Such was the impact of Step Down and the whole of the Scratch The Surface touring cycle that SIOA found themselves placed on a pedestal they weren’t strictly comfortable with. We’d always have people looking at us like, ‘What?’ to begin with and then, whether they liked it or not, you could see they appreciated the energy of this type of music.” “We actually took Korn out on one of their first ever tours, we opened for Sepultura, we did Reading festival a couple of times. “We did tour with a lot of metal bands,” nods Lou. Needless to say, what with Sick Of It All being one of the greatest live bands of any era, they smashed it. With the band sent out to tour the album, they were now being taken away from hallmark clubs like CBGB’s and placed in front of a very alien crowd. It was just being in the right place at the right time.” Ten years later we got the push and it did happen. “In the 80s it seemed like Murphy’s Law were going to go over the top and it just never really happened. The effect it had on Sick Of It All was to turn them into trailblazers for a type of music that had never made so much as a dent outside of its own walls.“I think a lot of it was to do with the timing being right,” considers Lou. Step Down then managed the previously unimaginable feat of being picked up by MTV, and suddenly a whole new world of people were having hardcore beamed into their living rooms. We were on tour with Rancid and we played them at bowling, and Matt Freeman came to bowl and fell flat on his ass! We’ve never let him forget that… or the fact that we beat them at bowling. Then, right at the end, one of them falls over. “There’s some guys doing the ‘Classic New York Style’ and then the next guys are doing the ‘Californian Version Of The Classic New York Style’ and getting it all wrong. “We had a little private joke at Rancid’s expense,” Lou laughs. There’s even a sneaky dig at one of punk rock’s most successful 90s bands buried within the clip. You know, ‘Oh, he’s picking up change.’ ‘Look at that guy making a pizza!’ We just decided to stick them in the video.” “And we would kind of point out the different dances that people were doing and make each other laugh by giving them different names. “We could go down to the shows around New York and just people watch,” says Lou about where the idea came from. But the most enjoyable aspect was the parodying of the many different styles of hardcore dancing that could be seen at club shows around the world – a brilliantly knowing and genius piece of satire on the scene from which Sick Of It All came. With a roving reporter “exposing” the murky world of hardcore (ironically, it would indeed have been many people’s actual first exposure to hardcore), the clip sees him entering a dingy club with SOIA tearing up the stage. The video for Step Down is still brilliantly hilarious today.
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