I’m a kid with social anxiety that has been diagnosed with everything – learning disabilities, ADHD, OCD – but I wanna be a rock star, so what do I do? I’m gonna make this Andy Sixx version of myself who isn’t afraid to talk to people. The truth is the Black Veil Brides version of me, in the early days, was me trying to create my own version of that character. How much did that character inform your idea of leading a group? “I mean, I could go on and on about that character and how it effects me in different capacities, but it was most certainly a motivating thing.
My mom wouldn’t let me watch it, so that probably sparked my interest in that character, to tell you the truth, because that was the unknown thing.” They recut the whole thing and released a kid-friendly version, but my dad had the adult VHS version where Batman kills a guy and Penguin eats a dude’s nose. Which is your favourite Batman? “I was only a year old when Batman Returns came out, but I was obsessed with it when I was little because it was gritty. It’s the George Clooney Batman with the nipples as opposed to the Christian Bale Batman, y’know what I mean? It’s whatever flavour of the character you want to see.” I can look back and go, ‘I don’t see how that was going to be beneficial at all…’ but in my mind at the time I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is a cool look for the band that ties into this thing.’ So most of the quote-unquote embarrassing things that existed were tangentially involved with the band in some capacity, so they’re not so much embarrassing, more just a different era or different costume. The good thing is, because I was fortunate enough to have any kind of success at that age I was paying attention to my career. Growing up in the public eye, do you feel that any past decisions you made will always be open to criticism? “Oh yeah, but I guess I just embrace that kind of stuff. “It’s been interesting to be able to see myself change and grow from the time I was a teenager online and in magazines,” Andy Biersack explains, “the weird periods, the good periods, and whatever else in between…” As he explains over the course of our conversation with lucid precision despite jet lag, it is a balance he has worked hard to redress in recent years. In the early years when Black Veil Brides were both touted by fans and reviled by detractors as “the most hated band in rock”, and Biersack was numbing his anxiety and OCD with alcohol, the line between his onstage persona and his personal life was blurry and, at some points, nonexistent. Growing up in the spotlight, though, has brought Andy Biersack intense pressure and scrutiny. Through a tireless work ethic and self-belief he has arguably changed the course of his life in ways few else manage. His list of credits now extends over seven albums and includes acting, presenting an online chat show, writing a comic book that accompanies The Ghost Of Ohio and a yet-to-be-released memoir of sorts. At 28 years old, he has achieved a lot since dropping out of high school in his late-teens to pursue life as a musician in Los Angeles. As Kerrang!’s snapper packs up their equipment, Andy relates their shared realisation that it has been a decade since his picture first appeared in this magazine. A tiger’s head ring indicates his affinity with the town’s football team, the Bengals. When we meet Andy Biersack in a function room of Shepherd’s Bush’s Dorsett Hotel, he is fresh from our photoshoot and dressed in a casual denim jacket and a white T-shirt with ‘Cincinnati’ emblazoned across the front.
In 2017 he appeared on cinema screens in the shlock rock thriller American Satan portraying rock star Johnny Faust, a role which he reprises in the upcoming spin-off series, Paradise City. On 2016 solo album The Shadow Side he unveiled Andy Black, a debonair vehicle for exploring darkened disco sounds and his personal relationships with love, anxiety and, most recently, his hometown of Cincinnati on second album The Ghost Of Ohio. As the frontman of Hollywood rockers Black Veil Brides, he has armoured himself in varying degrees of make-up and tattered leather over the last 10 years to lead his band, and their enduring fanbase, through allegorical tales of hope and resistance against dark forces. Andrew Dennis Biersack is a man of many guises.
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