2024 is shaping up to be an excellent year to be a Saxon fan. Besides the upcoming release of their 26th studio album, Hell, Fire and Damnation, the NWOBHM legends have just announced their first jaunt of the States in five years, co-headlining alongside fellow English metal pioneers, Uriah Heep. Who better to discuss these happenings with than the man who’s been there from day one, frontman Biff Byford? In this exclusive new interview, Byford tackles the storied past, exciting present, and unpredictable future of one of England’s longest running heavy metal dynasties.
Greetings Biff and welcome back to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Biff Byford: I’m doing fine thank you! I’m doing a bit of travelling today. I stopped travelling so I could talk to you.
I’m honored to hear that and I’d like to thank you so much for coming back on here. I’d like to start by congratulating you on another excellent Saxon album in Hell, Fire and Damnation. How soon after Carpe Diem did ideas start coming together for this album?
BB: Not really straight after because we toured quite a lot on Carpe Diem. Obviously, we had it made quite a long time because we made it during the pandemic. This one was a different kettle of fish. We had a few ideas. We were gonna release it in November of this year. Then Judas Priest came along and said, “We’d like to do this big arena tour together of the UK and Europe, but we’re gonna go in March.” We were like, “Oh, March?!” *laughs* We said, “Yeah, we’ll do it!” So we had to get a move on and get the album finished. At the same time, Paul Quinn retired from touring and Brian Tatler from Diamond Head joined. I just said to him, “Have you got any ideas for any guitar riffs in your back pocket?” He said, “Yeah, I’ve got a couple.” He sent me a couple of ideas and one of them ended up being “Hell, Fire and Damnation”, the track.
Indeed this is the first Saxon album to feature Brian Tatler on guitars in place of Paul Quinn. How did his inclusion impact the development of this album and the subsequent dynamic of Saxon?
BB: Well, alive he’s fitting in very well. The fans seem to love him. Paul’s a very unique player. You’ll never replace Paul, but Brian’s a unique player as well. I suppose we replaced one legend with another legend! I think he’s changed a bit of the music dynamics on the three songs that I wrote with him. He’s changed the dynamic a little bit, but he’s from the ’80s, so his writing style is quite similar to our early Saxon style. I suppose he’s sort of brought us back a little bit to a more of an ’80s guitar riff thing. It’s a mixture of old school and modern really.
When we spoke about Carpe Diem, you said the band set out to make a straightforward English metal album. I get this impression with Hell, Fire and Damnation as well. Am I wrong?
BB: No, you’re right! We want to make no gimmicks, no fancy computer trickery, just great music played by great people through fantastic equipment, and get that rawness and excitement down on an album. That’s what it’s all about, so that’s what we try to do. I think we achieved it on this album. It’s pretty raw sounding rock music to me.
The title track and cover artwork for this album are quite dark by Saxon standards. Did the band intentionally set out to surprise the fanbase with this move and was Hell, Fire and Damnation the title from day one?
BB: Well we hadn’t really had a gothic looking artwork for a while. We have had quite a few Celtic things and a couple of Aztec things. The album was gonna be called The Prophecy originally, but that was before I wrote the track with Brian. So I thought, “OK, let’s do a 1980s play-on to the song and get my mate Brian Blessed to do the talking.” It’s a heavy song, heavy album. The album cover fits the album title. I think it’s probably one of the best covers we’ve had for a long time. It looks fantastic on a t-shirt *laughs*.
Most definitely. Looking back at Brian’s career going back to Diamond Head with songs like “Am I Evil?” and “The Prince”, the theme of good versus evil run deep in his blood.
BB: Yeah, probably. Obviously he didn’t write any lyrics or anything. I don’t know what Diamond Head would’ve done with this song if he had took the riff to them, but I loved the guitar riff, so I thought I’m gonna do a song.
Lyrically, you really outdid yourself with this album, covering a wide array of historical topics and events ranging from the Salem witch trials to the Battle of Hastings. Have you always had a fascination with history and what historical events would you like to write about in the future?
BB: Well, if you look back at all our albums, even the early ones, “Dallas 1 P.M.” is quite a historic song. I’ve always had this fascination with history. I think it’s a very British thing. Maiden writes about history as well, so it’s something we like doing I suppose, singing and writing about our history.
One of my favorite cuts off this album is the hard rocking anthem, “Pirates of the Underground”: A musical love letter to the English pirate radio stations. What are your fondest memories of pirate radio? I imagine Saxon got airplay on these stations early on before catching the attention of the likes of Tommy Vance.
BB: We did! Radio Luxembourg in 1979 actually, or was it 1980? I went to one of these pirate stations. We flew in there and visited it. They changed the musical landscape in the UK in the 1960s. In ’64, ’65 they changed the musical atmosphere and everything. It was a big revolution musically. The pirate radio stations started all that.
Who were some of the bands you first heard on pirate radio growing up?
BB: We’d be listening to quite a lot of American stuff. Ike & Tina Turner, things like that. Obviously, a lot of the middle ’60s stuff, like a lot of the pop music. You couldn’t hear it in England. It was against the law. The BBC wouldn’t play it. So The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, all of those early tracks, we listened to it all on these little transistor radios that you could buy, Japanese radios. It was a bit of a bitch trying to tune them in late at night, so you got all these static noises and then suddenly, it would come in, “Paint It, Black” or something like that.
This spring will see Saxon’s long awaited return to the States, and co-headlining alongside Uriah Heep no less. Now this is a package that I know has been many years in the making, as you mentioned it when we last spoke in December of 2021. What can fans expect from this tour in terms of a setlist?
BB: Well, it’ll be the Hell, Fire and Damnation world tour obviously. There’ll be five or six new songs off the new album. The rest will be songs from our past. Obviously, the big three albums, Wheels of Steel, Strong Arm of the Law, and Denim and Leather, are always featured, but Power and the Glory and Crusader were pretty big albums in America. We’ll probably do a few ’90s songs as well. It’ll be a great setlist. It’ll be new songs interspersed with songs from our back catalog.
For a band like Saxon with such a vast back catalog, is it ever a struggle coming up with a setlist? No pun intended, but which songs do you sacrifice?
BB: *laughs* It’s really hard because you never please everybody. There’s always somebody who’s a super-fan in the far reaches of the planet. You go to his town and you don’t play his favorite song. People shout for songs. If we can play them, then we will do them. As you probably know, we do have a very fluid setlist. There’s a few songs in America that were quite well known like “This Town Rocks” for instance. It was a big radio hit for us back in the day because it used to start with me shouting, “Does this town know how to rock?” A lot of radio stations really liked that in the ’80s, so we got a lot of airplay with that. I suppose we have to do that type of track because people know it.
Speaking as somebody who’s witnessed it live firsthand, that’s always a song that gets the crowd going, especially here in the States. It’s still a classic.
BB: Yeah, I think when you go to see a band it has to be entertaining. I don’t think you want to make the audience bored listening to songs they’ve never heard before. This is why we release the albums before the tours, so people can buy the new album and then they know the songs. They can read the lyrics. They’re more involved with the live performance then.
That way we can all singalong and air guitar to the new songs as well as the old!
BB: You can if you feel like it!
I want to talk about a couple prominent Saxon anniversaries, starting with the 45th anniversary of the band’s self titled debut album. What lessons did the band take away from this album that were applied to later releases?
BB: I don’t think that first album is very focused musically. I think it was a mismatch of songs from me and Paul, songs from Steve (Dawson) and Graham (Oliver), and then a couple of songs we wrote together as a band. The first album, the songs were written over a period of about three or four years. Whereas the first real album that we wrote together was Wheels of Steel. I think from the first album, although it’s a great album, is very mismatched. There’s a lot of different styles on there. We focused more on creating a new style of playing and writing, which is what we did.
This year also marks the 20th anniversary of one of my personal favorite Saxon albums, Lionheart. Looking back on this album, where does it lie in the scope of Saxon’s catalog for you and what are your favorite songs off of it?
BB: It’s a really well liked album. Lionheart was one of our better selling albums in that period. Again, it’s quite a historic song, “Lionheart”. The album cover is different things. I think “Lionheart” is pretty cool, but to tell you the truth, I can’t really focus my mind on how many tracks are on that album, or actually what they are. What’s your favorite track on there?
For me, it has to be either the title track or “Witchfinder General”.
BB: “Witchfinder General” is a great track. “Witchfinder General” is about the witch trials in England that preceded the Salem witch trials and crossed over the Atlantic. That’s a cool song though. That’s a great riff.
You mention that era of the late ’90s and early ’00s when traditional metal was struggling. In the long run, do you think Saxon fared better than some of their peers during this era by sticking to their guns and not compromising musically?
BB: Yeah, I think so. A lot of metal bands stopped and retired a bit. I think probably Diamond Head stopped for quite a while and came back again. It was difficult if you weren’t at a certain level. To make enough money to keep a band on the road, it gets quite expensive to pay everybody’s wages and to pay salary to the crew and to rent things and trucks, it’s quite difficult. We managed to do it because we have a great fanbase in Europe and the UK, but we couldn’t afford to come to America much in those years. We probably would’ve liked to come a lot more in the ’90s, but we really couldn’t do it because things weren’t that good for British metal bands then.
Which is why it was so exciting to discover and get into Saxon when I did. I’m 24 now, so it was back when I was in middle school when you guys returned to the States and I remember what a huge deal that was. In the years since, between the increased distribution of your music in America and subsequent touring, is it wrong of me to say Saxon is bigger in the States now than ever?
BB: I think you’re probably right. We have a big following now in America. People are really turning on again to Saxon, discovering our earlier albums more, and obviously checking out the new albums and buying them and streaming them. The record company said that the new video that’s on YouTube, “Hell, Fire and Damnation”, they were saying that 65% of the views are from America. That’s pretty good. Our strongest period in America was probably around Power and the Glory/Crusader time, but “success” meaning in the charts and things. A lot of people saw us in the ’80s and I think if you were a young guy in the ’80s, maybe 15 or 16, you went to see Saxon and you got back into Saxon again. There’s a lot of young fans coming in to the band now, joining the club. It’s really good.
On a bit of a somber note, I’d like to send my condolences on the passing of your mate Tony Clarkin of Magnum. If you don’t mind me asking, do you have a favorite memory of Tony and Magnum?
BB: Yeah, we played with Magnum! I think Magnum supported us in Birmingham in 1980. They went on for quite a long time actually *laughs*! I just remember us giving them some grief after the show saying, “You’re supposed to play 40 minutes, not 60.”, but they were pretty cool. It was alright. They were a great band. They have some great songs.
In closing, do you have anything to say to the Saxon fans here in America?
BB: We’ve been waiting a while. We wanted to come on the Carpe Diem Tour, but the promoters couldn’t get it together in time for us. We insisted on this album we have to tour America. Our mates Uriah Heep wanted to do a tour as well, so we put that together and we’re coming. Keep a look out and check out the new album on January 19th. I think we have a new single as well coming in the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
The new Saxon album, Hell, Fire and Damnation, releases January 19th on Silver Lining Music. Saxon will be playing the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois on Saturday, May 18, followed by the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles, Illinois on Sunday, May 19. For more information on Biff Byford and Saxon, visit www.saxon747.com.