ANTHRAX Guitarist Says Reunion Tour Is 'Going Really Well'

ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian checked in from the group's Australian tour on the "Friday Night Rocks" show on New York's Q104.3 FM this past Friday (May 13). Several excerpts from the interview follow:

On how the reunion tour has been going so far:

"It's been going really well. It came together really quickly. We only had three days rehearsal and most of that was spent just busting each other's balls. The shows have been great. Chicago was amazing. We played a couple of shows in Europe. Specifically the show in Glasgow in Scotland was unbelievable. We've done one show here so far in Australia, in Brisbane, and tonight is Sydney, and I expect tonight to be pretty insane."

On whether same people are coming to the shows that have been seeing the band on the last few tours or if there are a lot of new faces in the crowd:

"I would say it's a combination of both. It's people who have been coming to us all these years who are obviously coming out because of the curiosity to see what it's like, as well as people who haven't seen the band in a long time who are coming out to see Joey [Belladonna, vocals] again, and as well as, I just think, new people who never had a chance… 'cause we are playing to more people and the shows have been doing really well. We've got this [New] Jersey show coming up that I believe is really close to being sold out, which we were kind of nervous, actually, thinking, 'We're only gonna have a couple of weeks to sell this show, and we're filming a DVD there and we wanna make sure it's packed,' and it's almost sold out, so the response has been really good."

On whether they are playing songs they haven't done in a long time:

"Yeah, we're playing all kinds of stuff. If we were gonna have Joey come back out and sing with us, we felt we had to do songs that people haven't seen us play since '86/'87. So, yeah, we're doing things like 'Medusa', 'Lone Justice', 'Armed and Dangerous' with the intro. We've been doing 'Gung Ho'. There's other ones, too. I think we might try the song 'Time' — not 'Got the Time', but the song 'Time', the opening song on 'Persistence of Time' — we might try that tonight for the first time since like the MAIDEN tour in '91. So, yeah, we're playing stuff that we haven't done in forever, which, in a weird way, makes us feel new, because even though it's reunion tour, we haven't played these songs in forever, so it keeps it really fresh for us."

On how if felt to share the stage with Joey Belladonna and Danny Spitz again after all these years:

"We did go into this with that advantage… We were a band for… this lineup was a band for eight years — from '84 until '92. That was the whole genesis of this band. So the bonds that were made at that point, it was very easy for that to come back, especially live. I mean, it's not like everyone had to study and go and had weeks' rehearsal to learn this stuff. I mean, it came back really, really fast. Really after the Detroit show, which was the first show on April 29th, that was the one… all the bugs just were out of us pretty much right after that show, 'cause going into Chicago, the two nights we did there, it was just instantly, we felt like a band, it felt like ANTHRAX. Looking over and seeing Danny [Spitz, guitar] and seeing Joey, it's strange, but at the same time, it's very normal. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it feels really good. It's a lot of fun, actually."