FOZZY Frontman: 'RICH WARD Is One Of The Biggest Underrated Talents In The Metal World'

Mark Holmes of Metal Discovery recently conducted an interview with FOZZY frontman and WWE wrestling superstar Chris Jericho. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Discovery: It's been over a year now since the rather awesome "Chasing the Grail" came out. How do you regard the album all these months on and do you still listen to it much yourself?

Chris Jericho: It's funny because I was just talking to Rich Ward [FOZZY guitarist] about this the other day. I put it on having not listened to it for probably six months and it was like, man, that's still a smokin' record! We've been playing the songs so much live but when you hear it from beginning to end, note for note, it's like, wow, it really does what we wanted it to do which was to create a quality, versatile album that kind of grows with each listen. There's so much stuff that you don't really notice the first couple of times you hear it. It's cool because, especially now with the level of recognition the band has gained over the last year, a lot of people are still discovering this album. They're like, "Wow, we never heard this before and I can't believe it took us this long to hear about FOZZY, and I can't believe it took this long to give FOZZY a try." Man, it just goes to show my big motto that the only people who don't like FOZZY are the people who never actually heard the band!

Metal Discovery: You stepped away from WWE last autumn so, apart from other bits and pieces you're doing, has FOZZY now become your primary focus in life for the time being?

Chris Jericho: Well, yeah, and I think it'sI didn't just wake up one day and go, "Hey, I wanna be in a rock 'n' roll band." I've been playing in a band since I was twelve years old and we've been playing with FOZZY for twelve years now so the fact that after "Chasing the Grail" came out and we got so much momentum off that and all these shows we've been doing, and we just got a new booking agent which is why we're on Sonisphere and all these other great gigs, you've gotta take advantage of that; you gotta ride the momentum while you can. So I think we're probably gonna end up touring until about October; we're hoping to end off in Japan. That'll be eighteen months of touring on "Chasing the Grail" which is a pretty good tour. Then we'll have to start working on another record and go from there and I'll weigh up my options to see what's going on after that. But, for right now, the band is the big focus because we've been working on it for so long it deserves the time and it's paying off finally.

Metal Discovery: Okay, so wrestling, singing, dancing, acting, writing is there no end to your talents?!

Chris Jericho: Well, I don't know, I just have no fear in trying things I think I can do and that's the secret. I mean, if you look at it, they're really all coming from the same place. Singing, dancing, acting, wrestling, writing it's all part of being a creative person and part of being an artist. And I pride myself on that moment I got interested I said, "I want to be in a rock band and I want to be a wrestler" when I was a kid. Those were the two things I was really interested in and I was crazy enough to try and make them both happen. Luckily enough, they both did happen for me so once you have a success story in not just one crazy dream but two, it kind of opens the door to go, "you know what, I can try any of these things." As long as I really feel like I can do it then why not, you know. I've always had that motto. I've failed on a few things before but most of the time they've been pretty successful so you've just got to take the chance and go for it.

Metal Discovery: You've obviously reached the top of your game in wrestling but is your aim to take FOZZY as far as you can and become a lot bigger than you are now?

Chris Jericho: Well, yeah, like I said, after all these years of working as hard as we have we've finally got some big people on our side that we've never had a great booking agent, which we've never had. So it's things like that when other people start taking notice, that's when you believe that you're doing something right. We're touring with ANTHRAX this summer as well at a bunch of gigs and they personally selected us so there are a lot of things that are happening now that never did before. So, like I said, when the momentum starts to build you gotta take advantage of that. That's what we've been doing and it's been paying off so, yeah, I want to take the band as far as we can go. I know we have such good momentum musically after "Chasing the Grail" was so well received and so good, if I do say so myself, that I'm really chomping at the bit to do another record and make it even better than "Grail" and kind of show that these are not flukes, that this is a great band with some very seasoned performers. I think Rich Ward is one of the biggest underrated talents in the metal world.

Read the entire interview from Metal Discovery.

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