Singer Geoff Tate (QUEENSRŸCHE) was interviewed on last night's (Friday, October 12) edition of the "The Metal Command" radio show, which airs on 88.3 WBWC in Cleveland, Ohio.

Asked what it's like playing with his solo band after his recent split with his QUEENSRŸCHE bandmates, Tate said, "It is very refreshing to play with people who are positive, people that are good players, people that you can live with and joke with and have a good time with and there's no animosities or jealousies or this kind of thing going on. You can kind of relax and not worry that you're gonna wind up in a negative situation with something you say or something they say or something like that."

He added, "A band, you know, is a funny mechanism. It's a tight-knit group and everybody has personality and you live in a real intimate atmosphere with people, and so it can get very intense and stressful."

Tate, who was fired from QUEENSRŸCHE in June after fronting the group for three decades, was asked if he was expecting to be kicked out of the group or if the announcement came out of the blue. "Oh, yeah, it was out of the blue — completely unexpected," he said. "And it actually, to this day, doesn't make any sense to me, in the sense that here you have this incredibly successful band — we're internationally known, we have a great reputation around the world, we've explored our niche in music to the nth degree. And why would you take a completely successful entity like this, at this point in our career — realistically, we have probably, like, 10 years of productive work ahead of us before we're all old men — and why would you destroy it? Why would you just rub it in the dirt and destroy any kind of integrity that you've built up over the years. And only to, what? Start over again? It makes no sense at all; it's madness, and I don't understand it. I am surprised that these moves were made with such a, I guess, short-sighted view on life. It's shocking to me."

Tate, who recently sought to prevent his former bandmates from touring and operating under the QUEENSRŸCHE name without him, says that he is very much open to patching things up with the other guys, telling "The Metal Command", "I would love to, yeah. I woud love to actually sit in a room and have a conversation. That hasn't happened since Brazil [in April]. It would be a wonderful thing to actually sit down as civilized people and have a conversation about everything. I'd patch it up tomorrow if I could."

The singer was also asked if he had any regrets about the physical altercation that occurred among Tate, drummer Scott Rockenfield and guitarist Michael Wilton before showtime at an April 14 concert in Sao Paulo, Brazil (Tate previously admitted to having spit on the band during the performance). "Definitely, I regret my actions that night," he said. "And I'm not making any excuses for it; it was definitely the wrong way to handle things. And I'm not trying to justify it, but bands are bands and we're a bunch of guys, and sometimes guys are physical [laughs], and it's happened many times over the years. THE WHO, for example, is a band that is pretty known for getting into brawls and things like this. It's not uncommon, definitely."

Tate's second solo album, "Kings & Thieves", will be released on November 6 via InsideOut Music.

Interview (audio):

Photo credit: Stephanie Cabral