Interview: Brian Greenway of April Wine Chats About Tour with Triumph, and the Canadian Hard Rockers’ Past, Present and Future

Promo Photo

Canadian hard rockers April Wine are currently concluding a U.S. – Canadian tour with reformed fellow north-of-the-border rockers Triumph.  The tour began in April with a couple shows in Florida, followed by a full tour across Canada.  The two bands are currently on an eastern-midwestern U.S. run currently scheduled to wrap up in Boston on June 6, with a rescheduled Montreal show ending the tour in their home country on June 10.

April Wine formed in the late 60s in Nova Scotia, and with the addition of Myles Goodwyn on vocals and guitar (who eventually became the band’s primary songwriter and main vocalist), released their self-titled debut album on Aquarius Records in 1971.  The band released six albums 1971 – 1977 during the ‘Aquarius years’, achieving first- division gold & platinum success in their native Canada but, other than scoring a minor U.S. hit in 1972 with a grooving cover of Hot Chocolate’s “You Could Have Been a Lady”, mainstream American and European success did not follow.

That started to change in 1977 when the band added third guitarist Brian Greenway, signed to Capitol Records in the States, and scored an American hit which the raucous boogie-rocker “Roller” (from seventh studio album ‘First Glance’), which began a string of success for April Wine in the U.S. and internationally.  The ‘classic lineup’ of the band (Goodwyn, Greenway, bassist Steve Lang, guitarist Gary Moffet and hard-hitting bald- headed drummer Jerry Mercer) struck U.S. gold with the chunkier guitar rock of 1979’s ‘Harder … Faster’, which featured blazing rocker “I Like to Rock”, and saw the band undertake extensive European touring in addition to North America, including a festival date at the inaugural Castle Donington ‘Monsters of Rock’ festival in 1980. 

They followed up with the platinum-selling 1981 LP ‘The Nature of the Beast’, which spawned the hits “Just Between You and Me” and a guitar-harmony-fueled cover of Lorence Hud’s “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”, amongst a host of killer deep tracks.  Although ‘Power Play’ in 1982 didn’t have the rock-solid consistency of songs and big sales of ‘…Beast’, it featured some real highlights like “Anything You Want, You Got It” and the earworm “Enough is Enough”.  In-band tensions after the 1984 ‘Animal Grace’ record led to a farewell tour and live album (‘One for the Road’, 1985).

Classic Lineup Promo

But the farewell was only for the classic lineup, and since the early 90s Goodwyn and Greenway have toured regularly (and released albums less regularly) with various lineups, until Goodwyn retired from the road in 2023 due to health reasons, picking his own replacement, Marc Parent, before sadly passing away in late 2023.  The current lineup (Greenway, Parent, bassist Richard Lantheir and drummer Roy Nichol) continues to rip it up on the road, and I spoke with longtime guitarist Brian Greenway gearing up for a gig opening for Triumph in New Jersey.

“Yeah, today we’re in Camden [New Jersey]”, says Greenway. “Sitting in the bus.  We got here this morning. I woke up in the parking lot!  It’s really nice to be back up north again from Florida and Texas. No humidity.  It feels like home on a May day, you know, late May. It feels good.”

April Wine were “home” from the latter part of April through early May 2026, opening for Triumph on a full Canadian run which stretched from Ontario to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Alberta.  “Yeah, we did Eastern Canada, we did Halifax, Moncton, Hamilton, Ottawa, Toronto. We were going to do Montreal, but the local hockey team got in the playoffs, so we were postponed until June the 10th.” 

The band played a completely different 45-minute set in Canada then they have been on the American dates which began in Illinois on May 13 and stretch through Boston on June 6, before the tour’s final date in Montreal.  The different Canadian-American setlists is by design.  “It is intentional because all the albums between, the first album right up until ‘First Glance’ was on Aquarius Records and only distributed in Canada,” says Greenway. “So, UK, Europe, United States, they didn’t have those in the stores and they weren’t being played on radio.  They’d be played here and there. With the exception of “Could Have Been a Lady”, that got a lot of airplay back in the early 70s. But other than that, those are songs that are very well known in Canada, but down here [in America], nobody knows what they are.”  The same holds true for European gigs.  “For all intents and purposes, when we play the US, UK, and Europe, the three main albums that everybody knows there are ‘First Glance’, ‘Harder … Faster’, and ‘The Nature of the Beast’. So those are the songs that we do, from those albums. And we can’t do all of them either, but these are the obvious ones that people really want to hear. And if you play the hits, you’re gonna have people responding.”

Photos by Mark Kurtzner

But April Wine have continued switching up the 10-song setlist ever-so-slightly on the various U.S. shows, playing the bigger hits every night, but alternately switching out “Right Down To It” for “Shotdown” for “Could Have Been a Lady”, and alternating “Big City Girls” and “Anything You Want, You Got It”.  “Yeah, the guys were getting bored,” he says. “They said they want to play something different after three or four weeks. I said, okay. The other night we put “Could Have Been a Lady” in.  Or if someone’s not feeling good and they don’t feel like, you know, their voice is going in harmony, we’ll switch [the setlist] up, so that’s not a problem.”

The 2026 tour with Triumph is not the first time the two Canadian bands have played together.  “Yeah, mid-70s, we did some shows in Texas with them, San Antonio, where Texas loves Canadian bands. Triumph and April Wine, no exception. And then I didn’t see them [Triumph] for many years, as nobody did, because they just stopped playing.  30 years later, they decided, okay, it’s time to do another gig.”

April Wine have a history of playing big shows with a wide variety of bands in Europe as well, such as Germany’s Golden Summernight Festival in 1982 (where they appeared with Jethro Tull, the Michael Schenker Group, Neil Young and King Crimson), or the much heavier first Castle Donington festival in England in 1980, where they played with Rainbow, Judas Priest, Scorpions, Saxon and Riot, and contributed the track “I Like to Rock” to the live compilation album ‘Monsters of Rock’, which featured live tracks by most of the bands from that festival.  Greenway remembers that gig, and that album.  “Oh, yeah!” he says.  “Pick up the cover [of that album] and turn it to the front or the back, whatever it is. There’s four pictures [of April Wine]…you’ll see April Wine with the red amplifiers and white cloth on … and sort of bright reddish clothing other than everybody else [who are] in black.  And it was a heavy metal festival. It was the last gig that Cozy Powell was playing with Rainbow. It had rained very much before the day of the festival, at least when we were there.  And people had days of rain and drunkenness, and the amphitheater grass came down to the front of the stage, and so all the water and the mud did too. So we went on stage with our red and white amplifiers, and representing the colors of Canada, and some of us were wearing white and red clothing. We were a real target for all these people that were dressed in black, because we stood out like a dandelion on a lawn, you know? So they were throwing all kinds of mud. There was big splatters everywhere. That’s what I remember about that.”

The band also toured England with some of the heavier bands of the day in that period.  In early 1981 just as ‘The Nature of the Beast’ album was being released, the band filmed a live concert at Hammersmith Odeon in London, with NWOBHM band Diamond Head. It was released on VHS as ‘Live in London’ in 1981, saw play on MTV as the Saturday night concert back in the day, came out on DVD in 2008, and is currently available to be pulled up on streaming.  When asked about that tour/show, Brian doesn’t remember much about Diamond Head, but remembers the tour. As for Diamond Head, “we didn’t probably see a lot of each other, other than shows, and I’m sure we were friends talking to each other. I don’t remember much of the tour. I remember Hammersmith, and I remember some of the bus rides. I remember walking up the steps and walking into my room in Glasgow or Edinburgh [in Scotland] and finding four single beds in my hotel room, and I could imagine four pipers suddenly rising up at the mist.”

April Wine’s appearance at Donington and touring with bands like Diamond Head arose from the UK record company marketing them as a metal band at the height of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. “Yeah, they sold us as a heavy metal band,” he says, “which we were not, but then again, back then, it was the beginning of heavy metal, and it’s nowhere what heavy metal is now. I mean, it was heavy metal was Uriah Heep, Scorpions, Saxon people like that, you know? But, not us. I didn’t think, you know, in Canada, in the United States, we weren’t considered heavy metal. We were a hard rock band.”

Photos by Mark Kurtzner

But April Wine’s appeal to metal fans in that era was easy to understand: ripping guitar solos, a three-guitar attack. Watching that Hammersmith ’81 video, it was notable not only how many great songs the band had, but the fantastic guitar playing, from all three of the band’s guitarists [Greenway, Myles Goodwyn, Gary Moffet],  “Well, thank you,” he says. “Everybody was different as a player, and that’s what made the chemistry so interesting. Because everybody came from a different style, a different genre of playing, and we put them all together, and … it sounded great. It was nice, because what one person couldn’t do, the other one was proficient at, and vice versa. We could use it … not everybody had to play at the same time. You could come in and out of the song for weight, harmonies.”

The band’s use of guitar harmonies is notable on songs like “All Over Town” and “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”, and especially in live shows, where the band used a lot of harmony solos live with all three guitars.  “Yeah, that was kind of the style back then,” he says, “but it’s something that we just fell into as well, not intentionally. It’s just that, hey, we’ve got three guitars, let’s do it that way.  it was a little bit of the flavor of the day with Queen, you know, and… look at Molly Hatchet doing a lot of stuff like that with all their guitar army. Having two or three guitars in a band was not uncommon.”

2026 also sees the 45th anniversary of April Wine’s biggest-selling record, 1981’s ‘The Nature of the Beast’, and a big international tour in support.  “Oh, yeah,” he remembers. “That was a real big tour we did. We had a huge stage that we did in Canada, and in the US as well. In Europe, we did a lot of shows, but we couldn’t take the big stage with us. We played Hammersmith Odeon a couple of times. That was a big place to play in London at the time, as well as the Palladium. We got to play there just last year when we were touring with Uriah Heep.

The band hit platinum sales in the U.S. and Canada with ‘The Nature of the Beast’.  “[It] was a great run we had with that [‘The Nature of the Beast’]”, he recalls. “You know, it was fun watching that – every week we’d have a little gamble of, okay, what’s the single and the album going to be in Cashbox this week? What numbers are they going to go to? You know, there was momentum going. It was fun.  It’s like being in a being in the finals, you know, like, okay, let’s get there.” 

The album’s diversity was an advantage in 1981, ranging from hard rockers like “Crash and Burn” and “All Over Town” to hit single “Just Between You and Me”, more of a light ballad, the guitar-harmony-fueled hit “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” and “Wanna Rock”, which almost recalls The Ramones.  “Yeah! Myles would bring in songs out of nowhere, you know?”, he says, “I never knew where his influences really came from, but “Wanna Rock” was just, like … that fast tempo. Yeah. Had it been more distorted, it would have been just like the Ramones.  And [then] he’d do takeoffs on Beatles tunes, like slowed down into a ballad. And it worked. But April Wine was always doing those sort of love songs, as I call them, right from the beginning. If you go back to the ‘Forever for Now’ album [Aquarius Records 1977], there were some great songs, “Child’s Garden”, or “Wings of Love” [from ‘The Whole World’s Goin’ Crazy’, Aquarius Records 1976] that weren’t rock songs at all, but they were very beautifully crafted and recorded.”

Photos by Mark Kurtzner 

But April Wine became a heavier band in 1977 after Greenway joined the band.  “It did,” he agrees. “I mean, I just played what I would play. But Myles was bringing in those songs and they were different than anything else he had brought in before. And I was just interpreting them that way. And so was everybody else. We had definitely had a harder edge when I joined. I don’t know why. Maybe I played more power chords than anybody else and made them hit louder? I have no idea.”

Goodwyn drove the heavier sound along with Greenway.  “I don’t know what Myles was thinking in his head,” says Greenway. “You know, he played his cards close to his chest.  He would bring in the songs, the idea. We would come up with our own parts. We would come up with different arrangements for it all. But he had the gist of the song - pretty much like “Roller” [from 1978’s ‘First Glance’] when he brought that in. We learned that and played it live for about 6 months before we even recorded it. So we road-tested that song. That’s the only one we really ever road-tested.”

Myles Goodwyn’s last show with April Wine was at Rath Eastlink Community Centre in Truro, Nova Scotia, and a live recording of that gig remains unreleased.  Greenway says that there is “a live album we did in March of 2023, Myles’s last show with the band.  And that’s being worked on. It just needs to be released. So one of these days it’s going to be released, but also with Myles passing…the boss left the building, right? So, anybody who had the signing ability to do anything [like that] was suddenly gone, and so now the estate is part of that. The estate’s not settled, so we can’t do anything until the estate’s settled, and then we’ll have a direction of where his daughter wants to take us.”

April Wine’s current lineup includes Greenway from the old band, and Marc Parent fronting the band in Goodwyn’s absence – and Myles Goodwyn was involved in picking his own replacement.  “Yeah, he was, actually,” says Greenway. “Marc’s name had come up in 2014 when he [Myles] was looking to go, but we auditioned some people and it was unfortunate for them, because no one could have passed the audition.  Because the song that [Myles] was hearing in his head that they would be playing was not the one that they learned. And there was no way they could have learned it because the arrangements changed over the years and no one really thinks [about] that, especially the writer, I guess. So when someone’s not playing what’s inside [Myles’] head, which they could never know what’s inside his head, they’re not doing it right. So we gave up on that.”  Marc was in the running for the spot in 2014 when Goodwyn originally considered retirement, but “he couldn’t because he had a couple of young children at that point.  Fast forward to 2022, Marc came up again, listening to some of his tapes, Myles liked his guitar playing and singing, and the clincher was when, a friend of Myles’ called him, and Myles was playing a demo tape of Marc in the background, and Myles’ friend said, oh, is that you in the background? Sounds pretty good. He says, no, that’s Marc, the new guy we’re auditioning.”  That clinched the deal for Parent to come in as Goodwyn’s replacement.  “So Myles said, yeah, okay,” remembers Greenway.  “That sold them right there. That works. [So] I sat down with Marc for three months and worked with him vocally and guitar wise to learn all the parts, not just learn the songs, but how to play the songs as April Wine would play them and little stories here and there. So you felt like you’re inside the song rather than just covering it.”  And Parent has worked out.  “He’s got a lot of energy. I like that. We’re becoming good friends,” Greenway says.

For the future, says Greenway, the Triumph “ends June 10 th .  We’ve got our own shows this summer.  There’s talk of an extension [of the Triumph tour] in the fall.  [But] we’re going to take the month of August completely off so everybody can cut the lawn and paint the house. Take the garbage out.  We’re playing Vegas, Golden Nugget in September, I think” [April Wine are playing a headline show on September 4, 2026, at the Showroom at the Golden Nugget, Las Vegas, NV].

The band have not yet contemplated new music. “Yeah, that’s in limbo, too,” says Brian. “We’ve just been trying to get over COVID, and then get Marc in, and then get on these tours to try to establish ourselves once again as an arena band. And play to a lot more people, get our [fan] base wider and wider and wider. So that’s been the game plan last year and this year.”

With the band trying to re-establish themselves, the question turns to what album, in Brian’s opinion, a new April Wine listener hunt down to check the band out with. “Wow,” he says.  “Maybe go to ‘First Glance’ [Aquarius/Capitol Records, 1978], because that’s [the one that] got people interested, you know, to follow the band.  Then the ‘Harder … Faster’ album [Aquarius/Capitol Records, 1979], any one of those, but one sort of leads to another.  I say a good starting point would be ‘First Glance’.  You know, if you like the book, go back and read the earlier ones.”

And of course, in 2026, we live in a music-on-demand short-attention span culture where many people just listen to a song on a phone or smart speaker rather than a full record as in days of yore – what song or songs would Brian recommend a new listener pull up to get a first impression of April Wine? “Yeah,” he says. “Okay: “Roller”, “Sign the Gypsy Queen”.  Wow. “I Like to Rock”.” The big hits are a place to start. “You know, “Roller”, “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” and “Just Between You and Me”, those are the three big ones at the end of the show that get people going. But thank God humans like different things, you know, not everybody likes the same thing. You’ve got “All Over Town”, you’ve got “Big City Girls” [both from ‘The Nature of the Beast’], you’ve got “Before the Dawn” [from ‘Harder … Faster’], you’ve got “Right Down to It” [from ‘First Glance’]. Even “21st Century Schizoid Man” [April Wine’s cover of the King Crimson song from the ‘Harder … Faste’r LP].”

So, there you go, some album and song recommendations from the man himself - get to the record store or pull up some April Wine for a listen.

Photos by Mark Kurtzner

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