Recently I got a chance to sit down with vocalist Corey Glover of Living Colour on the Toronto stop of the 25th Anniversary Tour for their debut album “Vivid”. To this day the album remains passionate and political, focussed through the sound of youthful optimism. But the band’s following albums got funkier and heavier, with a distinctly palatable sense of anger. Record sales declined until only the die-hard fans remained. After an aborted attempt at a fourth album in late 1994, the band went their separate ways. The break-up would last five years.
Fan support for the band has always been strong. The last time I met up with Corey was in 2009 when the band performed a headline show at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace. The place was probably over-capacity and the band delivered a two and a half-hour set. This was with almost no promotion or press coverage that I had seen.
All of a sudden things are different. The press coverage for this tour has been immense. They even performed at Wrestlemania, as their biggest hit “Cult of Personality”, has become the entrance theme for wrestler CM Punk. While their other pre-break-up albums are now out of print, “Vivid” continues to be a strong seller. This recent attention seems strangely out of place for a band who continues to extol fierce societal messages. So a tour where they play their most commercially successful release front to back comes as a bit of a surprise. Corey is extremely candid as always, and provides a lot of insight into their recent coverage and where he is now as an individual as opposed to when “Vivid” was released 25 years ago.