Andy Biersack—aka Andy Black of Black Veil Brides—joins idobi Warped Radio for a conversation filled with chaos, heart, and the kind of nostalgia that only Warped Tour can conjure. He takes us back to 2003, when he was just a 12-year-old fan attending his very first Warped with his dad. Camped out at one stage all day to see AFI, Andy was already dreaming about the day he’d play the iconic tour himself. That dream not only came true—it changed the course of his life.
From falling in love with his now-wife Juliet Simms (aka Lilith Czar, whom he met on Warped) to accidentally flinging a bag of poop out the bus window at fans (“yes, really,” he laughs), Andy opens up about the highs, the hilarity, and the legacy of growing up in the scene.
Speaking with Brandy-Baye Robidoux, Andy reflects on how Warped Tour marked a pivotal shift—from fan to frontman, and eventually, someone whose music became a lifeline for others.
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“Well I was really young when we started—I was 16 when we started. I’m obviously, ya know, 34, I’m a different person than I was at 16. There’s certainly similarities. I was very singularly minded as a kid of what I wanted to do. And I remain that artistically. But going to bring it to Warped Tour, I kind of went from being a kid at Warped Tour to then, ‘Oh, I’m going to be on Warped Tour,’ within a matter of a year or two, essentially.”
He speaks candidly about what it meant to grow alongside his audience—often just a year or two older than the fans screaming back at him in the crowd.
“So the first Warped Tour that we did, I was a little older than most of the kids that were in the crowd, but not by much,” he shares. “So to see it from that angle, it’s also different for me because I think a lot of times people associate Warped Tour with, particularly the 2010s version of Warped Tour, is seen as young people as fans and then the adults in bands. And that sort of power dynamic is different.
For me, I was the age of or a few years older than the audience that was coming to see us. We were all kind of experiencing it together. I view, even myself at that age, starting the band and the dreams and ambitions that I had kind of part in parcel with that whole experience of like, ‘I have this vision and this idea and I want to speak for and to these people that feel like me.”
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He continues, “It was also different from a lot of the bands that were around at the time because most of those other bands, and I don’t mean this as being rude, but a lot of them were speaking 10 years from those things that they were talking about. They’re in their mid-20s and they’re talking about ‘it’s hard to be a kid.’ …But I actually was a kid.”
Watch the full idobi Warped Radio episode featuring Andy Black of Black Veil Brides below. Be sure catch BVB during their set at Warped Tour in Long Beach, CA, on July 26-27.
