The 2000s were a wasteland for guitar heroes. Nu metal’s seven-string groovers had little time for plank-spanking pyrotechnics, and even Metallica metaphorically glued Kirk Hammett’s fingers inside woolly mittens so he couldn’t let loose with any guitar solos during the making of St Anger.
Luckily, not everyone had gone cold on the idea. In 2005, a brand new video game would put the guitar solo back on the cultural map in a huge way. And one of the biggest beneficiaries were a power metal band from the UK who suddenly became figureheads for the return of lightning-fingered fretboard fireworks.
DragonForce were formed in London in 1999 by guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman. The pair had previously played together in black metal band Demoniac, but their new venture found them pivoting sharply into power metal territory – a genre that couldn’t have been less trendy at the time.
Still, DragonForce’s first two albums, 2003’s Valley Of The Damned and 2004’s Sonic Firestorm, garnered them a small yet growing following. But it would be their third album, 2005’s Inhuman Rampage, that would kick their career to the next level. And its success could be pinpointed to one brilliantly OTT song: Through The Fire And Flames.
Inhuman Rampage was released in Japan at the end of 2005 and the rest of the world in January 2006. It opened with the turbocharged, seven-minute shred-fest Through The Fire And Flames, which fused dementedly galloping guitars and OTT sweeping with skyscraping vocals and air-punching melodies.
Through The Fire And Flames summed up the DragonForce ethos, which basically involved throwing everything plus the kitchen sink into the mix. In this case, that included sounds influenced by retro arcade game – specifically early 80s classic Pac Man.
“I was messing around with that Pac-Man noise but never actually found an opportunity where I thought it would be cool to use it in a song,” says Herman Li. “That was kind of the theme for the album – stuff we hadn’t done before that we hadn’t heard other bands do: these noises of retro videogames that we like. ”
DragonForce didn’t make any attempt to hide their technical chops, and Through The Fire And Flames went big from the start. The studio version grew and grew until it ended up over seven minutes long.
“When we first started playing that song live we didn’t have any acoustic guitars, so we told the keyboard player to play the acoustic bit on the keyboard,” says Li. “So there was a confusion about the beginning for a year or two that the acoustic guitar on the album is not actually acoustic. But we just couldn’t be bothered doing it live properly for the first two years.”
Through The Fire And Flames was released as a single in August 2006, eight months after Inhuman Rampage came out. it was accompanied by a video that was memorable for the sight of hammered guitarist Sam Totman drunkenly shredding his way through the song.
“Sam was controlling himself because it was our first music video, but then he couldn’t do it anymore and he said, ‘I’m going to get fucking drunk. I’m done standing around behaving,’” says Li. “So he just started drinking. We left his drunkenness in there, and then it just became a thing for us: drink and shred. He always had at least 10 beers before a show back then, so it was nothing for him.”
Through The Fire And Flames got a massive boost the following year when it appeared alongside songs by Metallica, Foo Fighters and Linkin Park on Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock, the third instalment of the video game that saw a generation of kids trying to replicate its finger-mangling dexterity. On the back of Guitar Hero, Through The Fire And Flames cracked the US Top 100.
“People can use Guitar Hero to slag us off and say, ‘Oh it’s because of Guitar Hero that they got big,’” says Li. “But to be honest, no, because we’d done a massive world tour before that game hit the store and afterwards it just carried on generating interest in the band.”
Still, he concedes that DragonForce weren’t prepared for the surge of interest in the band.
“We’re musicians that never did music to be successful, we’re just doing it because it’s fun,” he says. “When Through The Fire And Flames hit America, it was a whole different game.
“To be honest, we were not ready, and that’s one thing I’ve learnt. We were just a bunch of idiots at that time. We didn’t have the infrastructure of a professional, world-touring band.
“It all happened so quick,” he continues. “We had to jump on these tours and we didn’t have time to rehearse some of the songs as well as we should have. I’m just being honest here!”
Today, with more than 300 million plays on Spotify, Through The Fire And Flames remains DragonForce’s biggest song by a very wide margin.
“It helped us but then I heard fans who were like, ‘I used to like you guys but not anymore because my 10-year-old sister was into DragonForce too from playing Guitar Hero,’” says Li. “You can’t win. But it made us a household name in a lot of countries and we got a platinum record for Through The Fire And Flames in America, with more than a million sold.”
This feature originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 308 (March 2018(
