Jon Twitch In 2007 I had the opportunity to bring the Slackers to Korea, something I never even imagined possible. But the band I've really wanted to bring is the Wednesday Night Heroes, not a well known band, but still probably the greatest punk band I've seen live. We all come from Edmonton, and as long as I've been in Korea I've been thinking about bringing them over for a show.

This year was a big step in the Heroes' career. For their third full-length album, "Guilty Pleasures," they struggled to find an appropriate label. After a long wait, the album was picked up by BYO Records. The Heroes have toured Europe and the US several times, but never been over to Asia despite my years of begging. But it looks like they might finally be ready.

There's no date yet and we haven't agreed on anything, but their promoter is very interested in planning a Korea/Japan tour. First they want to get their name out there a bit more, and contact DJs, record shops, zines, radio stations, and venues. So far they've only sold ten CDs in Japan.

Over here in Korea their name is a bit better known. When I first arrived in December 2003, Jonghee and most of the Skunk Label punks seemed to know who the Heroes are. Their second full-length album is played nonstop on the Skunk van. After my last trip to Canada I brought back a bunch of Heroes CDs that were quickly bought up.

So why should you care? The Heroes are the perfect band to play in Korea. Born out of an isolated city with a small scene, they played for years barely making a penny, until one day they were so good nothing could stop them. They turned Edmonton from "Deadmonton" to the capital of streetpunk in western Canada.

Not bad for a band that basically started as a joke. They started playing back in 1996 or 1997, when they had pretty well no talent. All their songs were jokes, crammed full of "Oi!" and an ungainly combination of hardcore and streetpunk. At most of their shows they played to the same small group of school friends, which at the time included my younger sister. I was just the dorky older brother. It was hard not to smile when they were playing, and they tired us all out on the word "oi," which has been out of favour in Edmonton to this day except among freshcuts.

It all changed at a typical all-ages show. In Edmonton we held all-ages shows in community halls, usually in some weird corner of the city, and the promoters barely made a cent of profit. One such show with the Wednesday Night Heroes featured the Saskatchewan political band Junto, who clashed with the Heroes' patriotic, apolitical friends. While Junto was onstage shouting crap like "Canada is a nation founded on murder!" the show was suddenly shut down by pissed off Edmonton punks and skinheads. Following that incident, most of the promoters in the city blacklisted the Heroes, and rumours were spread they were a Nazi band.

The Heroes got by with the few remaining promoters that would work with them, and recorded an album with their friend Nik Kozub, back then in the streetpunk band the Cleats. Their first self-titled album remains my favourite to this day, inspired by the hatred they faced from people who disagreed with their beliefs. Songs included "FAQ," dedicated to the promoters who'd banned them, where they chant "FAQ--FAQ--Don't you tell me what to do." The true anthem of the album is "Hated ¡®n' Proud," where they sing

"We're the Heroes
We're not second best
They try to turn us down
but we're still the loudest tonight
We're the Heroes
We're not second best
They say we're hated but we're still the proudest tonight"

Over time it became clear that the blacklist and the hate had only made them stronger, so promoters started working with them again.

New streetpunk bands started popping up in town like the Dancefloor Disasters, Tosspots, Hit ¡®n' Run, Anal Rockets, Lord Anus, and the Transylvanians to name a few. The Heroes had their own side projects, including the Banzai Babies where they pretended to be Japanese, and the Moneyshots which had the Heroes drummer Todd on vocals and the singer Graeme on guitar.

The Heroes also began touring the US, coming back from their first tour with some pretty crazy stories. In Cincinnati they played in a ghetto neighbourhood to a room full of black youths who had never heard punk before, and fucking loved it. At the end of another show, they turned around to pack their gear away, and when they looked back, everyone had a needle in their arm. In one of their later tours in 2004, they played in Salt Lake City with the 12th Street Staggers, which some Korean punk afficionados might know as one of Paul Brickey's bands after he was kicked out of Rux and before he joined Suck Stuff.

One of my favourite stories about the Edmonton punk scene begins with a riot in Montreal. The Exploited were supposed to play there but the show was cancelled last minute because some of the members were denied entry into the country. The 800 punks waiting for the show were pissed and began rioting. Meanwhile, in the same month in Edmonton, the Casualties were supposed to play, but some of their members couldn't make it over the border. Instead of rioting, two members of the Heroes filled in for the missing band members and the show went on.

Maybe after that, the Casualties took the Heroes under their wing. Their second album was released on Longshot Records, a Vancouver label that was all of a sudden putting out mostly Edmonton bands, but Longshot wanted the Heroes to find a bigger label for their next album. It was around then that I left for Korea, and spent the next four years of my life constantly asking them to come to Korea.

Maybe the Wednesday Night Heroes will come to Korea in 2008, maybe 2009. It is my sworn objective to bring them here.

The most unforgettable member of the band is Graeme, the vocalist. A charismatic singer, Graeme spends a lot of his shows with the crowd leading them in choruses. Sometimes the audience gets so into the show, he doesn't even have a microphone for himself. Graeme is well known for his wild behaviour. At a house party my sister threw, he found an unlocked car down the block, and pissed on the front seat. He and his band got kicked off 100.3FM "The Bear" for relentlessly insulting the most famous band to come out of Edmonton, Nickelback, or as they said, "Nickeldick." He should have been kicked off CJSR FM88, the community radio station, many times, for profanity, political incorrectness, you name it. One time he introduced a song by Couch as "Turkey Baster Full of Semen Blasted onto a Cunt Full of Tits and Balls." None of this particularly freaked me out--he's a punk and punks do stupid shit--until, that is, I discovered he was straightedge and had done all these things stone cold sober. again.