DIAMOND HEAD's BRIAN TATLER Says It Was 'Great' To Perform 'Am I Evil?' With METALLICA

GetYourRockOut recently conducted an interview with guitarist Brian Tatler of NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) legends DIAMOND HEAD at the Hard Rock Hell festival, which was held November 13-16 at Camp HRH, Pwllheli, Gwynedd, North Wales, United Kingdom. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether he still gets inspired to create new music:

"Not so much. I know it's a nice idea, and I'm sure if we were signed to EMI and we could sell a million copies of anything we put out, we would probably be in the studio making albums all the time. But we're not. So the idea of creation is a lot of hard work, and I'd have to fund it, I'd have to find a studio, engineer, blah blah blah. So it's quite expensive and time consuming and a little bit frustrating, the amount of work that it would take for us to write and record a new album. So even though I come up with ideas, I usually just keep them on the backburner and wait for an opportunity or reason to work on them, really. And we've done two albums with [singer] Nick [Tart]. We haven't done anything for a couple of years, but, you know, something might appear.

"I used to really get off on the creative side, but at the moment, I quite enjoy just playing live and playing the old songs. And sometimes we bring in a song that we haven't played live before, or we play a song that we never played very often — maybe did it for a whole. We've literally got some songs that we haven't played for 20-25 years, so it's nice to bring them back out and polish them up a little bit."

On performing DIAMOND HEAD's "Am I Evil?" at the 2011 installment of the UK's Sonisphere festival with members of the "Big Four" of 1980s thrash metal — METALLICA, SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX:

"It was great. It's kind of a nod — isn't it? — towards DIAMOND HEAD to say, 'Respect. You're an important band. You might not have sold millions of records, but you're an influential band.' And it's nice to be influential. I mean, it's an important part of music — people pushing it forward somewhere new and not just copying and doing more of the same. I sometimes think of it, it's like a stepping stone — isn't it? — from bands like [BLACK] SABBATH towards METALLICA. DIAMOND HEAD took it faster and a bit sharper, a bit harder. I love BLACK SABBATH, but you can't just do BLACK SABBATH again. I mean, some bands do, but I was not interested in just rehashing BLACK SABBATH, I wanted to at least give something back to this music that I love. I don't wanna just take from it and repeati t; I wanna do something of my own."

Vocalist Nick Tart recently left DIAMOND HEAD and was replaced by Danish singer Rasmus Bom Andersen.

Tart joined DIAMOND HEAD in 2004 as a replacement for Sean Harris.

DIAMOND HEAD was a big influence on METALLICA, which recorded a cover version of the DIAMOND HEAD song "Am I Evil?" in 1984 and released it as a B-side to their "Creeping Death" single (and later on their "Garage, Inc." album).

Interview:

Performance clips from recent UK tour: