We’re talking about Warrior Soul’s song ‘Fuck the Pigs’. Lead singer Kory Clarke is telling us how it came about.

“Actually, that was about a time I was at the airport in Stockholm”, Clarke qualifies of what is a hard-luck tale of machine guns at dawn in the departure lounge. “We’d just finished some demos, been mixing all night, and I got to the airport after drinking beers for hours, and this time they wouldn’t let me out of the country. I go to a bar just before I get to the gate and a nice guy comes up and says ‘You want a shot of Jager?’ … I do a shot of Jager and I sit down, I’m really tired after being up all night and I decide to call my lady in New York before I get on a plane”, he recounts.

“Next thing I know some guy comes up to me and goes ‘Sir, you’re not flying today’, and I’m like ‘How come?’. He goes ‘You’re too drunk to get on a plane’ and I go ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ and at that point two guys with machine guns come up and they’re saying ‘You’re leaving the airport’ and I’m like,” - here he mimes a frantic phone conversation – “‘Sorry honey, I gotta go – I’m not coming home tonight because I’m too drunk to get on a plane!’”.

Warrior Soul’s exploits over the past couple of years have been a little bit…well, rock ‘n’ roll. Since Clarke reanimated his 90s American alt-rock outfit in 2007, recruiting a new Europe-based line-up, it has admittedly been a touch and go affair as to whether the frontman himself will make it to shows this side of the pond. Operating on a shoestring budget with the ethics of a true punk rock outlaw – and usually without a valid work permit - Clarke has had several near misses with immigration lately. The screws, as in Stockholm, have come close to successfully deporting him on a couple occasions, only for the singer sneak off at a stop over on his enforced passage home and board a ferry or flight back to Blighty, arriving at venues mere minutes before show time more than once.

Earlier this year his luck eventually ran out, leaving bassist Janne Jarvis to step up to the microphone when the band played London’s Hellfire fest in February. By that time tussles with British airport officials had already become such a running theme in his life that ‘Fuck the Pigs’, off the album Destroy The War Machine, seemed a good fit for this particular outfit.

Assuming no authority figure sees Clarke’s waist-length tresses and profiles him a candidate for instant deportation, he concludes this story by muttering that his arrival in the UK in July is, for once, almost assured. “I had some promoters get together and do the right thing and get some permits”, he laughs. Good news all round then, as with this archetypal rock ‘n’ roll troubadour spending an estimated eleven months out of every twelve living on the road, you suspect he’d be out on the street without them.

The fact that the men who complete Warrior Soul currently are spread throughout Europe (Jarvis and guitarist Rille Lundell reside in Sweden, drummer Billy Williams and second guitarist ‘Johnny H’ in the UK) ensures that Detroit native Clarke racks up air miles rehearsing before even he considers touring commitments to second outfit, Trouble. Between these endeavours he also records with industrial studio project Mob Research, which additionally features members of Ministry, Killing Joke and The Mission.

Of the decision to add a UK solo tour to such a packed agenda this April he shrugs “I’m a working musician”, he says, although it figures that having no burning desire to see home any time soon may be an equal motivation for keeping such a busy diary.

Detroit features on Destroy The War Machine only in the parting glance ‘Motor City’ – “A romantic kinda ‘I’m getting outta fuckin’ town thing, about the night I was leaving”, Clarke comments. Along with ‘Rise Of The Fourth Reich’, which supplies the ultra-heavy, grinding chorus lending the album it’s title and is inspired by Jim Marrs’ left-wing manifesto of the same name, ‘Motor City’ underlines the ‘difficult’ relationship Warrior Soul has had with it’s birthplace ever since the original line-up (the first of many, in which Clarke has remained the sole constant) issued righteously political debut Last Decade Dead Century in 1990, right as party rock was hitting it’s commercial peak.

“I criticize corporate fascism. I can do it in other countries easier than I can do it in my own”, Clarke lays down, emphasizing the present tense even as it’s pointed out to him that, since Green Day got serious, polemic-lite has been a strong feature of America’s rock mainstream.

Via the defiantly underground Warrior Soul however, “stupid” Americans “were never exposed to it. I think one of the major reasons was that I didn’t move to Seattle when everyone else did”, Clarke theorizes of his limited gains from rock’s various periods in vogue. “If I would have done that, it probably would have been a different story”.

Bearing the brunt of Clarke’s grudge for what happened in those days is Axl Rose, a name that begins to seem less like it entered the conversation from thin air when the singer explains that, while Warrior Soul were enjoying little exposure to the public, their then label Geffen were pouring every shiny penny, and pound of publicity muscle at their disposal into promoting Appetite For Destruction.

Clarke clawed back some of the publicity he feels Axl owes him after a fashion last year, when …War Machine received it’s first limited edition release on Warrior Soul’s website and merch stand under the title of Chinese Democracy, some weeks before the long awaited Guns ‘n’ Roses record of the same name hit shelves. It was a shameless stunt that predictably sparked debate among insulted Guns fans and those who were laughing with Clarke. Of course, any reaction played into his plan; “It certainly didn’t help [Axl] at all, but it certainly helped me a lot”, he cackles.

The August reissue (under a title less likely to instigate a lawsuit) is, Clarke says, a professionally produced “cool little package – we remixed it and added two bonus tracks from the same sessions; it’s got the lyrics on it and I used Banksy on the cover.”

Clearly, the route of its release is still determinedly independent. Warrior Soul had announced that they were collaborating with a UK label on the album but industry distrust born almost two decades ago apparently dies hard, as the singer now says, “we might be doing it on our own label at this point. There are still things I do with record companies”, he adds, perhaps referring to his side projects, or the classic Warrior Soul reissues due on vinyl later this year,

“But Warrior Soul…” he concludes, “we’d rather be on our own. We find at this level it’s best to be on your own”.