FOZZY Singer: 'We Demand A Lot Of Audience Participation From Our Fans'

FMQB recently conducted an interview with FOZZY singer and WWE wrestling superstar Chris Jericho. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

FMQB: You're about to kick off your next North American tour with old school British Metal group SAXON. Why did you choose to tour with them, instead of a newer band?

Jericho: SAXON is a legendary, influential band; huge all around the world; sold millions of records all around the world; and this is their first extensive U.S. tour in years. When the opportunity came up for us to go out with them, I thought it was a great mix because the most important thing when you tour with other bands is that you want to gain new fans. I've got a lot of respect for SAXON, I'm a big fan of theirs, but most importantly their new album, "Sacrifice", is one of the best records they've done ever. They're not phoning it in. They're still putting out great material and they're still a vibrant, living, breathing rock n roll band. It's a really cool mix, because there's going to be a lot of SAXON fans that don't know FOZZY and a lot of FOZZY fans that don't know SAXON. We all come from the same place, we both have very heavy but melodic music, and at the end of the night, I think we're both going to have new fans gained. People that are there that don't know one of the bands are going to leave as fans of both and that's the most important thing, so it's a great mix. Our last U.S. tour, we went out with SHINEDOWN and GODSMACK, and now we're going out with SAXON, so you get a real diverse, cross section of fans that are seeing us and that's the way to build our band.

FMQB: One thing that's really impressive about FOZZY is the lengths you go to with your fans. How do the VIP meet-and-greets work before your shows?

Jericho: We're very fan-friendly, from everything that we do on social media to the shows themselves. We demand a lot of audience participation from our fans, and we get it. That's one of the reasons we have such a great reputation as a live band. We started a VIP program a few years ago. I was looking at other bands doing VIPs, but I thought that bands were charging a lot of money and not really delivering a lot. So we came up with a whole VIP meet-and-greet system that's a little bit different from the norm. We let fans watch the soundcheck. If we're headlining, we have dinner with the fans, if not, we make sure to spend time with them and take them on the bus, and get to know people a little bit. It's not just a run-and-gun, and I think we've created a whole new society of FOZZY fans that met each other just from our VIP program. People have gotten married from meeting each other as FOZZY VIPs. It's a cool, underground society that we have cultivated. Especially in Europe, because we've toured there so much, and we're really excited about doing that on this tour as well.

FMQB: What's next for FOZZY beyond this fall tour?

Jericho: We have this tour with SAXON coming up, then I think we're going to Australia before the year's end. We've already started writing the new record. We plan to have all the songwriting done by the end of December, and start recording it in January, February and March, and then have it out and ready to for next summer. So that's the plan and we're excited, because there's a lot of great momentum with FOZZY. We've done a lot of touring on "Sin And Bones", I think we're up to 100 gigs already, and when you get to three digits on one record, that's success. So we want to keep that going and keep it rolling.

Read the entire interview at FMQB.