Author: wamdines

Harper bounds towards us, each step sending a brown spray of mud up her dazzlingly white trousers. Each slippy stomp is followed by a mischievous howl of delight; she’s made it her mission to destroy the pair of brand new trainers on her feet.

“I just love splashing in all the puddles,” she announces triumphantly, punctuating a particularly brave leap that sees her windmilling her arms for balance.

It’s June 2024, we’re at Download, and it’s wet, with punters cautiously wading between stages in knee-high wellies and raincoats. But 12-year-old growler Harper seemingly didn’t get the memo. While her explosive energy could well be a result of the “like, 20 Red Bulls” she’s downed today, she’s still riding the high of her very first live show.

Despite finding success on America’s Got Talent in 2022, and even performing Holy Roller with Spiritbox at London’s O2 Academy Islington the same year, Harper had never had the chance to perform for her own fans. She decided a baptism of fire was the best approach, making her debut at the UK’s biggest metal festival.

“I was so scared,” she admits. “But then, when I went out, everyone knew my music!”

Judging from the packed-out tent, people were eager to see how the youngest person to ever grace the Download line-up would rise to the challenge. From the bruising crush of Weight Of The World to a closing, crowd-pleasing cover of Bring Me The Horizon’s Chelsea Smile, Harper was a natural.

To celebrate, we’re doing a victory lap of the festival’s rides – and her sights are set on the bumper cars. After getting recognised in the queue (something she shrugs off casually, simply explaining “People always know me!”), Harper runs off, insisting we go in separate cars. As her bumper hits ours with a sharp thwack, nearly catapulting us out of our seat, it quickly becomes clear why…

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Six months later, we catch up with Harper in a starkly different situation. Rather than unleashing maniacal growls for her fans, she’s reined in the chaos for an uneventful day at school. Now aged 13, she’s living a double life, balancing maths equations and grammar lessons with afterschool recording sessions.

“I barely get detentions now,” she states proudly. “I have to try not to get them, or I’ll miss an interview or recording. Today I got to tell everyone, ‘Sorry! I can’t hang out later! Oh, why? I’m having an interview with Metal Hammer!’”

She’s particularly glad the chat is taking place at all. “Newsround were meant to bring a camera crew to my Download rehearsals and interview me,” she recalls. “But they didn’t want to use the song…”

The song in question was Harper’s single at the time, I Hope You Choke, which scared off the producers of the BBC children’s show. “If they ask again, I’ll write a new song called ‘Unicorns And Rainbows’,” she jokes.

While screaming and stomping around is typical teenage behaviour, Harper has been laying the foundations of her career since the age of four. Most parents might have booked an exorcism upon hearing their child unleashing gutturals, but Harper’s encouraged it – which checks out, considering her stepdad is Acres frontman Ben Lumber.

“She’d scream along to nursery rhymes,” Ben recalls. “We’ve even got a video of Harper screaming her ABCs.”

“It wasn’t proper metalcore screaming, but it meant she started learning her technique really young,” he explains. “During lockdown I showed her Spiritbox, and then we tracked 30 seconds of her screaming along to Holy Roller in my studio. It sounded legit – she was a natural.”

As her stepdad praises her, Harper sits silently, a smirk creeping across her face. “Sometimes I hear Ben on the phone saying, ‘I can’t even do that!’” she announces, positively smug as she mimics Ben’s voice.

But Ben’s not ashamed to admit when he’s met his match, responding with a confession of, “Well – sometimes I’m jealous!”

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Harper’s initial Spiritbox cover was so good that Ben uploaded it to YouTube. She’d soon audition for America’s Got Talent with the same track, before cruising all the way to the semi-finals. While she didn’t win, she was given an even more prestigious stamp of approval – a record deal from Pale Chord, Spiritbox’s very own label.

Since being signed in 2022, Harper has released a slew of singles. Her debut, Falling, was the perfect introduction, balancing sweet choruses and bitter, malice-infused verses. Her follow-up, Weight Of The World, even saw her collaborating with US metal heavyweights Brand Of Sacrifice and We Came As Romans. Not too shabby!

That collaboration only scratches the surface of the metal world’s love for Harper. She’s pretty smitten when discussing “bestie” Courtney LaPlante (“It’s pretty cool – we text every now and then,” she says, with a hair flick), and apparently Oli Sykes loved her Bring Me The Horizon cover.

Harper also says Melissa Cross, metal’s favourite vocal coach, refers to her as her “little star”, while Andy Copping has promised to put her on Download’s Main Stage one day. “He said I need to release a certain number of songs and he’d do it,” she says.

We were privy to a similar interaction back at Download. We’d just tackled our last ride: a towering contraption that swung high up in the air, Harper squealing along to Sum 41 as we stared, upside-down, at the thousands of fans crowded by the Main Stage for their set.

To calm our stomachs, Harper suggested ice cream. En route, we bumped into a festival promoter eager to find out whether Harper was enjoying herself. “Everything has been amazing… but I won’t come back unless I’m on the big stage!” she’d sworn, playfully sassy.

That’s the thing about Harper – her confidence is blatant. She’s happy to prattle on about anything, from the time she almost gave her friend concussion after hoisting them over her shoulder and bashing into a wardrobe, right down to the traumatising memory of her stepdad stealing her sweets when she was four (which she immortalises in song, unleashing an improvised pop-punk ode to her beloved ‘gummy eyeballsss!’). It’s a confidence she’s recently started taking into the recording studio.

“Now, I’ll be really firm if I want to re-record a line,” she says. “When Ben writes some lyrics for me, I also know what feels right. I’ll correct and rewrite things with him.”

With a goal of releasing more tunes to secure that Download Main Stage slot, she’s got her head down working on new music. Her latest single, Thorn In My Side, is a booming onslaught of thundering drums and raucous howls, with a call-to-arms chorus – an anthem that will undoubtedly win over festival crowds.

Looking ahead, Harper has got her sights set on crafting an EP – and maybe fitting in some live shows. She’s particularly excited at the prospect of hearing fans parroting her lyrics back at her again. Considering she was plunged into the metal world at such a young age, we can’t help but wonder whether Harper has ever considered any other path in life.

“At one point I wanted to be a flight attendant,” she admits. “But… then I was too scared to die in a flight accident. And I know sometimes jobs aren’t great – like, picking up dog poo. I feel like music is way more fun.”

Harper’s latest single, Thorn In My Side, is out now via Pale Chord.

Full-time freelancer, part-time music festival gremlin, Emily first cut her journalistic teeth when she co-founded Bittersweet Press in 2019. After asserting herself as a home-grown, emo-loving, nu-metal apologist, Clash Magazine would eventually invite Emily to join their Editorial team in 2022. In the following year, she would pen her first piece for Metal Hammer – unfortunately for the team, Emily has since become a regular fixture. When she’s not blasting metal for Hammer, she also scribbles for Rock Sound, Why Now and Guitar and more.

Last week it was all about bands returning to the limelight, as the returning Beth Blade and the Beautiful Disasters, the returning Fishbone and the returning Wytch Hazel did battle in our Tracks Of The Week competition. And, once the returning officer had tallied up the votes, Beth Blade was returned as your winner. So congratulations to her. Her disasters are more beautiful than ever.

This week, we have another eight contenders to contend with. We hope you enjoy them.

Please vote for your new favourite below.

The Marcus King Band – Honky Tonk Hell

In the past we’ve had dazzling bluesy fretwork, introspective heartbreak, contemporary soulfulness and more from this young South Carolinian. Now he’s gone full saloon boot-stomper with Honky Tonk Hell, billed by King as “an anthem for anyone out there like myself who have struggled with the permanence of sobriety” and joyously laced with piano, slide, brass, gospel backing and all those juicy accoutrements that make southern rock’n’roll so damn lovable. You could totally see him rocking up onstage with Blackberry Smoke or the Tedeschi Trucks Band or someone and having a jam through this.

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Kadavar – Scar On My Guitar

Berlin stoner rock beardos Kadavar continue to set the tone for their next album, I Just Want To Be A Sound, with this driving, bright-eyed new number. Essentially a pretty straight-ahead rocker by their standards, Scar On My Guitar adds a touch of urgent, goodtime Hives-y mania to their psychedelic soup – still audibly them, but with a snappier sheen that’s more conducive to dancing than flopping into a beanbag and spacing out for a few hours.

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Joanne Shaw Taylor – Summer Love

“I specifically had it in my mind that I wanted to write a summer pop single for this album,” says Joanne of this easy, breezy but heartfelt ode to the best of times destined to last a season, not forever. “It’s just something I’ve always loved—driving around Michigan, now Tennessee in summer and having that one song you love to hear on the radio that years later triggers happy memories. I hope this could be that song for someone out there.” Gorgeous Tele solo, too. Plus a key change for added happy-faced, major key vibes.

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California Irish – Live Fast, Die Free

Cormac Neeson and pals drew from classic road trip flick Easy Rider for this latest single – all long-haired, freewheeling Americana and warm slide vibes, with a loose-limbed swampiness and sweet, gospelly harmonies. “The song tries to tap into some of the hippie ethos that’s captured so beautifully in the movie, themes of freedom, love and living life without regret,” Cormac says. “It’s also one of those loose, groovy songs that the live analogue recording process suited perfectly.”

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The Scaramanga Six – Cultural Cannibal

Yorkshire-bred and proudly DIY to the core, The Scaramanga Six strike an angular but heartrending note with this slickly composed marriage of alt textures, beautifully rich yet smoky vocals and swooning minor-key sensibilities. You’ll find plenty of existential darkness and jagged, avant-rock twists in Cultural Cannibal’s sonic walls, but shot through with a yearning, melodic intensity that keeps you hooked through all its five minutes. Darkly romantic.

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Bernie Marsden – Calling Card

The late, much-loved Whitesnake guitarist and rock scene stalwart does a beautiful, smooth job with Rory Gallagher’s pensive blues jam. Part of his posthumous ICONS album series (the latest of which is just out now, also featuring Jimi Hendrix, Allman Brothers and Albert King covers among others) it finds him dropping the tempo slightly and adding Hammond organ lines for a brooding, city-after-midnight ambience. Think neon lights and rainy streets around closing time.

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Mark Morton – Dust (feat Cody Jinks and Grace Bowers)

The Lamb Of God six-stringer is joined by outlaw country dude Cody Jinks on vocals for this deep, crunchy, swaggered-up slice of his excellent rootsy solo album Without The Pain – with fast-rising, Nashville-based hotshot Grace Bowers popping into the studio to lay down some tasty guitar flourishes. “I wrote it in an afternoon together with Jaren Johnston and Cody Jinks,” Morton says. “And trading off guitar solos with Grace Bowers was a total blast…that’s me on the slide parts and Grace handling the shredding.”

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Battlesnake – Murder Machine

“The Exultants demonic hound pigs, their faithful servants built to hunt Jesus Christ,” intone Battlesnake, regarding their latest opus. “The ‘Machina Mortifero’ in English ‘Murder Machine’, they feed only on bile and human waste. The scent of the Son of Man drives them into insanity and the hunt begins….”. Now, we don’t know about you, but we’ve no idea what they’re on about. But that doesn’t stop Murder Machine from being a literal behemoth of a song, churning with monstrous intent and NWOBHM/prog malevolence. If Godzilla started a band to play atop the pyramids, during a lightning storm, it might sound something like this.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

Pearl Jam have released a new EP compiling songs featured in the award-winning HBO drama series The Last Of Us.

In the latest episode of the series (season 2, episode 5), set in Seattle, Bella Ramsey’s character Ellie is shown singing the opening line of Pearl Jam’s Future Days, a song originally recorded as the closing track on Pearl Jam’s 2013 album Lightning Bolt. The song also occupies a pivotal spot at the beginning of the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II, where Ellie is shown the song by her friend and guardian Joel (played in the HBO series by Pedro Pascal).

Future Days is the lead track of Pearl Jam’s new The Last Of Us EP, with the tracklist completed by All Or None from 2002’s Riot Act album, a performance of Future Days recorded live at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana festival last year, and Present Tense (Redux) from 1996’s No Code album.

As well as being made available on streaming services, a strictly limited 12″ EP is available to members of their Ten Club,

Watch the new video for Future Days below.

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Pearl Jam were joined onstage last week by veteran British rock Peter Frampton.

Referencing Frampton’s hugely successful 1976 double live album, Frampton Comes Alive!, Vedder added, “It was one of reasons why we loved live records, and later we decided to release bootlegs because of his influence. He’s such an incredible human being on top of it. It is our honour, because at this point he’s become a good friend to the group. He’s recorded with Mike [McCready, PJ guitarist] and [drummer] Matt Cameron and we get to play with him tonight.”

Frampton then joined the band to perform Black, from their 1991 debut album, Ten.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

Pentangle released six albums between 1968 and 1972, but the wealth of bonus material here expands this fine collection to a mammoth 14 discs of vinyl. Out-takes, live tracks and material cherry-picked from contemporaneous solo albums by the group’s esteemed guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn all feature.

And with 20,000 words of sleeve notes and six different music journalists each writing an essay specific to one of the half-dozen Pentangle albums revisited, it’s hard to imagine a more thorough or inviting introduction to the band’s key releases.

Given the group’s heady confluence of talent and later influence, it’s extraordinary to think that Transatlantic – the imprint that would go on to release Pentangle’s first five albums – weren’t keen at first. Label boss Nat Joseph had released Jansch and Renbourn’s 1966 LP Bert And John and wanted more solo works.

But when mellifluous-voiced jazz fan Jacqui McShee sang with them at their London folk club The Horseshoe, with double bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox standing in, a five-pointed star was born.

The band’s complex, imaginative sound was immediately striking on tunes such as Bells and Waltz from 1968’s debut The Pentangle; but for many their greatest album is 1969’s Basket Of Light, home to intricate prog-folk masterpiece Light Flight, the sitar-imbued Once I Had A Sweetheart, and the haunting acid-folk of Hunting Song.

Elsewhere, acts of daring – such as Danny Thompson’s brilliant solo bass composition Haitian Fight Song (from 1968’s part-live double set, Sweet Child) and Jack Orion, the 19-minute tale of a servant using an enchanted fiddle to seduce his master’s sweetheart (from 1970’s Cruel Sister) – support Renbourn’s contention that, while on Transatlantic, Pentangle were free to do whatever they pleased.

This licence fired their experimental approach as they took folk in jazzier, often part-improvised directions. Witness their gorgeously languid version of Charles Mingus’s famed instrumental Goodbye Pork Pie Hat at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1968.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacqui McShee’s favourite Pentangle LP is 1972’s Solomon’s Seal, wherein succinct, bewitching trad folk songs such as The Cherry Tree Carol – rather than extended instrumental passages – take the fore.

According to Jim Wirth’s fine accompanying essay, the LP was off catalogue for 30 years “until master tapes were found propping up a wobbly table leg in Renbourn’s house.”

Solomon’s Seal was last released on vinyl in 1977. Together with the rest of these often masterful LP’s, it’s great to see it revisited, re-evaluated and expanded.

The Albums: 1968-1972 is on sale now via Svart Records.

James McNair grew up in East Kilbride, Scotland, lived and worked in London for 30 years, and now resides in Whitley Bay, where life is less glamorous, but also cheaper and more breathable. He has written for Classic Rock, Prog, Mojo, Q, Planet Rock, The Independent, The Idler, The Times, and The Telegraph, among other outlets. His first foray into print was a review of Yum Yum Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington, and in many ways it’s been downhill ever since. His favourite Prog bands are Focus and Pavlov’s Dog and he only ever sits down to write atop a Persian rug gifted to him by a former ELP roadie. 

Scorpions are one of the longest-running bands in music, with a career that stretches back nearly 60 years. In 2004, as they released their 15th studio album, Unbreakable, Classic Rock sat down with the band to look back on the rollercoaster journey of German’s biggest band.

Given the sporting rivalry that has long existed between England and Germany, it’s ironic that Rudolf Schenker would choose the year 1966 to form the Scorpions. But that’s what happened. At around the same time that two extra-time goals from Geoff Hurst broke West German hearts in the World Cup Final, the Schenker family was abuzz with music.

“I was learning the guitar and could already play rhythm, and my mother suggested I should play with my brother Michael,” explains Rudolf. “I was already about sixteen and had taken a job, and Michael was very young, maybe about nine. But he showed a lot of ability as a lead guitarist.”

Again thanks to his mother, Rudolf learned of three local rock musicians who were rehearsing in the basement of his local church. Until the intervention of Rudolph Schenker, none of them had had the confidence to organise a concert.

“It was 1965, and because we didn’t have a name we played as The Nameless,” reasons Rudolf. “It was just three songs, but it was a big success. Then I found a better drummer and guitarist, and at the start of the following year we began calling the band the Scorpions, playing all the Hannover clubs. We did songs by The Pretty Things, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. I was splitting the vocals with the drummer, who was into more commercial bands like The Dave Clark Five. I would sing The Pretty Things’ numbers, things like LSD. I’m sure that my father still has the recordings somewhere.”

Committed to writing in English from the start, Rudolf was schooled in the work of The Yardbirds, The Animals and Spooky Tooth and was already becoming a proficient composer, but he knew that he wasn’t equipped to be his band’s permanent frontman. He had already approached Klaus Meine, from rival band Mushrooms, on several occasions to consider joining, but each time he was politely rebuffed. Gradually, the Scorpions’ live repertoire began to toughen up, absorbing material by Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

“Klaus had just got out of the army, and I had the idea of putting him and Michael in a band together,” recounts Rudolf. “My brother and the band he was in at the time were all drinking like hell, and they were all about thirteen years old. Klaus had to go to my father and promise to take care of Michael. Which he did.”

The result was Copernicus, a band that Rudolf Schenker also managed. It was only a matter of time before osmosis took over, and both Michael and Klaus found themselves joining the Scorpions on New Year’s Eve of 1970. Rudolf, bassist Lothar Heimberg and drummer Wolfgang Dziony had been experiencing problems with an existing guitarist, and realised that they might as well make two line-up changes as one.

Although the new-look Scorpions had no trouble in finding live employment, gigging with Uriah Heep, Atomic Rooster, Chicken Shack and Rory Gallagher, record companies scoffed at their international ambitions. Eventually they had a lucky break in meeting Conny Plank, the producer who would eventually oversee the band’s 1972 debut Lonesome Crow for Metronome Records. They had been working on the music for an anti-narcotics film called Das Kalte Paradies (The Cold Paradise) when they bumped into Plank at a studio in Hamburg.

“We’d wanted to make an album, but for a German rock band there seemed little possibility,” Rudolf recalls. “We met Conny, and two days later we had a contract. In October 1971 we began recording. It was all done in six days, including all the mixing…”

“And probably even the cover drawing,” Meine adds with a laugh

Lonesome Crow surprised everybody by selling more than 10,000 copies. It was a promising record from a band still looking for an identity, and a guitarist awaiting his 15th birthday. “It had some elements that are still present,” says Klaus. “In Search Of The Piece Of Mind was a great ballad, and there was some jazzier, more psychedelic stuff. But coming out of the club scene, they were the first original songs we wrote.”

Even Plank didn’t take the band’s plans seriously. “We said to Conny: ‘Some day we will play in America’. He just laughed and said: ‘You guys have no chance,’” remembers the singers.

In the summer of 1973 the Scorpions set out on what was to be a fateful tour opening for UFO. When the headliners’ guitarist Bernie Marsden forgot his passport and failed to turn up for a gig in Regensburg, Michael Schenker was asked to deputise for the night. Although UFO bassist Pete Way hurriedly taught the young guitarist the chords to Boogie For George and C’mon Everybody in the venue’s lavatory, and the tour was eventually completed with Marsden, Michael had made an immediate impression.

“Michael was so striking with his Flying V guitar and blond hair,” UFO vocalist Phil Mogg told Classic Rock in 2000. “So we asked his older brother Rudolf if we could borrow him, and he said: ‘We’ve been trying to get rid of him for years’.”

“Ah, that’s just the English humour,” says Rudolf. “It wasn’t like that at all. When my brother told us [he was leaving] he was very drunk. He’d already said yes to UFO, but he didn’t know how to tell us. It wasn’t easy for me or the rest of the guys [to accept], but I knew he was a great guitar player and that this could be a good chance for him. At least before he went, Michael did one good thing – he spoke to [his eventual successor] Uli Roth.”

Inevitably, Michael’s departure threw the Scorpions into a state of turmoil. Metronome Records announced that they didn’t want them minus their teenage talisman, and the group almost split up. Indeed they would have done had Schenker junior not made the aforementioned approach to then Dawn Road guitarist Ulrich Roth.

“Michael left us to be a part of the famous UFO in England,” Klaus told me in 1991, failing to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “We were fucked. Left behind without a lead guitarist and a record label.”

“But we still had one very important TV show to play. And it was difficult to get Uli to agree to help us as he already had his own band,” Rudolf continues. “Eventually he agreed, it was a big success, and Uli really enjoyed it. At first Klaus didn’t think that Uli should join, but somehow I convinced him that it would work.”

Roth initially remained a member of his ex-band as well as the Scorpions, although when that arrangement proved impractical Dawn Road bassist Francis Buchholz was brought in as part of a replacement rhythm section, completed by new drummer Jürgen Rosenthal. On the strength of their televised appearance, this grouping signed a new worldwide deal with RCA Records, and co-produced the next album with the then unknown engineer Reinhart Mack, later to work with Queen, Billy Squier and Electric Light Orchestra.

“Did we think that Mack would become famous one day? Not really, but he probably thought that we wouldn’t either,” Meine admits.

However, 1974’s Fly To The Rainbow was a big improvement upon the debut. True, there were some quite nonsensical lyrics – amid the cowbell-embellished opening track Speedy’s Coming, Meine pairs up almost anything that vaguely rhymes, crooning: ‘D’you like Alice Cooper/D’you like Ringo Starr/You like David Bowie and friends/And the Royal Albert Hall’ – but Roth’s shamelessly Hendrix-inspired style gave They Need A Million, Fly People Fly and the nine-minute title track an added maturity. Uli, whose vocals were at pitiful as his instrumental prowess was inspiring, was also allowed to take to the microphone for Drifting Sun and part of Fly To The Rainbow itself.

“Uli was never a good singer,” Rudolf admits when pressurised on the subject. “Some of his singing is not so bad, because it suits the songs. Keith Richards is not a good singer either. But Uli was writing material that Klaus didn’t feel comfortable singing.”

The third album, 1975’s In Trance, took the Scorpions to new creative highs, and was their first to be produced by Dieter Dierks at his studio in Cologne. The band already knew they didn’t want to produce themselves any more, and had happened upon Dierks – whose track record with Tangerine Dream and Nektar had placed him on their wish list of collaborators – at a party.

“With Dieter, the concept of the Scorpions’ music became much stronger,” Klaus observes. “We made an album that had all our trademarks; we’d found our style.”

Before beginning work on the album, Dierks suggested the band should record German versions of The Sweet’s Action and Fox On The Run as a double A-side single.

“In Germany you received 50 per cent of the publishing rights if you did a song in a different language,” Rudolf explains now. “We got 7,000 Marks [around £2,500], which was money that we badly needed.”

In Trance’s title track was a ponderous ballad written by Klaus and Rudolf in a church, although Robot Man and Top Of The Bill were altogether slices of harder rock. Once again, Roth sang, on Dark Lady and Sun In My Hand. Indeed the guitarist’s name appears six of the album’s 10 songs. The sleeve, which featured a topless blonde straddling a Fender Stratocaster, was the first of many risqué covers.

By 1975 the band’s gig itinerary had taken in France and Belgium, the latter the homeland of new drummer Rudy Lenners, who joined when Rosenthal was called up into the army. The band also played their first tour of the UK. Although the group turned up to support The Damned at Barbarellas in Birmingham, they took one look at the audience and decided not to bother. And at Liverpool’s famous Cavern club, they were astounded when some of the audience became so inebriated that they urinated on the PA system.

“We had never seen anything like it before,” Schenker says. “We didn’t come on stage until one o’clock in the morning, and they’d been drinking all evening. They were pissing in the corners of the room, everywhere…”.

The Scorpions’ rise continued with the following year’s Virgin Killer album. It’s partly been overshadowed by its unforgiveable artwork – an image of naked 10-year-old girl that has subsequently been banned – but musically, Schenker describes the record as “definitely the hardest, hottest and craziest album we’d done up that point”. However, the creative nucleus was becoming ever more divided. On the one side, Uli Roth’s fixation with Hendrix was taking him in one direction,and the rest of the band were going in another.

“It was obvious that the Scorpions had split into two camps,” Meine nods. “Rudy and I had become a good writing partnership, but Uli was so influenced by Hendrix that he was coming up with things like [Virgin Killer track] Hell-Cat. For a while it was an interesting mix. Van Halen were very influenced by the early Scorpions sound; they played Catch Your Train and Speedy’s Coming in the LA clubs. The first time I met Eddie Van Halen, he wanted to know all sorts of things about Uli Roth. But it became very wild on stage. A lot of crazy stuff happened.”

Sure enough, there was another personnel change before the next album, Taken By Force. “The stress was too much for Rudy Lenners, who had to go from the studio to hospital because it was affecting his stomach,” Rudolf explains. Michael Schenker had met Herman Rarebell in London’s notorious Speakeasy club, and recommended the drummer to his ex-colleagues.

Rarebell met the band when they played at London’s Music Machine, and remained with them for many years to come, even releasing a solo album called Nip In The Bud in 1981.

However, for Uli time was running short. In fact, Rarebell’s appointment – opposed by Roth – merely accelerated the departure of the latter, who had co-written the song We’ll Burn The Sky with Jimi Hendrix’s ex-girlfriend Monika Danneman.

“Uli and the rest of us had drifted further and further apart on Taken By Force,” Meine reflects. “He hadn’t wanted us to hire a heavy drummer like Herman, because he was on a totally different trip. We were writing songs like Steamrock Fever and He’s A Woman – She’s A Man, and Uli was writing I’ve Got To Be Free, which seemed to say it all. It was a good album, but you could tell that the band was splitting apart.”

The sleeve of Taken By Force – their second album in 12 months – showed two kids playing with guns in a graveyard, and was once again considered too distasteful for some territories, including the UK, where it was replaced by a plain black-and-white cover with five individual photos.

The chance to play two shows at Tokyo’s Sun Plaza Hall in April 1978 was a welcome distraction from the group’s inner angst, but everybody knew that the writing was on the wall for the current line-up. Recorded for an exceptional double live album called The Tokyo Tapes, the Japanese dates served as an emotional swansong for Uli Roth, who went on to form Electric Sun. The new Scorpions guitarist was found through an advert placed in the Melody Maker. Matthias Jabs joined the band from German band Fargo whose bassist Peter Knorn coincidentally went on to manage Uli Roth Michael Schenker.

The Scorpions’ next album was the one that ushered in a golden age for the band. Released in 1979, Lovedrive even saw Michael Schenker himself return to the group briefly. Schenker had stunned UFO by walking out on them just as they were the verge of a commercial breakthrough with the Strangers In The Night double live set. He agreed to play on three of the ‘Lovedrive’ songs, and even joined the Scorpions on tour – although that arrangement lasted for a mere two weeks.

Of his second spell with the Scorpions, Michael Schenker would later tell Classic Rock: “My brother had said he needed some help [with the album]. Matthias was too fresh in the band, and they needed some excitement. Rudolf sent me a tape with four or five numbers. I did my part and everything was good, but then when I was touring I realised that it was a bad move. I had to play other people’s songs and lead breaks by someone else; it was so uncomfortable.”

Although Jabs was recalled by the band, Michael arrived at the Reading Festival site with them in 1979, telling the Melody Maker: “When I feel healthy, I can tour. With the Scorpions, I thought I was healthy, but it all came back so fast that I couldn’t believe it. I’m not a very strong person. So I went to Spain to find some warm weather.”

“Michael was in a good mental state at first, but he’d just got married, and when he and his wife went back to their house the lock had been changed and his car was gone,” explains Rudolf. “The [UFO] management had told the band that certain things were theirs, but they were only hired. It was a big shock that he’d worked like hell but was left with no money.”

The person who deserved the most sympathy was Matthias Jabs, who was dismissed from the group not once but twice upon Schenker’s return. Jabs had played his first Scorpions gig in August 1978. Having sensed trouble, he was “disappointed though also relieved” when Michael was reinstated. So he was stunned to receive a call from Schenker during the band’s tour, advising him – though not the Scorpions – that he wouldn’t play in Cologne that evening. Ignoring the situation, Jabs went on holiday to a location where there were no telephones.

“The island’s only policeman, on his pushbike with a telegram, found me,” Jabs recalls. “Would I go back to the Scorpions? They would send a helicopter. It was lucky I had my guitar with me.”

The arrangement was that Jabs would help the band finish the German tour. Schenker duly returned again, then did another disappearing act.

“Michael played the next two or three shows in France, and then Francis Buchholz rang to say that he’d failed to show up in Lyon,” Jabs remembers. “Funnily enough, my stuff was already packed as I knew the call would come. They asked if I would please help them out – and this time it would be forever.”

Michael went on to fail an audition for Aerosmith, and so formed his own group. However, while staying at manager Peter Mensch’s London flat and assembling the latter solo project with ex-Montrose drummer Denny Carmassi and future Mr Big bassist Billy Sheehan, Schenker shaved off his hair, smashed his beloved Flying V guitar and vanished again.

“He was caught between Heaven and Hell,” Rudolf says. He was playing the best I’d ever heard him, but mentally he was in a terrible shape.”

Even a quarter of a century later, Lovedrive still sounds amazing, from the chunky, riff-heavy opening strains of ‘Loving You Sunday Morning’ to the ferocious Another Piece Of Meat and Can’t Get Enough. The band had finally discarded the hippy baggage of Uli Roth, but Holiday and Always Somewhere confirmed they could still write world class ballads – a skill that would serve them very well in the future.

Besides design company Hipgnosis coming up with a cover image of a man with his hand stuck by bubblegum to the breast of a female taxi companion, the group also upped the ante with the sexual content of their lyrics. In I Can’t Get Enough he certainly issues the command: ‘Move your legs, stamp your feet/The language of your body, is right now all I need/To understand you’re ready for love’.

Lovedrive quickly became the band’s biggest album, with 500,000 copies sold giving them their first US gold disc. On their first major American tour they opened on a bill that included Ted Nugent, AC/DC and Aerosmith; their popularity in Chicago had them promoted above intended headliner Nugent. By contrast, British critics still weren’t exactly gushing with praise for the Scorpions, one of whom called them “the worst German import since the V2 bomb”.

While the following year’s Animal Magnetism album wasn’t a match for its predecessor it deftly repeated the formula and applied a quick follow-up punch. One of its best songs, Don’t Make No Promises (Your Body Can’t Keep), included the feminist-baiting couplet: ‘She started to undress, what a sight to see/Padded bra, blonde wig, not much left for me’. Keeping up the run of controversial album sleeves, the front cover showed a dog and woman staring provocatively at a man’s groin area, its reverse image seeming to portray a bout of canine-human fellatio. “Animal Magnetism could have been a lot worse,” says Jabs. “You should have seen the demo of what we wanted!”

The novelty of the group’s nationality seemed to take a while to wear off, and the band understandably tired of the clichés very quickly. “When we first went to England, all papers said: ‘Heil Hitler, crash-boom-blitzkrieg, the Krauts are here!’” sighed Klaus

“But we don’t think about the war,” Rudolf Schenker bristled. “It’s all in the past. Look, if I’m in England or America it doesn’t matter to me that those countries have been involved in wars [with Germany].”

The Scorpions were on a mission to conquer the globe, their own ambition inescapable. “There was a real sense of competition between ourselves and other bands on a similar level,” Jabs admitted a decade later. “It was always friendly rivalry, but we looked at what bands like AC/DC and UFO were doing and always tried to top it. We took particular notice of Van Halen in America and AC/DC in Europe.”

The Scorpions’ live shows had by now shaped into something very entertaining. The group became famous for their shape-throwing, posing and headbanging frantically at the front of the stage, even climaxing the show by forming grinning, human pyramids. Arriving in the UK to play the inaugural Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington in August 1980, they drove themselves around in rental cars at breakneck speeds.

“If the police stopped us it was quite simple – we pretended not to speak English,” grins Rudolf, who before the Scorpions took the stage completed a lap or two of the Donington race-track circuit.

But such pranks were relatively innocent. Unlike some of their contemporaries, the Scorpions steered clear of more dangerous things, not least hard drugs.

“We’d been touring with Aerosmith when they had bad drug problems,” Jabs confides. “At one show, Steve Tyler went up to Francis [Buchholz] and said: ‘Hi, Tom’. He actually thought Francis was [Aerosmith bassist] Tom Hamilton!”

“In America cocaine was as easy to get as a beer, but we never tried hard drugs,” clarifies Schenker. “We learned our lessons early.”

Women were a different matter. The group’s videos were sometimes shot at arena concerts, and often included girls flashing their breasts at the band. Did the Scorpions get much attention from groupies?

“Groupies are very important part of rock’n’roll,” Rudolf says seriously. “At one point we had so much security that our backstage area was completely clean. We became bored. We said: ‘Let the girls in, let some people in’. If you’re having a meal, you need that spice to go with it.”

By 1982, the Scorpions had become headliners in North America. So it was all the more distressing when Meine discovered he had lost his voice as they prepared to record their new album, Blackout. Various treatments were sought for the nodes on his throat, including visits to a Viennese specialist whose clientele consisted entirely of opera singers. The singer was ordered not to talk for weeks at a time, and gradually his voices came back. However, to this day it’s rumoured that Dokken frontman Don Dokken, who receives a credit on the sleeve, contributed more than just backing vocals to the album.

“Don sings backing vocals on just one track, which I think was You Give Me All I Need, I did everything else,” Klaus says. “He was in the studio as back-up in case the worst happened. It was never really spoken about, but at one point it looked as though I might not be able to return to the band. I told Rudolf that they might have to look for a new singer.”

Putting their trials behind them, the Scorpions unveiled an album that smashed open the American market for them. Released in 1982, Blackout is among the definitive metal releases of the 80s. Containing the manic title track, the anthemic Dynamite and Can’t Live Without You, and even the band’s answer to Led Zeppelin’s Dazed & Confused in China White, it was a winner from start to finish. In America Blackout made the US Top 10 and sold more than a million copies. In 1983, they were second on the bill to Van Halen at the massive Us Festival, playing to more than 300,000 people.

Their commercial and creative success continued with 1984’s Love At First Sting. Featuring such classics as Bad Boys Running Wild, Rock You Like A Hurricane, Big City Nights and their best ballad so far, Still Loving You, Love At First Sting struck an instant connection with Middle America (and

France where it sold an incredible 1.7 million singles).

“The …First Sting album was recorded digitally and that was a minor mistake because the technology wasn’t quite perfect yet,” observes Rudolf. “The guitars sometimes sound a bit thin, but the sleeve [shot in Paris by fashion photographer Helmut Newton] was fantastic.”

However, there was trouble in paradise and during some recording sessions in Stockholm the band had come close to ousting Rarebell (“He went through a difficult time and became this crazy party guy,” says Meine) and Buchholz (“There were lots of musical problems,” adds the singer) in favour of former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli and ex-Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, only to change their minds at the last minute.

By 1984, they were filling New York’s cavernous Madison Square Garden for three nights as part of a tour immortalised by the following year’s double-album World Wide Live, while their opening acts included the fledgling Bon Jovi, Metallica and Def Leppard.

“We had a great time with Def Leppard, who were still young kids,” Schenker reminisces. “Bon Jovi very quickly learned from us how to be a rock’n’roll band. Doc McGhee [their manager] told them, ‘Copy how the Scorpions do it’. Before that they were a pop band, but we showed them what rock’n’roll was all about.”

“Did our success in America go to anybody’s heads?” muses Rudolf. “Egos did become bigger, but it was hard for them not to. We had our own plane and we had to learn to live this life.”

Their next album, Savage Amusement, wouldn’t emerge for four years. Partly this was down to a heavy touring schedule followed by a much-needed break. But the album itself took 12 months to complete. It would be the last album they made with longtime producer Dieter Dierks, the band’s frustration at both Dierks methods and having to work in the same studio finally reaching a tipping point.

“We knew it and so did he,” Klaus told me in 1991. “With this album, Dieter became a dictator. Love At First Sting may have been successful, but all the feeling was gone. We had a so-called perfect album, but there was no spirit.”

But they were still breaking new ground behind the Iron Curtain. In 1988, the band played 10 sell-out gigs in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to more than 350,000 fans largely starved of Western music. The following year, they joined Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe and more at the Moscow Music Peace festival, playing before 260,000 people in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium.

Having unshackled themselves from Dieter Dierks, The Scorpions recorded their fourteenth album, 1990’s Crazy World, in America with Keith Olsen. In contrast to their previous album, just three months were spent in the studio with Olsen, who’d previously worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Santana and Whitesnake.

“We ’ve literally started a new life,” exalted a gleeful Rarebell in an interview from the time. “We feel like kids again, you can hear it in the music. Even if nobody likes [this album], we had fun doing it.”

“With Savage Amusement, we even considered giving up, but the new blood has made a huge difference,” added Klaus.

They even brought in a co-writer, Jim Vallance, most famous for working with Bryan Adams on some of the Canadian rocker’s biggest hits. “He went through our lyrics and it was so good working with the guy that we even wrote some new songs,” says Klaus.

But the album’s biggest single – and the biggest song of the Scorpions’ entire career – was written by the singer alone. Wind Of Change was an epic power ballad that had been inspired by their time in Russia. Featuring an optimistic lyric from Meine – and some memorable whistling – it topped the charts in 11 countries, bringing them an invitation to the Kremlin to meet then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The song has been the subject of mockery from some quarters down the years, but both Meine and Schenker concur that its extraordinary popularity enabled them to ride out the grunge era while many of their rivals fell by the wayside.

“It helped us to survive and to continue playing big tours even when Nirvana and all the rest were happening,” says Schenker. “Okay, some didn’t like it, but we’re probably still here because of it.”

The most memorable show of the Crazy World era wasn’t one of their own. In July 1990, an invitation came in from Roger Waters, who wanted the Scorpions to appear in his re-vamped version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. As a German band, the Scorpions couldn’t turn it down.

“We’ve played some big shows, but that one was incredible,” recalls Meine proudly. “The stage was huge. Matthias was playing in East Berlin and I was singing in West Berlin. It was an emotional experience. The Brandenburg Gate had been out of reach all our lives; you could see it, but it was as far away as the Moon. Standing there on that stage and seeing 300,000 people on top of Hitler’s bunker – what a triumph over stupidity.”

The huge success was tainted slightly by the dismissal of long-serving bassist Francis Buchholz, who also handled many of the band’s business affairs, in 1982. He was replaced by 30-year-old unknown Ralph Rieckermann “Francis was supposed to be the band’s link to the world of business, but he betrayed us and we haven’t spoken since,” Meine told me witheringly afterwards.

Following the success of Winds Of Change, 1993’s Face The Heat album leaned heavily into ballads, though it still had its fair share of quality hard rock in the shape of Alien Nation and No Pain, No Gain, plus the ludicrous Taxman Woman, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the German government taking 65 per cent of their earnings in tax. “The old we get, the funnier we get,” said drummer Herman Rarebell, by then a tax exile living in Monaco. He wasn’t laughing for long – Face The Heat would be his final album with the band.

If the 1980s and early 1990s had been the Scorpions most successful era, the second half of the latter decade was more of a struggle. 1996’s Pure Instinct was a long way from being a classic. “I know that,” agrees Rudolf. “I knew it then, too. The time was wrong. The nineties were against what the Scorpions do. So we continued playing music, and we did release some good songs, but something was missing.”

1999’s Eye II Eye had a pop flavour that polarised the fans, something Meine acknowledges. “To me, ‘Eye II Eye’ wasn’t a bad album, but it wasn’t well received,” he says.

Still, the latter saw the arrival of drummer James Kottak (“I don’t know how we made it this far without being rhythmic,” said Matthias Jabs), while certain members’ Bobby Charlton-style combovers and increasingly sparse barnets were replaced by shorter, sensible hairstyles that didn’t attempt to cover balding pates.

“It was a new millennium, so the hair had to go,” observed Jabs at the time, adding: “There wasn’t much left anyway.” “Actually, it was beginning to fall out when the band started,” added Meine, with commendable self-mockery.

They clawed back some credibility with 2000’s Moment Of Glory, which saw them re-recording some of the classic songs with with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Meine denies that they were copying Metallica, whose similarly orchestral S&M album had been released the previous year.

“Actually, it was the other way around,” insists Meine. “The Berlin Philharmonic approached us in around 1994, and we were blown away because they’re the Rolls-Royce of classical orchestras. We actually met with [arranger] Michael Kamen in 1997, so we were a little surprised when we saw Michael doing the same thing with Metallica.”

Their most recent album, the defiantly-titled Unbreakable, is the back-to-basics Scorpions album that fans have long craved. They even toyed with the idea of reuniting with Dieter Dierks for the first time since Savage Amusement.

“At the time when we first worked together, he was our manager, our producer and our [music] publisher. We paid heavily for that,” explains Rudolf. “We wanted to move forward again with Dieter, to forget everything that had happened in the past.”

“Being in the same tiny studio in Cologne was a bit like being in a time warp,” agrees Matthias. “You had to pinch yourself. But it was just like the old days – Dieter didn’t seem to realise that we had a delivery date.”

The album was eventually produced by Erwin Musper, a member of their background team since the 1990s. When asked about the commercial expectations for a new Scorpions

album in 2004, Klaus is realistic.

“Whether we’ll sell lots of records again,” he says thoughtfully, “well, that remains to be seen. We’ll still have a reputation as a great live band. We’ll still rock your nuts off all night; no one can take that away from us.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 66, May 2004

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.

Peers of Metallica who never quite scaled the same heights as James Hetfield and co, LA’s Armored Saint were one of the great cult bands of the 1980s. In 2017, Metal Hammer sat down with frontman John Bush to hear tales of triumph, tragedy and thwarted ambition.

“I got a call from Jonny Z, who was the manager of Metallica at the time, and he said they wanted me to sing with them,” remembers John Bush, ex-Anthrax singer and longtime frontman with US metal veterans Armored Saint. “Do I regret turning that down? What I always tell people is that Armored Saint was developing and we were doing well, and these guys were my buddies, you know? Metallica were doing well, but it wasn’t like it was Metallica in 1987. It was a few years before that. So, I didn’t want to leave my band. I liked them and I still do!”

There are two things that every thrash connoisseur knows about John Bush. Firstly, he could have been the singer in Metallica. Secondly, he has had first-hand experience of Anthrax’s once-inexplicable revolving door vocalist policy. You may also be aware that he recorded voiceovers for Burger King commercials. In truth, however, the most pertinent fact about John Bush is that more than three decades after forming in Los Angeles, California, his first band, Armored Saint, are still a very potent going concern and are heading to the UK for a rare proper tour this March. Beloved of diehard metalheads but still comparatively unknown in the rock mainstream, the band’s career has been somewhat episodic, with at least one seemingly final split along the way. But today they have the wind in their sails. 2015’s Win Hands Down album was widely acclaimed, and confirmed that these lifelong friends have still got plenty of shared chemistry to exploit.

“Oh yeah, our friendship goes all the way back to us being little boys,” John grins. “Gonzo [Sandoval, Armored Saint drummer], Joey [Vera, bassist], myself and Phil [Gonzo’s brother, guitarist] went to the same elementary school. We met each other around the 3rd or 4th grade, when we were around eight or nine. Obviously Gonzo and Phil knew each other because they’re brothers! But that’s when the friendship developed, and I’d say it was a strong friendship through the rest of our teenage years, and it just kept going. Obviously there was a little time when I joined Anthrax that the relationship became a little more distant, but we didn’t have phones back then, so I’d be on tour and looking for a damn pay phone, ha ha!”

Formed in 1982, Armored Saint stood out from the start, not least because the majority of metal bands in their native LA were firmly in the sleazy, Sunset Strip camp, as MTV began to take notice of heavy music’s burgeoning popularity. By the time the band’s debut album, March Of The Saint, emerged in 1984, the thrash movement was noisily underway too, but John Bush and his bandmates’ bluesy and melodic but precise and muscular take on the old-school metal template didn’t fit into that scene either.

“We’ve always been in a kind of limbo state,” John shrugs. “We started in ’82 and we played with all the bands that came out of LA, so that’s Ratt, WASP, Quiet Riot, Steeler, Black ’N Blue, Great White, everybody. They were great shows and those bands were cool and we got along with them. But we sounded a little different from the bulk of the LA bands and that became more obvious as time passed. We always wished we were from England, and I mean that honestly. Our favourite bands were Priest, Motörhead, Sabbath and UFO.

“When thrash happened, we had some songs that were fast, but we were always more of a bluesy hard rock, heavy metal band, and we’d write slow songs, so that didn’t really fit in with that scene. We did tours with Metallica, and I’m sure we could have done the same with Anthrax and Slayer, but we weren’t in that scene, so people would be like, ‘So, what are they?’ Back in the day it was somewhat frustrating, because we couldn’t connect with a scene, but as time has gone on, I’m happy, because we ended up doing our own thing.”

Despite their undeniable square peg status, Armored Saint retained a sizeable following of heavy metal connoisseurs throughout the 80s, and were approaching the 90s and the recording of their fourth album with a degree of optimism until original guitarist Dave Prichard succumbed to leukaemia and passed away in 1990.

As they mourned their friend, John and his fellow Saints made a collective vow to finish working on the songs that Dave had been writing prior to his death. The result was 1991’s Symbol Of Salvation, widely regarded as Armored Saint’s masterpiece, and an album that, with hindsight, suggested the band were better equipped than most to weather the oncoming storm of grunge and nu metal. Unfortunately, the emotional fallout of losing a cherished comrade, coupled with years of hard slog, brought the first chapter of Armored Saint’s story to a premature end.

“I think we probably had these expectations that Symbol… was gonna be bigger than it was,” John remembers today. “But truthfully, even though we received a lot of acclaim on that record, we didn’t get the results that perhaps we’d expected. There was some frustration on the US tour that we did after the album came out. It was one of the most miserable tours I’ve ever done in my life. We were driving through the Rockies with all our luggage and 10 guys in a van. I thought we were going to die every time we hit the road and there were a lot of short fuses in the band. It felt like a big sigh, you know? We’d made Symbol… but we were exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally. The tour was terrible and then Anthrax came along. It just seemed like the right time to end it.”

John Bush jumped ship to join the New York thrash legends in 1992 and went on to record four well-received studio albums, culminating in 2003’s classic We’ve Come For You All. But Armored Saint was never truly done and dusted, and the strength of its members’ friendship ensured that the band were back in action again when the 21st century dawned, releasing their fifth album, Revelation, in 2000. Unlike many of their earlier peers, the band’s sound was fluid and malleable enough to be deftly upgraded for a new era, and John’s soulful rasp had never sounded better. It would take the band a further decade to make a follow-up, 2010’s La Raza, but with the logistical intricacies of the is-our-singer-in-Anthrax-or-not debacle receding in the rear-view mirror and the universal thumbs-up given to Win Hands Down, the last few years have been among the band’s most successful to date.

Having quit Anthrax after the birth of his children to avoid being away on tour for long periods, John Bush admits that Armored Saint will never return to a full-on touring schedule again, but the chance to attend to some unfinished business in front of an ever-expanding, multi-generational and international audience is too good an opportunity to waste.

“There are still a lot of territories that Armored Saint have never played that I do want to go to,” he says. “We’ll try to make that happen. We just have to find a way to do it so we’re not gone for months at a time, because then I’ll be divorced and a junkie, and that’s not the road we want to go down, ha ha! It worked out perfectly when I left Anthrax, because I’d just had my daughter and it seemed like the right thing to do for my family. The one thing you can’t get back is time. But I do love performing. I love singing. It’s one of the few things in my life I do well!”

It’s hard to imagine that John Bush doesn’t occasionally daydream about how his life might have turned out if he’d accepted Metallica’s offer all those years ago. But in 2017, he could hardly be happier, and Armored Saint have never been more in demand. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race, hands down.

“We’ve always just believed in ourselves. Not to get too spiritual, but the Armored Saint thing is just here. We’re a cool entity! We’re pretty unique, and not too many people can say that they’re in a band with people they’ve known for 40 years. We’re only in our 50s and we’ve known each for four decades. So there’s a lot of history here and it’s pretty awesome. I dig it!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer magazine issue 294, March 2017

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.