“Even during my childhood, I was not the kind of kid for whom my parents had to set up strict rules,” the singer continues. “My dad’s a marine and my mom is Japanese; those are very disciplined cultures. They never had to set a curfew for me. They never had to worry about me being out partying because they knew that I was in the house playing guitar or working on Trivium lyrics. They knew that’s all I ever did.”
Yet out on tour, at least at first, Matt Heafy went nuts. Presumably equipped with a well-thumbed copy of The Dirt, and an approach to sexual relations that might charitably be described as ‘old-fashioned’, Trivium hit the road like a rock band as imagined by Viz magazine. In an astonishing interview with Kerrang!, from 2006, the singer spoke of – among other things – enjoying “twosomes, threesome, foursomes – whatever” and of having sex with “two [or] three people in public places, with all the windows open”.
Back in Orlando, Matt headed out to buy the magazine on which his face adorned the cover and brought it back to the family home. He then proceeded to read the article in the company of his mother, his father, and a girlfriend who, miraculously given such material, is today his wife. The printed revelation that “I have a girlfriend so I’m a good boy now” went only so far in restoring order, as Ashley placed down the magazine and said to her partner, “Yeah, you sound really fucking cool, don’t you?”
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“Having been strict my entire life, we did go a bit nuts,” recalls Matt. “We got it out of our system very quickly, within a year, which is a pretty short time. But within that year, our band went from absolutely nothing to dominating every single magazine cover, to winning every single award, to being a band that were spoken of as being the next biggest band in the world. We had every move we made, and every word we said, watched by everyone.
“In the meantime, we were encouraged to play up this insane thing,” he says. “Do it! Go for it! Be nuts! So we were a bunch of 18- and 19-year olds that were being told to go nuts, and we did. And, yeah, [the stuff] is gross and disgusting.”
But…
“No-one was victimised or abused,” says Matt. “And I do know of bands that want to hurt people, who want to victimise people, and who have victimised people. There are bands that want to kill people, who have tried to kill people, and who have killed people. What we were doing was never that. What we were doing was the kind of thing that 18- and 19-year olds do when they’re being idiotic… but I do remember that stupid interview. And I do actually need to be reminded of those things. I don’t like messing up, I don’t like failures, but it is important to recognise where you messed up, and not just to evade it and ignore it.”