SUICIDAL TENDENCIES Frontman Talks About Upcoming Albums, Recent 'Olympic Auditorium' DVD

Gian Erguiza of FrantikMag.com recently conducted an interview with frontman Mike Muir of the long-running Venice Beach, California thrash/punk band SUICIDAL TENDENCIES. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

FrantikMag.com: I was wondering if you guys were working on a new SUICIDAL CD for 2010 by any chance.

Muir: Yeah, we've got two CDs coming out this year. One is a re-make of NO MERCY songs, band where Mike Clark and I were in before Clark joined SUICIDAL. Clark joined after "Join The Army", so there's also old songs from "Join the Army". In the fall, we have the actual SUICIDAL record coming out.

FrantikMag.com: What can your fans expect from this new CD? Are you guys going back to your earlier, thrash roots or more rock?

Muir: You know, every record we do people always ask us what it's going to be and I think that the important thing is that it's different stuff. Years later when you play a live show, it all fits in. When we did our first record we had big problems. When we did our second record, we had big problems. And then we did our third and that's life. Some people are just used to everybody regurgitating the same thing, doing what's popular at the time. I think that's something that's definitely not needed. There's a lot of people doing the exact same thing. I think that whatever we do, we put the SUICIDAL signature on it. For us, the parameter of what a great record is not how it fits in at the time to what music's around at the time, it's how many people are still listening 20 years later and how it fits into music then.

FrantikMag.com: How did you pick which songs were going to end up on [the recently released "Live At The Olympic Auditorium"] DVD and how come "You Can't Bring Me Down" or nothing from "Art Of Rebellion" made it onto the DVD?

Muir: Basically, the Olympic Auditorium, if you go back to the history of that place, it was where all the big punk shows were in the early '80s. It was the only place where they had big punk shows. We played there in '84 and '85, and basically, we got a call from someone that wanted to promote the show whom said, "Hey, the place is closing down, and it's being bought by a Korean church." As like the Forum and a lot of places, like an Arena in Houston, they were being bought by churches. It would basically be the last time we could do a show there. I had back surgery and we hadn't been playing but we got a chance to headline a show in Colombia in front of 95,000 people and the Olympic show was right after it so we did that. The thing with the Olympic Auditorium is kind of like a legacy, a history of where we came from so all the songs that we played are from stuff that we had done when the first record was out. We opened for ANTHRAX at the Olympic Auditorium back in '85 and we did "War Inside My Head" together and I think in Johnny D's book, he writes about how it was the most scared in his life he was when he came on the stage with the crowd. We played "Waking The Dead", a NO MERCY song and "Possessed To Skate", obviously. Then we did a couple of the newer songs that we felt were reflective of that time and period so it kind of fit in. "You Can't Bring Me Down" that was much later and that wasn't really what was going on at that time. For us, it was much more than a SUICIDAL show, it was a moment, kind of like a one-off show.

Read the entire interview at FrantikMag.com.

Professionally filmed video footage of SUICIDAL TENDENCIES' December 19, 2009 performance at the Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California as part of the Affliction $5.00 Christmas Concert can be viewed below.