Saxon Interview

It’s been a busy year for Saxon, now more than 30 years into a career that started out back in Barnsley when they were first known as Son of a Bitch. ‘The Inner Sanctum’, their eighteenth studio album, was released to strong reviews across the board and they received significant TV exposure in the UK with the Harvey Goldsmith collaboration ‘Get Your Act Together’. Aside from the usual bout of extensive touring, Biff Byford’s autobiography ‘Never Surrender’ was published and they are closing out the year with a five hour DVD ‘To Hell And Back Again’ and the re-issue of their 1997 album ‘Unleash The Beast’.

When I caught up with Biff he was a little pushed for time but I did manage to get a HRH exclusive in terms of him revealing some of their plans for 2008...

Biff Byford

Hi Biff, how’s it going?

BB - Really well, thanks. We’ve just got back from playing some dates in Japan which went great and last night I was at the Classic Rock awards ceremony

Right, so was that a late night then?

BB - Yeah it was great, it was a good night. We didn’t win anything although we were nominated for ‘Event of the Year’ but Aerosmith won it

Ok, so let’s talk about the DVD which is just about to be released. Two discs across five hours, that’s quite a lot of Saxon on there…

BB - It is very long, yeah, I just did an interview with a guy who sat and watched the whole thing this morning, so that’s dedication (laughs). You can’t really sit through the whole thing in one go unless it’s at night and you’ve got plenty of beers in. We’ve been putting it together for ages really, collecting different bits and pieces and we’ve got so much footage of the band that we have got quite a lot of these things in the pipeline. And we wanted to do something a bit more off the wall really rather than the last DVD we did which was ‘Saxon Chronicles’. It’s a good package and the booklet is really good and we’ve tried to keep the same theme that we had with ‘Chronicles’ so yeah I’m very happy with how it’s turned out

The time period is set around recording, promoting and touring the ‘Lionheart’ album which had one of your most striking covers

BB - Yeah the coat of arms. The strange thing is that I went on the internet to source a coat of arms and I was looking at heraldic websites and Byford came up which is basically a Saxon name; By being a crossroads and Ford is crossing the river. And the coat of arms is a lion grabbing an eagles foot - how fucking weird is that (laughs), although we didn’t end up using that one in the end. But yeah I quite liked that cover and it made a really good poster aswell. As a matter of fact somebody liked the design a bit too much and they stole our backdrop - you always know you’ve come up with a good album cover when people start nicking them (laughs)

Saxon

There’s a lot of footage on their from various Metal festivals around Europe, notably Wacken. Download aside, we haven’t got anything like that in the UK, do you think we’ll ever catch up?

BB - Well I think it is starting to catch up and there are going to be some big ones next year going on, separate to Download, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed. We’ve already been offered quite a few of the European ones for 2008 but things are getting better in the UK and there might start to be some space for these sort of things to start to take place over here.

Well, let’s hope so. You’ll be headlining the inaugural Hard Rock Hell event in Minehead this week-end, so maybe that’s the start of something happening

BB - Yeah that one should be good, but I’m not going to run on stage and shout “Hello, Butlins!” (laughs). It’s a bit Spinal Tap. I think these places are a bit derelict in the Winter so they are just trying to get something going on really, but the Motorbike one in Skegness gets 25,000 people there over the week-end. And with Butlins you get the accommodation instead of being in a tent so I’ll reserve judgement until I‘ve been there, we’ll see what happens

‘The Inner Sanctum’ got some strong reviews. Is it important to you to keep coming up with fresh material

BB - Well I think its important that people are listening to what you are doing with your music and I think people are quite interested in hearing new material by us, they are waiting for them. And I think that’s a good position to be in. We spend quite a lot of time writing songs and trying to get a good mixture of Metal and Rock n Roll, which is where we are at I suppose.

Do you hear a lot of Saxon influences in the European bands, I’m thinking here of bands such as Hammerfall

BB - Yeah, Hammerfall certainly and a lot of the Power Metal Scandinavian bands are heavily influenced by ourselves, Maiden and Priest, as are a lot of the German bands and it’s nice when you have got people like Machine Head and Pantera and all these bands that come along to you and say they love your music…it’s great really

You mentioned Maiden who are going out next year with an 80’s based tour. Is this something you might do in the future

BB - Well we might do some of those shows with them I think. When we were in Japan recently we did an 80’s thing really because we hadn’t been there for such a long time and we just did a couple of new songs. But we like to keep it varied and the gig in Minehead will be a mixture of 80’s stuff and the new album

You’ve also got ‘Unleash The Beast’ being re-released after ten years. How do you think that album stands up now

BB - I think it’s a good album and if you listen to it and then ‘Metalhead’ and ‘Killing Ground’ you can see really the band was starting to come back and build a style and becoming really solid again. I think ‘Unleash The Beast’ was the time when we started to get some direction back again and if you are into Saxon history and discography then it was a new start for us really and the time we started to regain our focus. A lot of bands go down and that happened a bit to us and then you start to build it up again, and going up is obviously a lot better than coming down…if you know what I mean (laughs)

You’ve been at this more than 30 years now, is there plenty more to come in 2008?

BB - Yeah we’re doing a special gig on St George’s Day at the Shepherds Bush Empire next year…actually you’re the first person I’ve told about that so far…and then we’re going to Japan and Australia and so we’re really busy. We’re starting to write the next album at the moment and we’re doing Heavy Metal Thunder Part 2.

I noticed you’re on the new Helloween album doing a spoken word intro

BB - Yeah, right at the beginning, they are mates of ours obviously and the guy sings on our new single aswell. I’ve done a few of those actually, I did one for Freedom Call and I do get asked a lot because of the English voice, they tend to ask me if they want a ‘Yorkshire Devil’ (laughs) as opposed to an American one

And finally a quick word about your book, ‘Never Surrender’…

BB - Yeah its done very well, its only available on the Internet though. I haven’t been asked to go on Richard and Judy to promote it or anything like that (laughs)

Thanks to Biff for his time. Saxon's new DVD, To Hell And Back Again, is released on November 12th. To find out more about Biff and Saxon then you can visit their official website @ www.saxon747.com