TRADITIONALLY SPEAKING, THE UK has proven to be barren ground for power metal. The sub-genre’s spread throughout the 1980s represented a (near) global conquest as it moved from its origins in the US to climes as far flung as South America and Asia, but far as the UK was concerned, the rare homegrown band that did emerge could never compete with its continental counterparts. The hypersonic antics of Dragonforce went some way to finally establishing some kind of presence on the global power metal stage in the early 2000s, followed shortly behind by some Scots with a healthy appetite for drink and silly songs ready to make seismic waves of their own.
It all began with Heavy Metal Pirates, the song that launched a hundred ships - and one that didn’t even make the debut album. “I knew a bunch of guys who were in a band, so I wrote that song and sent it over to them,” says Alestorm vocalist Christopher Bowes. “They came back like, ‘Hey, would you like to join our band? We can write a bunch of songs about battles and sound like Rhapsody and shit!’ I turned up to the first rehearsal and asked what they had written. They were like, ‘Nothing!’ so I gave them my stupid song about pirates… before we knew, it every song was about pirates!”