I went to see Arch Enemy in 2004 (or 2005), SYL were supporting.

December 2004 (at least the London date was) First gig I ever shot.

I was round my then boyfriend's house, and brought a Metal Hammer with me which came with a DVD (I think in like, 2005?) and we sat and watched it, and the video for Love? came on, my boyfriend was like "Lulz this is silly" and I was like "SHUT UP IT'S RIPPING OFF MY FAVOURITE FILM EVER AND THE SINGER LOOKS LIKE A CANNIBAL RAPIST I LOVE IT. Sounds pretty badass too." So then I got into SYL, saw then at Download (best band of the weekend, IMO and that's with my best friend's band also playing) and then discovered Synchestra....which was not SYL but sounded like SYL on a good day. So I started digging around to find more stuff by him then decided that it was pretty much fact that I loved all of it. Then Ziltoid came out and I decided I was a Devidian forever. His face also makes me smile

Wow Lettuce, it was through that very same metal hammer dvd that i first found out about devin . At first i thought that what the hell are those fifty year old fat, bald and ugly fuckers doing making metal music, retire already! But then I heard it a second time and effin loved it. I think i after that went online and downloaded some random devin townsend band song (earth day) that came up when doing a search on strapping young lad and i have been hooked ever since. I showed the love? video to my brother also and he went straight to the record shop and bought alien . This was something like 2006 right before devin announced he would not play music anymore.

My brother mentioned to me that his friend likes this band that has this crazy singer and i checked out Love and the rest you can conclude yourselves.

[Octillus]

Lessee.

Back in the days of my teen years (we're talkin around 02, 03ish) I had been into the heavier stuff for a couple years, and at that time I was a part of a ton of various Swedish Melodeath (d'awww training wheels) forums, but in particular a Dark Tranquillity forum and a French In Flames forum. Well, if anyone remembers In Flames around that time, that's when they started to release a bunch of stuff that I wasn't super keen on (though I still really liked half of Reroute to Remain), and through there people would talk about Strapping Young Lad and how great and "crazy" it was.

Well, through Kazaa and other various forms of TOTALLYLEGALAMIRITE downloading, I picked up a chunk not knowing what album it was from, but basically almost all of the stuff I grabbed was City and a couple of chicken feather songs. I really liked it a lot, but it wasn't anything that to my palette at the time was incredibly special.

One fine day at the local record store, I decided to pick up City, and listened all the way through. Dude, when you're 15 and have a lot of anger and mild social anxiety, that is the single greatest album you could EVER hope to pick up. Saying that now, nearly 10 years later, I totally get why Dev disbanded SYL. A few weeks after that, when Shitstorm was put out for download, my mind was officially blown. I bought Alien on its first day out. It was everything I wanted to hear at the time. They were another band to be added to my pantheon of teenage listening that consisted of Swedish Melodeath+CoB, Type O Negative, Danzig, Maiden, Priest, Queens of the Stone Age and Modest Mouse as music that defined me. That's such a big deal when you're a teenager, finding these things that are supposed to define you when you have trouble defining yourself...

Anyhow, went to college and had to share a room with 4 other people my first year. This was atypical of my university, and I only talk to one of those guys still, but I think by surviving that living situation I am able to live in ANY situation. It was at this point I was still really frequenting those French In Flames boards that essentially died halfway through that year. Synchestra had just come out and I was chatting with a French girl, who basically told me I needed to listen to certain things. Mainly Ocean Machine.

It was during this time I went through a TON of personal changes. At the end of the day, I'd sit on my computer playing a hacked version of Phantasy Star Online, listen to Dev and just decompress. These weren't especially happy times, but they were the first trying times that I could remember just charging through headfirst. I will never forget the point where all of a sudden the music clicked, I sighed a contented relief and clicked the repeat album button. Devin's solo stuff IMMEDIATELY surpassed my love of SYL.

I ordered probably too much stuff from HDR the next day, and got a bunch of stickers that sat on my car til the poor thing was junked like... a month ago.

From there, I bought everything and lurked on these boards without registering for a while once Dev announced that he was done.

I have a ton of other stories, most of which I'll save for another time, but I do remember one more that firmly entrenched me in the Dev fanbase. I was home in Santa Cruz for the summer after my first year of college and the New Black had just been released. It was a hot and miserable day so rather than go to Streetlight Records (the best place in Santa Cruz, by far), I just went a couple of blocks to Wherehouse Music in my newly acquired (and still owned and loved) SYL logo shirt. I went in and picked up the New Black, and some guy in a car in the parking lot yelled out "SYL FUCKING RULES DUDE" and drove off. That was a good day.

I went to see Arch Enemy in 2004 (or 2005), SYL were supporting.

December 2004 (at least the London date was) First gig I ever shot.

First metal gig I went to.

I think I went to the Wolverhampton show. I think it was Wulfrun Hall? The fact that I didn't like Strapping when I saw them is probably the biggest musical regret I have

In 2001 at the age of 16 I was dissatisfied with the whole music scene (meaning metal scene) as I knew it and listened to "The Fluke" on a sampler of the german journal Rock Hard. First I thought the music could be classified as this untrue Nu Metal stuff all the untrue people around me were listening to. As I was a true metal fan at this time I first rejected to listen to it but after some time I loved the song.

It so happened that the boyfriend of a class mate of mine had the Terria album and I immediately asked him if I could borrow it. After 1 1/2 years I gave the dark green Terria Ltd Edition (!) back to him (I was hoping he would forget who had it but he didn't) and at this time I already owned nearly the whole back catalogue solo, SYL, Zimmers Hole and anything which was in any way related to Dev.

From Accelerated Evolution and the chicken feather album on I impatiently wait for every new album to be released or leaked and buy it asap.

The first time was technically "SYL" on the radio in 1995. I shrugged it off. Then I won a Century Media compilation CD featuring that same song along with "Goat." The label made out pretty well off the deal as I've stayed loyal to my major discoveries from that compilation for 15+ years. Only time I faltered was before a Dev concert last year when I realized my fandom had a few months on half the people standing around me. That lasted until the first song.

I´m not quite sure of when I FIRST heard anything that Devin has made, but I know when I first was aware of listening to Devin.

It must have been in 04-05 or something like that, my bf at the time was a SYL fan and played City for me thinking I´d appreciate it. And I did, but every song was so familiar, esp Room 429. So I must have heard it earlier, but I can´t remember when. Probably when I was 16-18.
But after that first conscious listening I was hooked.

I remember it really clearly, which is a bit odd, but I was about 15 or so and got a Metal Hammer covermount CD that had Antiproduct on it. I remember putting it on my ipod and listening to it while I walked to the corner shop, and walking down the road I was thinking 'It's OK, but a bit repetetive.' After that, I heard Love, downloaded the SYL albums but couldn't get into them, and one day on a train ride home from college in october I decided to listen to City and it just clicked. Then I saw HMV.com had a sale on, and all the SYL albums (minus HAARHT) were about £3each, so I snatched them up, listened to them gradually, and let them digest a bit as they're a bit tough to take in all in one go.

In 2005 I was cleaning my house, and I found some old stuff my ex-boyfriend left. One of those things was a blank CD.
I was curious what it was, so I put it on, and I was like, WTF what is this music, I love it!!!
There was no name or anything on the CD or the CD-case, so I had to call my ex to sing the music I just heard, to have him tell me it was the Infinity-CD
After that I bought every album.

I had heard bits of Terria at one point, one of my brothers had bought it. I liked Devin, but it didn't click at the time. Though I remember
thinking "Vampira" was great.

A few years later, I was really, really musically bored. I was goofing around on youtube looking for good music, and I don't know
how at all, but I ended up on "AAA" and "All Hail The New Flesh". My reaction was basically "Holy SHIT."

So I binged on SYL for a while. Then I got my hands on all of his solo work. SYL has been my favorite band, and Devin has been my favorite artist, ever since.

I got into Dev later in the game, right after he had split with SYL. Now i've heard about SYL prior, but didn't pay much attention. A friend of mine (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!!1) introduced me to him through the Ziltoid album. I go through the album until halfway into Hyperdrive that it all just hits me.

My husband was watching some concert he downloaded on his computer and said, "Hey, look at this guy." There was Devin onstage at some outdoor show, yelling insults to a crowd. He looked amazingly crazy with his long yellow dreads and bald head and I swear he was wearing red rimmed glasses. He was yelling about cocks and clams and such, and I said, "Man, I don't need to hear this right now." So I went about cleaning the house and my husband kept the concert on. All that day and the next and the next I just could NOT get that music out of my head. Luckily my husband was already pretty obsessed and had found all the SYL stuff online so I listened to that pretty religiously for awhile. Husband, however, does not like Devin's solo stuff at all, I found all of that on my own. Always loved everything he did. But I cannot for the life of me find that original show with the red rimmed glasses (I swear they were these red plastic looking frames)! If anyone knows what I am talking about, please help me out!

There was Devin onstage at some outdoor show, yelling insults to a crowd. He looked amazingly crazy with his long yellow dreads and bald head and I swear he was wearing red rimmed glasses. He was yelling about cocks and clams and such, and I said, "Man, I don't need to hear this right now."

I need to see that too! NEED to!

Mine was around 1995 i think..

City came out, metal hammer put underneath the waves on a free compo cd, i heard that, then about 2 days later i saw the video for Dettox oh headbangers ball or some other metal related tv show.

The next day, i bought SYL and City and i've pretty much got every other Dev/SYL album the day that they have been released...

Then back in 1998 (i think, i can't remeber the exact year) i did the random superfan thingy in metal hammer for Dev.....I looked like a cock.....but was worth it though, a fair few people i've met since have said that they got into Dev/SYL because of that, and i got some free stuff from the old record label too!!!!!!