“I think when you spend ten years doing any sort of job, you need a break,” says the 30-year-old, reached on the phone from his Toronto-area home. “There are a lot of things that we did which were enjoyable at first, but they eventually became stresses in our lives. Not to mention the success Dallas (Green) was having with City and Colour, which was eclipsing anything we’d done. So when Dallas announced that he was going to focus solely on that, there was the initial twinge of resentment and anger. But once you let the dust settle on that, you can see why he’s doing what he’s doing. Simply put, it was done,” he continues. “It may have taken Dallas and Wade saying it out loud for us to understand it, but it was certainly necessary.”
A year after the split, rumblings of one last tour began to surface. Fans were hesitant to buy into the rumours, until the band announced a string of farewell shows. Pettit admits feeling guarded about announcing the tour, wondering if the band’s once-devastated fans would be ready to accept the band for one last tour.
Yet it turns out the response, including the first show in London having sold out in a matter of minutes, has given Pettit a keen understanding of just how important Alexisonfire was to their fans.
“It’s actually been amazing,” he says, sounding incredibly touched. “I didn’t know what to expect; it’d been a year and a half since we announced we were done. We wondered if no-one would give a shit. We’d played Brixton Academy in London once before. It didn’t sell out, but it was a great show. And now we’re able to sell out two nights, it’s a great feeling. There’s a lot of messages being passed around through various social media sites, and we’re getting a real sense of what this band meant to our fans. It’s very humbling. It makes me feel like we did something worthwhile. You stop thinking about the little mistakes you made here and there on records.”
All mistakes aside, while the purpose of a farewell tour is to allow fans one last opportunity to say goodbye, the very nature of Alexisonfire’s breakup can’t come as a huge surprise to the more keen observers.
Formed out of the ashes of other Southern Ontario bands that split, including Helicon Blue and Condemning Salem, there has always been a volatile intensity to the aesthetic of Alexisonfire. At times, that intensity could be mistaken for vulnerability, especially when Dallas Green began finding success with City & Colour.
So was the breakup of Alexisonfire an inevitability? Pettit takes a long pause, considering the question.
“It’s tough to say,” he concedes. “There were some moments throughout the band that came out of left field, and it was entirely possible that we could’ve continued on with this band but have been very unhappy. Maybe it wasn’t an inevitability, but maybe it should be that way with every band,” he continues. “There’s only a certain amount of creative juice you can squeeze. We probably could have made another record, but I also think we did everything we needed to do.”
With the farewell tour booked across four continents, culminating with a run of shows throughout their native Canada, the only thing left to do now is look back at the career of one of the most impassioned and fervent hardcore bands of the 21st Century. How the pundits frame Alexisonfire and their legacy remains to be seen. For Pettit, continuing to be collaborative was always important.
“I think when you’re in a band with five people making equal amount of creative decisions, you get used to coming to compromises. That’s important. Because the band was a collaborative effort, I feel good about what we achieved.
“10 years from now, who knows what people will think of the band. Hopefully they think we did something worthwhile. In a lot of ways, we probably inspired a lot of bad music,” he laughs.
That Pettit can finally find humour in the break-up is incredibly telling. Their best days may be behind them, yet there’s no reason for fans not to enjoy their last kick at the can.
“Sometimes I think we did as much harm as we did good, but I don’t have a lot regrets. If people look back on us ten years from now and think we were a good live band and we made some records that stood the test of time, that’s all I can really hope for.”
BY JOSHUA KLOKE
