Paying no heed to the charts

Japandroids have been too busy touring to fully appreciate the success of their second album, says Ed Power

BRIAN KING has no appetite for talking about Appetite for Destruction. “We have given a bunch of interviews and name-checked a lot of albums as influences,” says the Japandroids singer. “And that’s the one record they always ask about. Always Appetite for Destruction.” That’s because people perceive a gulf between Japandroids’ frenetic, super-sincere, blue-collar rock and Guns’n’Roses kitschy tales of hair-metal excess.

“I can say, with absolutely no irony, that we are influenced by that record,” says King. “Just not in the way you might imagine. We aren’t trying to sound like a hair-metal band. However, if you think about Appetite for Destruction — one of the great things is that practically every song was a hit. So we could aspire to something like that.”