ONSLAUGHT Guitarist On Ex-Drummer's Exit: He Is Upset We Didn't Ask Him To Rethink His Decision

Reporter Jens Lundell of Swedish web magazine CriticalMass.se conducted an interview with guitarist Nige Rockett of U.K. thrashers ONSLAUGHT when the band played in Gothenburg, Sweden on April 2, 1011. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

CriticalMass.se: Drummer and founding member Steve Grice recently quit the band. In his statement he claims that you temporally used another drummer and that he wasn't informed about it.

Nige: "That is completely untrue! I have e-mails I can show you where I asked him about these shows. I asked him twice: 'Are you willing to cancel your holiday to play these shows?' These shows were very big shows, [playing to] potentially 25,000 people, 10,000 in Germany, 10,000 in Austria and 5,000 in Switzerland. [They were] very important shows for a band like us that wants to move forward but he didn't want to cancel his holiday. Our alternatives were to cancel these shows, which would be a very bad move for the band, or to find a replacement drummer. He knew very well about them, he's done this to us before when we went touring South America. He said that he wouldn't do it so we went away and worked with two or three different drummers within a month to make sure that we got the right guy for the job. It cost us a lot of money, time and effort. A week before we were about to tour, Steve turns up and says that he has changed his mind. He just wasted all this money, time and effort so this time around we didn't give him any opportunity. We were going to do these three shows with another drummer and when we got home, Steve was still going to be in ONSLAUGHT and that would be the end of the story. I think there are other issues to why he quit. He wasn't really in the band, he didn't want to rehearse that much and it's been evident for the last two years that he clearly doesn't like touring. It's quite awkward that he dropped this upon us two weeks before the tour. Luckily, Jeff [Williams, bass] knows Mike [Hourihan] from DESECRATION, who has done a fantastic job in ten days and knows the set perfectly. We have not discussed any full-time replacement, though. We will think about that after the tour."

CriticalMass.se: He also wrote that his decision follows a series of events that, in his opinion, have seen the recurrence of old patterns of behavior that fuelled the band's original demise in 1991.

Nige: "Well, I think that this is just Steve's sort of bitterness. When he told us that he was leaving, nobody questioned it, everybody accepted it and we all agreed to move on. I think he is annoyed that nobody tried to talk him out of it and I don't really understand his comment about why we split in the first place. At that time we lost our record deal with Polygram, Steve Grimmett [vocals] quit the band to go solo and things weren't that great. I don't think there were any issues going on internally in the band; I think that the band appeared to come to the end of its natural cycle. The grunge came along which had a big impact on thrash, there was no sign of any new record deals being offered and it was like, 'Where do we go from here?' I think that the natural thing to do was to split the band."

CriticalMass.se: There seems to be a few hard feelings between you two.

Nige: "Yeah, I guess. As I said, I think he is a little upset that we didn't ask him to rethink his decision. He said, 'I'm going to quit' and we said, 'Fine, we'll move on.' We don't want to get into a war of words with him but he seems to try that at the moment. We don't want to get involved in any public argument; it's not good for us. We just try to keep being professional about it and move on.

Read the entire interview at CriticalMass.se.