BLAZE BAYLEY: 'I'm Really Sick Of The Big Business Side Of Things'

Marko Syrjälä and Jarno Huovila of Metal-Rules.com recently conducted an interview with singer Blaze Bayley (ex-IRON MAIDEN, WOLFSBANE). A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Metal-Rules.com: You've got an all-new band and management [now former management; see previous BLABBERMOUTH.NETstory. — Ed.]. How about record label?

Blaze: It's gonna be our own label. Because of all of the problems I've had with SPV/Steamhammer, Def American, Phonogram and Geffen, I'm really sick of the big business side of things. We're about the music and the fans, and the way big record companies do things is all about the product, which I always hated. When you agonize over the lyrics, sometimes for days or even years, that's not a product to me, that's part of my fucking life. In the future everything will be our own and we'll just have distribution.

Metal-Rules.com: You recently changed the band name from BLAZE to BLAZE BAYLEY. Was that to mark this as sort of a new beginning?

Blaze: The thing is that I spoke to a lot of fans that knew me from IRON MAIDEN and WOLFSBANE and they kept asking what I was doing now. I had released four albums with BLAZE and they just didn't know. But everybody knows BLAZE BAYLEY, so hopefully, there's no mistake about my heritage, that I come from WOLFSBANE and IRON MAIDEN, it's just easier to recognize.

Metal-Rules.com: Have you already started writing material for the new album?

Blaze: We've just got some rough ideas at the moment because it's new for all of us working together. The ideas we have worked on are very dark and quite aggressive because of what's happened over the last couple of years with all the people that have lied, cheated and stolen from me. I think the new album will have a quite dark edge, some of it sounds very old school, some of it more modern, some of it's really heavy, almost in a death metal sense, and some of it's more classic in a MAIDEN and BLACK SABBATH sense. In June we'll lock ourselves in a rehearsal room and won't come out until we have fifteen great songs.

Metal-Rules.com: A little while ago you played some shows with DORO and the classical orchestra. Can you tell us a little about that?

Blaze: I had done couple of shows for Doro's agent, with my band, and she was doing this classic thing and they particularly wanted to do "Fear of the Dark", I didn't write that songs, but it was one of my favourites in the MAIDEN days to sing, a great live song. So they asked me if I wanted to do it, then picked out another couple of BLAZE songs and my hits from IRON MAIDEN and arranged them with the orchestra. As a singer you've always got a bit of a soft spot for doing something with an orchestra. It's cringey, it's sickening and all of this business, but there's still something about standing in front of a 25-piece band and singing, it's really magical. You think that classical musicians would be really stuck up, but they're exactly the same as every other fucking musician that you've ever been on tour with, like "Where the beer, the girls, the cello players..."

Metal-Rules.com: Were you asked to or did you simply decide to tone down your stage act after joining IRON MAIDEN?

Blaze: Yeah, I did have to tone it down. I toned it down a bit because I thought that MAIDEN was so much more serious and more about the music and the songs as opposed to having a good night out. In WOLFSBANE we came from the pub and club background and before we had a record deal we had to get a reaction, no matter what it took. With MAIDEN you didn't need to do that because people already knew the songs and were interested in what the new songs were like, everybody had come to see you. So I toned it down, but did get told off a couple of times for too much swearing and being too aggressive.

Metal-Rules.com: Do you still receive royalties for the IRON MAIDEN stuff, especially with all these compilations and live albums being released all the time?

Blaze: Just a little bit, not much now.

Metal-Rules.com: Has it ever crossed your mind that perhaps joining IRON MAIDEN was a mistake?

Blaze: Well, it was not MY mistake, because it's a legendary band, one of the biggest bands in the world, one that I respected and was a fan of. I thought that it was an unusual choice to choose me and my voice, because my voice is so different to the previous singer [Bruce Dickinson] and different to the first singer [Paul Di'Anno].

Red the entire interview at Metal-Rules.com.