, skeptically muttering, “I don’t trust the kitchen in this place,” having had a glimpse of the rather depressed neighbourhood outside. He was promptly reassured by multiple LanaLou’s habitués that the food is quite decent—try the poutine!—but he did not seem convinced.
Sitting at a table with photographers Bob Hanham and Cat Ashbee, Dwarves new-guy guitarist Mike Pygmie, Blag Dahlia, and Billy, I suggested to Billy we take advantage of the moment to do an interview. What about the Black Halos’ first two albums, coming out again on Yeah Right! Records?
The reissues began when Sub/Pop—the parent company of Seattle’s Die Young Stay Pretty Records, which released the Halos’ eponymous debut in 1999 and is the label behind their follow-up, 2001’s The Violent Years—told Billy he could have access to the Halos’ back catalogue at no cost.
“They just gave us the rights for free, after all these years, and we immediately reissued the first two albums in a deluxe format, which is amazing looking and sounding. They’re remastered with liner notes and a double-gatefold on The Violent Years. And the first album has a completely metallic silver cover, like a chrome cover, which is pretty amazing. You know Cream did that album that’s all silver and metallic?”
Wheels of Fire? I prompt him with the title.
“Yeah, that! It’s like that, which is really cool to me, because I like vinyl, and I like gimmicky covers.” There’s also a different cover photo “from the same photo shoot we did for the first album” and lyric sheets—not originally included with the debut. Plus the albums have been remastered by the long-running U.K. producer and engineer Dave Draper, which “makes it sound totally different.” The album sounds “huge” now, and the band loves the results.
“You didn’t do any fixes to it?” I ask, and Billy chuckles. “No, we’re not doing that. We didn’t get AI Billy Hopeless in there, just dust it a little with some AI, sugar it up.”
Billy is alluding to how, two weeks before, the Dead Boys—a legendary, first-generation Cleveland punk band, originally fronted by the now-deceased Stiv Bators, whom Hopeless reveres—had been in the music press over a controversy: the singer for the reunited band, Jake Hout, quit in a huff over the intended use of AI on a recording, to make his vocals sound more like Bators.
Billy has opinions on most things punk rock. He’s no fan of rerecording previous work, for example.
And remastering doesn’t always work either, he opines. “Sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don’t.” Take the second Dead Boys album, We Have Come for Your Children, for example. When the album got remastered, Billy explains, “they took out the barking of the dog on ‘Son of Sam.’ I love that barking of the dog! People go, ‘It’s cheesy,’ but when I first heard that album, that was how I heard it.”
I mentioned that talking to Billy is always a pleasure. Fact-checking him never is: there have been 26 different releases of We Have Come for Your Children, and there is no mention online that I can find of a version of “Son of Sam” with the barking of the dog removed, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. My 2006, 180-gram pressing still has the dog, but there have been multiple reissues and at least one remastering since. Is Billy wrong, or is he in the know about a point of punk trivia that has not been widely reported? I wouldn’t place any bets—maybe he’s thinking of an alternate “lost sessions” version? But never mind: he said what he said. (Editor’s note: As it turns out, Billy was right, and a dog-free version does exist.)
Blag perks up: “How precious are you gonna get about the Dead Boys when they made two albums and only one of them is good? Come on!” He and Billy immediately fall to quibbling. Billy is of a mind that We Have Come for Your Children is also a fine album. “Don’t kid yourself—it sounds like dog shit!” Blag counters. “And incidentally, the first one’s production sucks too!” he adds, referring to 1977’s Young, Loud and Snotty.
So would Blag get in there and make changes? “There’s different schools of thought on that,” he says. “Look, I think three records that really need some help are Young, Loud and Snotty, Raw Power”—by Iggy and the Stooges, which he later describes as having a “cocaine mix, with no rhythm section”—”and the first New York Dolls record. They’re all great records, I love them all, but none of them are produced right.”
Billy, talking over him, argues that he wants to hear the albums exactly the way he heard them the first time: “That’s how I heard it, that’s how I fell in love with it, and that’s how I like it! They’re produced wonderfully terrible: it’s like love. You don’t look at the flaws and go, ‘I’m going to change you.’ You just go, ‘Oh, man, you’re beautifully flawed.’”
Cat Ashbee chimes in, “You’re a hopeless romantic, Billy.”
“Yes, I am,” he admits.
Meantime, Philly Roach, frontman for the Campfire Shitkickers—whose name is sometimes given as CFSK—begins setting up for a solo acoustic opening set. Philly had joined the Dwarves onstage the night before, in luchador mask and cape, in the guise of HeWhoCannotBeNamed, the frequently unclad original guitarist for the Dwarves, who, it turns out, has been “played” by multiple musicians over the years, even though, as Blag acknowledges, “there is one guy” behind the alias. “It’s confusing,” he tells me, when I try to press. He doesn’t seem to welcome my attempt to delve into the mysteries of HeWho.
But Philly is fine fessing up that it was really him, stage diving half-naked the night before: his telltale tattoos give the game away.
Billy and Blag Dahlia. Photo by Cat Ashbee.
As Blag prepares for his own set at LanaLou’s, which will see him acknowledging Billy from the stage, I realize Billy and I have not talked about his upcoming Rickshaw shows. Anything special planned?
“It’s exciting—we’re doing The Violent Years start to finish,” Billy tells me. “We did that in Spain” during their 2024 return jaunt. “There are songs we’d never played live that are on that album,” like “Capt. Moody,” an evocative midtempo rocker with nautical themes: “Like a drunk at sea/Or a king without a home/Man overboard/Overthrown.” The song was inspired by Spencer Moody from Seattle’s Murder City Devils, who were label mates of the Halos early on. “When we were touring with the Murder City Devils, that band, at that time, were completely like a bunch of drunken pirates. And we were kind of like that too. So touring with them, there was one night that I was sick with the flu in Saskatoon, at a hotel called the Senator, and there’s a bar and they have this lounge, like an old fancy lounge bar, and I was was taking a walk by, and I saw Spencer. He looks at me and goes, ‘Hey.’
‘Hey, man, I’m sick and shitty.’
And he goes, ‘Have some hot brandy.’
‘Hot brandy?’
And he’s got this big brandy snifter. ‘Yeah, hot brandy, it’ll make you feel better. Here, I’ll get you some.’ And I drank that with him… I was just thinking about all the time we spent on the road with those guys and I was like, ‘I’m going to write a song a song about this time.’”
Billy shakes his head, remembering, “We were a drunken ragtag crew, but those guys, you couldn’t touch those guys…”
Another undersung song that Billy is rediscovering off the first album, “Sad Boy,” pushes the singer’s romanticism even further. “Any album, there are songs that don’t really get you at first, and then they get you later. That song is so Dolls to me. And I really think the end of that song, it’s like Jim Steinman/Meat Loaf good. I really love that song. It’s that weird thing: you don’t want to listen to your old music that much, but when you do, wow.”
There will, of course, be some old favourites of the Halos on the set at the upcoming Rickshaw show, like “Some Things Never Fall”—subject of an entertaining rock video, featuring D.O.A.’s Joe Keithley, “Metal Queen” Lee Aaron, and the Smugglers’ Grant Lawrence. But it’s different doing a song you always do compared to something fresh. “It’s still great, and we still get off, but we’ve been doing that song forever. When you’re doing a song you haven’t heard, haven’t sang in a long time, and you sing it, it’s totally cool.”
One highlight of the Halos’ recent return to Spain, where they played the Azkena Festival, involved Hanoi Rocks vocalist Michael Monroe—“Rich’s other girl, the blonde,” as Billy describes him, referring to Rich Jones, who has been playing guitar and writing for the Hanoi Rocks singer for his last few albums. Rich and Billy’s shared enthusiasm for Hanoi Rocks is an important part of their bond, so I’m delighted that Monroe came and sang with the Halos, covering two songs originally sung by Stiv Bators. It’s not always advisable to meet your heroes, but Monroe wrote Hopeless “one of the nicest letters I’ve ever gotten from another musician,” Billy says, beaming. And Monroe was generally “a great guy. I love him to death—he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met.”
Thinking of Cat’s comment earlier, I come back to it. “That’s something I really like about you, Billy,” I tell him. “You are a romantic.”
“You’ve got to be,” he says. “Love’s a very important thing.”
The Black Halos play the Rickshaw January 25.
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