The following highlights were sent to us from the interview that Chris Van Vliet did with Joe Hendry on Insight With Chris Van Vliet:
On his theme song being so catchy:
“Well, I reverse-engineered it from what I wanted to happen. So for me, professional wrestling is all about crowd interaction. So throughout the song, you’ll notice we literally show and tell what we want the audience to do. So ‘Say his name and he appears…’ and you will see the two claps. Whichever version of the song I’ve had, there’s always been a visual of the two hand claps. Then I literally tell the audience to wave their hands from side to side. It comes from how I heard Queen talk about how they structured We Will Rock You and how they found the perfect BPM for how they wanted people to stomp and clap. And then I looked at the BPM they used for the slower moments and I went for 120 BPM for the faster bit which is the kind of hypnotic pop timing.”
On the song going viral:
“So I think that professional wrestling and entertainment is all about timing. So there are certain things that I’ve done that would be good ideas in isolation but if the wave is coming at the right time and then you deploy the idea, that’s when things explode. So I’ll give you an example. The billboard that I just appeared on [in Glasgow], that’s an idea I’ve had for months and months and wanted to do but just never had the right moment. I thought, well, you know, tens of thousands of wrestling fans are going to be in my home country on a certain day at a certain time, maybe that’s the time to deploy the idea. So I kind of take the same approach with everything and I take my approach to wrestling like that. So with the song, a lot of people were telling me to upload it to Spotify and release it officially and I knew I was going to do it. But it was when I noticed on TikTok that if anyone made a TikTok with the song, it was getting hundreds of thousands of hits. I thought now might be the time. So I decided to upload it, I did that and then I started to think actually, how many units do you need to sell for it to chart? And then as with many things I do in life, I watched a YouTube video on how to do it, honestly, YouTube is such a phenomenal education for anything. So there was a video about these guys who got sponsorship money from Saints Row and they were told to make something to promote the video game in a YouTube video and they were like, Let’s make a song about Saints Row and get it in the charts. And they unveiled the units it takes, they unveiled the process you have to go through and I didn’t do the exact strategy, but I took elements of that. The funny thing is the charts run from Friday to Thursday, but I didn’t know that. I just thought well, I’ll release it on Monday. So this all kicked off, this is where the luck came in, this all kicked off because there was no release competition on the Monday because all artists released on the Friday. So in Monday’s iTunes charts, we were like, I looked at my phone, I was like, oh my God, number 20 in the iTunes charts, that’s crazy! Then I tweeted that out and everyone’s like, he’s number 20. Let’s push him up. Then it went to 1 in the UK on iTunes, 6 in the US, 1 in Malta, and 3 in Ireland, it was wild. Then it really caught fire and then we hit the media trail, and then it started to actually do pretty well.”
On previous praise from Drew McIntyre:
“I appreciated that. I really did. That means a lot because, again, I’ve said this as well. I’m gonna compare him to someone you met recently, which is to me, on the UK indies, Drew was our Undertaker. He was the guy you went to, he lifted the shows, he was an example. To me, he is just like Jordynne [Grace], Drew is an example inside and outside of the ring. And yeah, so I was absolutely honoured for him to say that, especially when this was his moment and to even just take a second to say that he knew how big that endorsement was going to be for me. So I’m always grateful for having worked with Drew unbelievable wrestler unbelievable human being. Just, you know, him and Jordynne are credits to the business.”
On a previous WWE cameo:
“I was actually Rusev and Lana’s lawyer at one point as well, which was crazy. Because if you think about how few people get mic time on Raw and SmackDown, I cut a 90-second promo as their lawyer, I think it was Smackdown in Liverpool. [How’d that even happen?] So it’s quite a funny story. So what I didn’t know is two people had been specifically hired to be brought in to do this role, specifically hired. I didn’t know this. William Regal told us that when you are asked if you can do something, be the one that steps up. Someone backstage came up to me and said something like, ‘Oh, remember the red ties.’ And I was like the red ties? So I went to some clothes shop and bought red ties. What happened was whoever that was backstage, I think it was one of the referees, but they got the wrong person. So they told me to go get red ties, and it wasn’t me.
So I brought the red ties and I said to someone ‘What are the red ties for?’ They said ‘Oh it’s Rusev’s lawyers.’ I was like, Oh, cool. So someone goes, ‘Where’s my lawyers?’ I went [raises hand]. So some poor dude that had been hired to do it specifically is sitting behind me, he had to shave his head for it and everything, right? So he’s got prepared, and I just went like this [raises hand]. So they asked me to come forward. So it was me and it was me and Lionheart actually, who very sadly passed away. Again, someone who gave a lot to [wrestling], especially Scottish professional wrestling. Piper Niven actually had, I think it was like an armband with his symbol on it. So you know, that was really cool that she did that. But it was me and Adrian and they said, here’s this promo and you’re both gonna read it out and we’re gonna pick one.
I remember at the time, this was really cool because me and Adrian were close so for both of us to get this moment on TV, it was very cool and I’m glad that we got to do that. But they said to me ‘Can you do a Russian accent?’ I remember Stone Cold saying about the forklift truck. It was like, Can you drive a forklift? Just say yes. So I was like ‘Yeah, of course I can.’ I’m looking up Russian accents, my Russian accent was horrible. But they said ‘Go read out the promo, we’re gonna let a couple of people do it and we’re going to pick one.’ I knew in my heart, I was like, the thing was this long. It was a lot. I thought if I memorise this word for word, they’ll just pick me if I don’t use the sheet. So we went in the ring, there were a bunch of different people who were going to try out for it. I read it once without the sheet and they went him, nobody else got the chance to do it. So that’s how that came to be.”
