Just as they sang all those years ago, when the going gets tough, the tough get going! With this in mind, perhaps no band in metal is tougher than Raven. Although their 2025 touring activities were thwarted due to health issues concerning both Gallagher brothers, John, Mark, and trusty drummer Mike Heller are back with a vengeance in 2026, eager to make up for lost time with a global jaunt of lunatic-proportions. As this titillating trio countdown the days to the first leg of said jaunt, a lengthy run of the States, we sat down with founding bassist/frontman John Gallagher to discuss his current health status, the highlights of 2025 (It wasn’t a complete wash!), and playing for the Hell’s Angels.
Greetings John and welcome back to Defenders of the Faith for the fifth time! How are you doing tonight?
John Gallagher: Very good, sir. Fifth time? I’ll have to start paying rent *laughs*!
You’re here rent-free, my friend. Whenever we get together for one of these chats, we always have something new to talk about, and this one here is no exception. When we last spoke, Raven had a brand new EP and were ready to hit the road to celebrate their 50th anniversary. That ultimately didn’t end up happening. For those who might not be aware, could you tell us what happened to you and Mark? Furthermore, how are the two of you holding up?
JG: We’re doing great. Initially, we were supposed to be doing a lot of touring. We did the Hell’s Heroes Festival in Houston in March of 2025. It was a great show, great time. Then, we stayed over in Texas for a bit. Saw our friends Saxon and Riot play. Hung out at Mike’s. Did some work on some songs, pre-production as it were. We were all set to go and do a whole bunch in the summer and the fall. When it got to the fall, I basically had the fall! We were working in our lockup, moving equipment around and a snare drum in a case fell from a shelf down and hit me on the hit. Dumb accident. “Ow, that hurt!” Whatever, got on with it.
Two days later, I had these headaches that just would not go away. I put up with it for two or three days like an idiot, like guys do. Eventually, I got it checked out and they said, “You got a bleed on the brain. We need to take you to ICU and operate on you immediately.” This is basically what happened to Ace Frehley, same thing. I’m incredibly lucky. I got seen early enough and they went in with drill tools in this part of the head *points to top of head*. Discovered there was no brains there, so they were OK. They could keep going. It was alright.
They got most of the blood out, but not all of it. They had to go in again a week later and do it over. It’s been a 6, 7 month process of getting back on my feet, figuratively and literally, I guess. When we were doing that, Mark had said, “Well, I’m gonna get me knee done.” He did his ankle in April and then went and did his knee because the ankle was shot, bone on bone, and the knee was bone on bone because he was leaning on the knee to stop relying on the ankle, so he’d damaged that too. Now he has a metal ankle, a metal knee, and he’s the most metal man I know, so that’s good!
By any chance have these recent life events influenced the direction of what could become a new Raven album or EP? I imagine when put in a situation like yours, there comes no shortage of lyrical inspiration.
JG: No, there’s not. I’ve written a few since then, but actually, we’ve been writing a large repository of songs starting with that meeting we had back in March of last year. Personally, I wrote an awful lot of songs right before this happened, but I’m very excited to get in and actually start recording these things. The EP’s a good jumping off point. It points a little bit the way we’re going. There’s a lot of everything. There’s melody, fun, dark, some incredibly heavy, some fast, some progressive. It’s all Raven, and it’s the next step where no Raven has gone before *laughs*!
Never ones to be held down, Raven are celebrating their 50th anniversary a year late with quite the expansive world tour, beginning with a U.S. leg in just a couple weeks. What can the Raven lunatics expect from this tour, and what’s the overall feeling from the band at the moment?
JG: We’re hungry. We’ve had enough of having time stolen from us with the pandemic, so this was not expected at all. What it has done is enabled us to push the envelope as far as the songwriting thing’s going on, which is great. We’re gonna get out there and do what we do, 110% every time. This is the Can’t Take Away the Fire Tour coming up. We’ve got this cool band Slackjaw, an American three piece, which is awesome. It’s gonna be great. We’ve went through the setlist and there’s some old classics we’re keeping. There’s a couple of old ones we’ve either never done or done very rarely. There’ll be probably at least one or two new ones as well we’re still messing around with. It’ll be the business. We’ll do it right.
At this point, how does Raven go about determining a setlist? Surely, it must be a Herculean task to accurately capture 50 years worth of music in the span of 90 minutes.
JG: Yeah, it does get harder, but we’re very lucky in that we’ve got a lot of really cool songs we can mess around with. There’s probably 20, 25 songs we can pick up at anytime quite easily. The other ones, it’ll be a case of, “Why don’t we do this?” “OK!” Then, we all woodshed and we’ll get together and do it. We’ve never rehearsed in 10 years, which is strange, but we’ve never played the same setlist for 10 years. We do try to mix it up. In 2022, we did the Wiped Out album all the way through, so there were a few songs there that’d never been played live. In 2023, we did All for One over in Europe, and again, a couple of songs there had never been played live. We try to keep that. The actual 50th anniversary tour was in ’24. We did “Inquisitor”, which was one of the earliest songs we’ve ever done. We’ve never played that in forever, so that was a lot of fun. It keeps it interesting for us, and I think it keeps it interesting for the fans too.
Most definitely. That’s the reason why myself and others keep coming back to see Raven. There aren’t many bands of your era who keep the setlist fresh and exciting like that. Couple that with the energy, and you can’t go wrong with a Raven show.
JG: Yeah, it’s the energy. We never play the song exactly the same way twice. We all put little fills in and they’re all different. It’s all depending on how we feel that night. Mark rarely plays the same solos. I’ll always do a bit of improvisation when I’m playing my solos. Whatever sparks you off that night, who knows? That’s what makes it fun. You got to have a little bit of a challenge and see if you can come up with something. It’s very easy to play it like a robot and play the same thing. It would be very boring, and we’re not boring *laughs*!
Now 2025 wasn’t completely a wash for you, as despite Raven’s off-time, there were some notable events. The first was the release of Helm Deep’s Chasing the Dragon, on which you provided bass, backing vocals, and writing. Could you talk about your role in that band and how you got involved?
JG: That’s all Mike’s fault. Mike was working with Alex (Sciortino). Alex is the mastermind behind Helms Deep. He’s a very talented guy. Mike had just said, “I’m playing drums and doing some production for this guy, Alex. Remember him? He came to the show. Would you like to play bass?” Yeah, sure! Cha-ching, gimme some money!” *laughs* We bounced ideas around a bit and changed things up. It’s challenging music. It’s like Iron Maiden on crack *laughs*! Very, very involved.
Mike wasn’t able to do the second record and Alex asked me if I’d like to contribute. The guy who was doing the production and playing some guitar was Ray DeTone, who’s a New Jersey guy who I worked with when I did a couple of weeks with Paul Di’Anno in the ’90s. Ray’s a lovely guy, great musician. That was a lot of fun. It’s very, very challenging when someone is like, “This song is in E flat at 428 Hz and this song is in drop D at 440 Hz and this song is in Z minor at 421 Hz.” It’s like, “Ah!” *laughs* Very strange! We had that. Of course, we had Can’t Take Away the Fire. The EP came out and got a great reaction. People really liked that. You’re gonna pull up the next one. I’ll let you do it.
Yes, you also joined a new live supergroup called Lords of NWOBHM, which also features members of Persian Risk, Praying Mantis, Tank, and Diamond Head. I imagine you have quite some shared history with those guys. What’s that experience been like thus far, and how does it feel for you to not just be celebrating your legacy, but playing the songs of your peers?
JG: That was something I’d arranged obviously long before the accident. When I started feeling better…we had a lot of dates set up and one by one, it was like, nope, can’t do it. I set my sights to say, “January, I’m gonna see if I’m fit enough to do this Lords thing.” January 2nd, I was off to London on a plane. I met Carl Sentance, the singer, back in the ’80s. They opened for us way back when, Persian Risk. I’ve known Cliff (Evans) since 1985. I’ve known Karl Wilcox, the drummer from Diamond Head, over 10 years, maybe 12 years at this point. It was lovely to meet and get on with Tino (Troy) from Praying Mantis. Like you said, there’s a lot of shared history and legacy. Of course, the war stories were hilarious from everybody.
We were in this great place. This guy had a huge building outside London that was a Motörhead museum basically. Fast Eddie’s Cafe is where we had breakfast every morning. It was wonderful. We did a warmup show in London, which was awesome, a lot of fun. Then, we went to Japan and did a couple of shows in Tokyo. All good guys! It was a lot of fun, great music. Nothing wrong with getting up there, jumping up around playing “Princess of the Night” by Saxon, for example. That’s awesome. That will be on the side if Raven’s not doing anything and we have something coming up, yeah, I’ll happily join in. It’s great.
You mentioned you met Tino getting this band together. Praying Mantis and Raven had never crossed paths in those early days?
JG: Nope, not a bit, because back then, we were so laser focused on what we were doing, I deliberately didn’t listen to a lot of other music. Occasionally, there’d be those compilation albums and you’d hear one or two tracks and go, “Oh, that’s OK.” A lot of stuff I didn’t hear. The Praying Mantis stuff is really cool. It’s heavily influenced by a lot of the classic British bands like Wishbone Ash, very melodic, so it was a nice change, something cool. I was more familiar with Tank and the stuff from Diamond Head. We did a couple of Carl’s songs from Persian Risk. Cool, great stuff! All those bands had some really cool music coming out then. I’m kind of pissed off I didn’t get to hear it until now, but hey, I did now, so that’s good *laughs*!
That was the beautiful thing about the NWOBHM. Bands like Praying Mantis, Raven, Tank, and Diamond Head could all exist within the same scene, but none of them sounded alike. Not only that, but you had to sound different. If you didn’t, it was career suicide.
JG: You nailed it. It was a period in time. It was an era. None of the initial bands sounded anything like each other, but they had energy and they had the DIY ethic where they just wanted to play the music. Everyone had aspirations of whatever, but they were doing it for the love of the music, which is evident, I think very evident.
Whenever we have one of these chats, we look back on a release that celebrates an anniversary. This year, we have two, starting with The Pack is Back, which turns 40. To put it very bluntly: What happened?
JG: Oh yeah, the dreaded costume album. Well, Stay Hard was unaffected by record company trends. To us, it was just a natural follow-on from All for One. It didn’t sound quite as bludgeoningly heavy because we only got Michael Wagener in at the tale end. He recorded one song, maybe two songs, and he mixed it. He didn’t do the recording. The record company and the management, when they got Eddie Kramer in as the producer, they all decided, “Let’s pick a direction for the band completely antithetical to what they are and to what Eddie does.” Eddie built his career on recording bands live in the studio, bringing that live energy into the studio. This was, “No, let’s all pretend we’re Mutt Lange.” Whatever.
Back then, playing to a click track sucked the life out of the band. “Let’s do a few more tracks of clean guitar in case we need them.” Push, push, push. Some lyrics which I’ll charitably will say really belonged in 1986. There’s some good songs. There’s craft. It’s well done, but it’s not particularly creative in the sense of what we were doing, pushing boundaries or anything like that. It was great lesson: A lesson in how not to do things. A lesson in don’t do an album, recording it for 3 months. Don’t spend half a year mixing it, sucking the life out of it. It was a tough lesson to learn. Then, the record company didn’t even want to support it after they’d spent all this time and money. They didn’t want to do a video. They didn’t want to do anything. We ended up doing an EP, the Mad EP, which was very much more getting back on track. There’s another anniversary.
The band rebounded very fast with that EP, which is far more indicative of the traditional Raven sound. Were these songs that came about during the Pack sessions that the label deemed too heavy, or did they come together on their own?
JG: They were completely on their own. It was like, “Regroup. This ain’t happening. We don’t care if the record company likes it or not. We gotta be happy with what we’re doing.” We went to the beautiful paradise of Trenton, New Jersey. If you cocked your ear, you could hear machine gun fire. It was a little rehearsal studio there and we wrote all 5 songs, worked them up, and then recorded them in a studio called House of Music in Pleasant Valley, New Jersey, probably the same Pleasant Valley made famous by The Monkees. We recorded it there in a week, something like that. Bang, bang, bang. Got it mixed there and mastered over at Atlantic in Manhattan. It was great. It was a way more comfortable affair.
It still resonates today, especially the opener “Speed of the Reflex”. What a killer!
JG: It will return *laughs*!
I’ve heard it floated about that the band would be open to the idea of rerecording The Pack is Back. Like you said, there are some strong tunes on there. As of now, where do you stand on the matter?
JG: If we have the time. It would be fun doing some of that stuff, I think, and playing them live. We actually played “The Pack is Back” at a soundcheck in 2024. Mike was having difficulty with his drums and he said, “Is there a song I can play with one hand?” “Yeah, “The Pack is Back”!” *laughs* *air drums the beat* We played most of the song and made it work. I said, “This sounds pretty damn good!” *laughs* There are good songs. “Young Blood” always sounded good live. “Nightmare Ride”, that was initially written around the time we wrote the songs for Stay Hard and we revised the chorus. You can hear the original demo on a CD called Raw Tracks. You can hear it on there. It’s a little bit heavier, and that’d probably be the way we would go with it. We’ve done with that. A year or two ago, we pulled out “Extract the Action” from Stay Hard and were playing that live. It kicked ass. It was great, a lot of fun.
This tour will see you playing all over the world to many different audiences, but perhaps none as brutal as the one described in issue #3 of Kerrang!, when a group of Hell’s Angels demanded the band play Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” 5 times.
JG: I’ll tell you the story behind that. Our drummer at the time, Mike Kenworthy, still a good friend, he was older. He was a student and he got friendly with the Hell’s Angels. If you’ve ever seen the Tommy movie from The Who, there’s Hell’s Angels at the end. It’s those exact guys.
No kidding!
JG: Yeah, so they were having a party south of Newcastle, out in the country in a field. They had a generator. They had tents. We’re invited to play a big outdoor show. We get there and we’re playing. It gets gray and miserable. The crowd love it and it starts raining. We’re playing “Born to Be Wild”. We finish, and they’re like, “Play it again!” “Yes sir!” We play it again. “Play it again!” “Yes sir!” By the time we get to the third time, we’re playing and my brother just goes spastic, falls on the ground shaking. We freak out thinking it’s electric shock, so we kick the guitar away from him and looking at what’s going on. They’re all shouting, “Play it! Play it!” We go, “No, we’re done. It’s raining. He’s having an electric shock. The show’s over.” We pick him up, carry him to the van. He starts giggling and he goes, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” *laughs* True story!
The funniest thing is, about 10 years ago, we were playing in London and we went out to get something to eat. This woman of about our age was looking at us and looking at us. She comes over and goes, “You’re the Raven boys, right?” “Yeah.” “I used to go out with…” She mentioned this guy’s name who used to roadie for us. “…I’ve got photographs of that show.” We got in touch there and she gave me the photographs. They’re hilarious, playing in the dark out in the field. *laughs* Amazing!
Even funnier, that sounds like something Mark would do!
JG: Oh yeah, quick witted! We got out of the situation. Oh, another thing you’ve never mentioned, it was something we’d done a little earlier and it actually came out was our track for the Metallica Kill ‘Em All cover album.
Yes, thank you for mentioning it! That came out last year as well. When did you guys record “Metal Militia”?
JG: We recorded that right after recording All Hell’s Breaking Loose. It was sitting in the vaults for a bit because other bands didn’t have it together or somebody pulled out. They needed to have the 10 bands or however many tracks are on the record, they needed that. We had a lot of fun doing that. That was great.
That had to be a full circle moment for you: Raven paying tribute to the band they first took out 43 years ago. Who would’ve thought?
JG: We take them out on tour, we have to copy their songs. We’ll be feeding them next! *laughs* I hope they enjoyed the hell out of that cuz we did. We had an idea for an intro and it was too boring, so we decided to take the song and go ’50s jazz style, which is why it’s a very strange intro. It had a strange ending as well, but the powers that be made us cut it out due to “synchronization rights”, or some nonsense. We rearranged the song a little bit, put some extra stuff in here and there. It’s a rollercoaster ride to hell! That’s the song that troubles them them the most because when we did the show with them in Florida, Kirk (Hammett) was saying, “What the hell were we thinking?!” They were trying to play “Metal Militia.” He was like, “My God, it’s so fast!” *laughs*
Maybe next time you guys do a double bill will be for one of those Sphere shows!
JG: It’s nuts. I don’t know about…I think there’s certain bands where that would really work, like Pink Floyd or some spacey band, you can get into that. I don’t know if a dirty rock n’ roll band belongs in somewhere like that, but I’m sure it’ll do very well over there *laughs*
Very well! Looking to the future, what does the rest of 2026 have in store for Raven?
JG: I’ll tell you. As soon as the tour finishes, which is May 3rd, we have about a week off and then we fly to Europe. We have about 15, 20 dates. We’re playing some places that we’ve either played once or never at all. We’re playing Spain for the first time in quite a long time. We’re playing Greece. We’re playing Bulgaria. We’ve never played Bulgaria before. That’s gonna be fun. We’ll do that. Then, we have a period of June, July, August where we each have stuff going on, but we hopefully get to record the new album right then, that’s the plan. Then, we have a second leg in Europe in September, about another 10, 15 dates. Then, we’re going to South America in October. Then, there’s murmurs of more Europe or UK stuff either at the end of the year or the beginning of ’27, and some other stuff we’re working on already for then. We aim to be busy because by ’27, the new album will be out and we’ll be hitting it hard once again.
And the Raven lunacy and legacy continues!
JG: I’ve been busy making new guitars. That was my therapy after coming out of the hospital. I’d work on this guitar about 5, 10 minutes a day until I was tired and would go to sleep. One of the guitars is Mark’s original white Stratocaster that was used on the first single and first album. That was beat to death. The very day I got hurt, it was lying in the corner of the lockup. We were like, “You’re kidding me. How long’s that been there?!” It hadn’t been touched in 20 years. Picked it up, dusted it off, and completely…new neck, new electronics, new everything, but it still looks beat to death, which is great *laughs*!
Will we see Mark playing it on this upcoming tour?
JG: I certainly hope so. I gave it to him for his birthday present so he better bring the bugger along with him *laughs*!
I love it! Thanks again for the conversation, John!
JG: Absolutely man! We look forward to seeing you and the other crazies at Reggies! We love Reggies. It’s always a great place. Thank you Shane (Merrill). We look forward to seeing you there too man. Everyone out there, thank you for the support. Thank you personally for the support you gave me. I know a lot of people sent money for a GoFundMe. It saved our asses because we were so out of pocket with the Europeans with the tour we had to cancel, and of course, my costs for this surgery. It’s been very, very wonderful of everyone. We’ll pay it back by getting out there and kicking your ass!
Raven are playing Reggies Rock Club on Thursday, April 9th. For tickets, click here. For more information on Raven, click here.
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