It’s no surprise that we love CAUCHEMAR here at Iron Fist. The Montreal metal machine are fronted by the one and only Annick Giroux, author of our World Downfall column. But nepotism be damned, even if Annick wasn’t part of the family we’d still be a sucker of their Sabbath meets Mercyful Fate meets Sortilege meets Blue Oyster Cult vibes. With a new album ‘Chappelle Ardente’ out now we look back to Iron Fist #6 (Summer 2013) when Dave Sherwood had a dangerous meeting with the band around the release of their Nuclear War Now! Productions debut ‘Tenebrario’

We know you as our world correspondent, but not for your own music – tell us about Cauchemar Annick: “Cauchemar started as a doom metal project between myself and the guitarist, François [Patry]. At first, I wanted to play bass, but we couldn’t find a vocalist so I decided to sing instead. We were aiming to play ‘trad’ doom but our heavy metal influences took over and it ended up being some sort of bastard mix of heavy/doom. We recorded and released our mini-album ‘La Vierge Noire’ in 2010, and did our first three gigs in Canada afterwards. In January, 2011, myself and the guitarist … Read More

Classic heavy-metal! Punk rock! Women yielding swords! The recipe worked so perfectly with Iron Dogs so why shouldn’t it with Ottawa’s Zex? Especially since they have in common multi-instrumentalist and former Germ Attak and Cauchemar live member Jo Capitalicide… While Iron Dogs are “not doing much at the moment”, with no warning this quartet have just unleashed their debut EP ‘Savage City’ on Electric Assault, two tracks of sing-alongs and fist-banging that conjures the late ’70s spirit of both the nascent NWOBHM and glam-punk scenes, performed by a half-female, half-male line-up. “Zex was a long time in the making,” unveils Jo. “But the concept lurked in my mind for a long time before finally materialising. With the demise of Germ Attak in 2011, I ended up with loads of unused ideas that I started working on about a year later. Gretchen was to be our singer and Rick Morin, who played bass for Germ Attak on our final tour, was to be our lead guitarist but sadly, as we had no rhythm section at the time, he soon left. We had to wait until people moved to Ottawa to get a full line-up and since last November, we‘ve been rehearsing … Read More

Welcome to the “difficult third issue” – difficult only because we put this magazine to bed with serious post-festive hangovers – not doing that again in a hurry!!!!

This issue of Iron Fist ended up being actually the most fun to make – and not just because we were still pissed. It had a real spirit of the blitz vibe to it, as our editor Louise and her trusted sidekick Kim knuckled down to some serious pizza eating and sub-editing all-nighters, while our designer Adam told us were we dickheads for keeping him up all night – but the dude is a legend – look at that SAXON cover! The guy’s a genius. I’ve been editing magazines for years and reading them for even longer and that’s seriously the best-looking magazine cover I’ve ever seen.

It was also a bit of a fluke that all the articles in this issue kinda follow the same theme – we didn’t plan it, promise! You got the men that brought us all together on the cover and without knowing Ms Kelly opened her article about the METALPUNK crossover scene with that very sentiment, citing Mr Byford for opening the gates for the myriad heavy metal … Read More