Chris Hollywood

Chris Hollywood — American guitarist — was part of Black Veil Brides' initial line-up, in the period before the band's national reach. He was in the group when it was still a Los Angeles project put together by Andy Biersack, who had moved from Cincinnati at eighteen to try for a career. There was no significant contract, no audience beyond the local circuit and no sign that Black Veil Brides would come to enter the American charts or develop the theatrical presentation that would make it recognisable. It is the band's least documented phase: small shows, home recordings and an unstable line-up, with frequent changes before the group found the configuration that would record the albums it is known for. Hollywood belongs to that beginning — the period when Black Veil Brides was a wager by teenagers newly arrived in Los Angeles, with nothing beyond the conviction that it was worth reintroducing into American heavy rock a visual and musical vocabulary the scene had abandoned two decades earlier.