Since 1982, Onslaught have been England’s premiere thrash band, unleashing power from hell for well over four decades. At the helm of it all has been founding guitarist, Nige Rockett. When one looks at the list of musicians who have been in and out of the Onslaught fold over the years, it’s Rockett’s name that remains the sole constant, carefully cultivating each lineup, album, and tour. And yet it’s their most recent of said tours which led to where we are today: Onslaught on the brink of their first U.S. tour in 12 years, and with classic singer Sy Keeler back where he belongs. Rockett explains how it all happened and more in this brand new interview.
Greetings Nige and welcome to Defenders of the Faith. How are you doing today?
Nige Rockett: I’m great, thank you!
Thank you for taking the time to do this interview! It’s been a long time since Onslaught last toured the States, 12 years to be exact. How long did it take to put this run together and what do you look forward to on this upcoming trek?
NR: It’s been put together really for the last year because we were due to play Hell’s Heroes last year, but visas didn’t come through in time. Some of the visas didn’t come through. 3 of us got them and 2 didn’t. They came through a week after the festival. Things were being organized for then, so we had to switch everything around for 2026. We’re obviously starting off with Hell’s Heroes on March 18th, I think. Then, we’re heading off predominantly to the west coast. We’re really looking forward to it. As you said, it’s been a really long time, and we’re going to some of our favorite places, which is very cool, and kicking off with a great festival. I’m super excited about everything. We’ve got a second run to look forward to. At some point, following this one, we’re going to do the east coast and Canada. Very exciting times for us to get back to the States after so long.
Joining Onslaught for this tour is none other than cult U.S. metal legends, Warlord. Now this is quite the interesting pairing, as both bands come from very different areas of the metal world. What led to this package and were you familiar with Warlord in the ’80s during their initial run?
NR: No, I had not heard of them before. How it came around is our manager, Giles Lavery, sings for Warlord. *laughs* I’ve obviously kept up with everything that they’re doing nowadays, but I wasn’t really familiar with them back in the day. It’s bizarre they have such an amazing following, but they’ve never played the States. It’s just unreal. The interest for that as part of the package has been very cool. I like to tour with bands who are a little different to ourselves. If I go to see shows with 4 of the same style bands, it can get a little tedious. It’s nice to mix things up. Black metal, death metal, traditional metal: It’s cool. I think it’s interesting for the people when they come to the shows as well.
Some people are branding this a “Heaven and Hell” Tour, considering Warlord’s Christian lyrical themes and Onslaught’s, well, not so much!
NR: *laughs* That’s a good one! I’ll have to remember that. That’s cool.
Perhaps most importantly, this run sees the return of Onslaught’s classic vocalist, Sy Keeler, who’d last left the band in 2020. What events led to his return?
NR: I guess it’s been fairly well documented. We were heading out on a European tour early in 2025. Our vocalist at the time, Dave Garnett, quite the week before, which was not cool of him. Whether he hoped it was going to take the tour down, I don’t know. The thing with Dave is he did an amazing job for us when he was in the band. He was a great frontman, gave a great performance on Generation Antichrist, but he was untested for touring. He’d never done a full tour in his life. When we started to extend dates out, I think he was finding it really tough. We did some shows in Scotland as a warmup for the European tour, and he didn’t deal with it well at all. His voice was breaking up a lot, even after 3 shows. He was struggling being away from home. Then, he dropped the bombshell right before the tour started.
In true Onslaught style, we tried whatever way possible to make the show go on. Luckily for us, a guy called Oscar Rilo stepped up. He was gonna be tour managing the support band. He said, “Look guys, I’m a massive fan of the band. I think I can pull it off for you.” 4 days to the first show, he started learning the material. What a guy. What an absolute legend he was. He obviously wasn’t completely up on the lyrics and everything on the first few shows, but he worked so hard in the interim period. By the end of the tour, he was completely rocking it. He saved the tour. The fans really loved him and appreciated him for it. He told the story before we went onstage every night. The tour was just incredible, 80% incredible. Oscar was just amazing.
At what point then does Sy come back in the picture?
NR: Oscar was perfect for the Power from Hell material. It was never gonna work in the long term. Oscar didn’t expect that. He’s a booking agent, as well as having his own band and numerous other things going on in his life. It was only gonna be to save our bacon on this tour, if you like. The discussion was, “What are we gonna do?” (Bassist) Jeff (Williams) came out of the shadows. He said, “Let’s ask Sy. We’ve got nothing to lose.”
We’ve all been in touch with Sy randomly over the last 5 or 6 years. Jeff gave Sy a call and Sy was like, “I’m there. I’m back.” That was it. No persuading, nothing. He was back. We set up some rehearsal with just me, Jeff, and Sy, with some programmed backing drums. We just went in and kept it really lowkey. Even the first day back, Sy hadn’t sung for 6 years. It immediately sounded like Onslaught. It just pulled everything back in place. We rehearsed last weekend and his voice his just off the scale. He sounds even better than he did in his prime. We did Australia in November and southeast Asia. Sy was just getting stronger and stronger every show. Now, he’s better than ever.
Is it too early to ask about a new Onslaught album, and do you continuously write yourself?
NR: No, I don’t continuously write. I like to take a break between writing to refresh, get new ideas, and keep everything coming from the same path. Sy can’t wait to start doing new material. He’s at me all the time, “When are we doing new stuff?” I’ve got everything in place. No finalized songs. We’ve got the album title, song titles, tons of riffs. Nik (Sampson), our guitarist, is sending loads of riffs over. There’s so many ideas. There’s just a bit of intensive touring coming up at the moment. Once we’ve got a little downtime, we’ll start putting all the pieces of the jigsaw together for the new album.
The setlist for this tour will feature songs from Power from Hell and The Force, the latter of which turns 40 this year, and was the first to feature Sy on vocals. How did Sy end up initially joining the band? Had you demoed any songs off The Force with Paul “Mo” Mahoney or yourself on vocals?
NR: No, we’d never done anything really. We were still in the writing stage when Sy joined the band. I remember exactly what happened. We had a guy who used to roadie for us. He also ran our fan club in the very early days. He was a friend of Sy. We didn’t know Sy at all. He said to us one day, because we always used to get friends around and lots of people around to rehearsals. It was always a good gauge to see what people were thinking of the material we were writing. They were gonna be honest if they were friends. He said, “Do you mind if I bring this guy around? He’s a friend of mine and he’s a bit of a singer as well.” “OK, no worries.”
They both came up. We jammed through some stuff, what we were working on. Sy said, “Do you mind if I get up and have a sing?” I can’t remember for the life of me what song it was or anything. It could’ve been “War Pigs” from Black Sabbath, anything like that. Sy was into that kind of thing: Sabbath, Deep Purple, Zeppelin. We used to jam loads of covers at rehearsals. All I remember was him getting up and singing and everybody just went, “Wow, what is that?!” It just sounded so good. When he went away after, we all looked around at each other. “Is this guy gonna be good for Onslaught? Should we offer him the job?” Mo was very up for it. That’s what happened. He was so good and cool that we offered him the job there and then. The rest is history *laughs*. It was bizarre, just built on a visit to our rehearsal room.
Even before that, for the way the material was headed with The Force, with the songs being longer, more technical and complex than Power from Hell, did it ever cross the band’s mind to expand the lineup or have a “proper” frontman to accompany the evolving sound?
NR: No, I don’t think it was really there until Sy came along and triggered that thing in everybody’s head. Obviously, the music had progressed a lot. We were progressing as musicians. When we wrote Power from Hell, everything was very basic. We were still novice musicians, as you can hear on that album. There was lots of hard work from everybody in the band to improve their personal performances and their skill on their instruments. When Sy came along, we didn’t want to get rid of anybody from the band, so Jase Stallard moved to guitar, and that was another advantage of the band, having two guitarists. It allowed us to do a lot more musically.
Mo could play bass fine anyway, so he was happy to slip into the background a little more on the bass. We had two guitarists and a vocalist. All of a sudden, the sound was transformed. It was much bigger. We could do a lot more in terms of guitar parts and twin guitar parts, and Sy on top of everything to cap it all off. It was a massive change in the band, and a big change in the sound as well. It worked massively *laughs*!
What memories stand out to you the most from the recording of The Force, and do you have a favorite song?
NR: “Let There Be Death” is still one of my favorite Onslaught songs ever. I still love playing it live. It’s got so much energy. We had some strange things go on in the studio. We recorded in a studio called Matrix in London. Lots of history there. We had some strange things going on in the control room. We were just setting delays. We didn’t mix it. We were just setting it for reference and to make things sound good when we were recording, using delays and reverbs. Dave (Pine), the engineer, he was setting the delays to 250 milliseconds, and it would immediately set itself to 666 milliseconds all the time. It was like, “Wow, this is weird.” That was happening constantly. Honestly, it would reset to 666 milliseconds all the time. I think the biggest thing that freaked him out was we left the studio one evening, about 8 o’clock. He turned everything off and one of the studio speakers was just pulsing. It was going “do-do, do-do”. He was like, “I’m getting out of here!” *laughs* There was some real weird shit going on there. I don’t know, but there was definitely a force in that room, hence the title.
The Force came out during what many consider to be thrash’s greatest year, 1986. Yet in hindsight, it feels like the American coastal thrash scenes and German thrash scene received more notoriety than England’s. Did you ever feel, in the moment, that English thrash acts had to work harder, so to speak, to break out?
NR: It was very apparent that particularly the Bay Area bands were getting a lot of attention. We were doing good in England. The British music press was behind us. It was a bit more of a struggle to land in Germany, for example, and the U.S. also. We were underneath all that. There was a lot of things going on in the U.K. At the time, it was, “Who’s gonna be the next big band to break? Will it be Slayer or Onslaught?” It was neck and neck at one point, early ’86. Slayer had just done Reign in Blood and it went way off. *laughs* Unfortunately for us, we didn’t get in the tailwind of that too much, but in those days, we were always in the shadow of those Bay Area bands a little more.
Speaking to your point, and I should’ve brought it with me for this interview, I do have an old issue of Kerrang! in which The Force is given a 5 K review.
NR: Yeah, we were the darlings of British metal at the time. We were one of the only few thrash bands in the U.K. at the time that were particularly challenging America or the Germans. They really gave us a kick, and they were amazing for a long, long time.
Something I’ve always found intriguing about Onslaught is that you originally formed as a punk band. Was there any one member of the band who pushed for a more metal direction? Furthermore, did you face any troubles from your original punk audience for making that leap over to metal?
NR: No, not at all. No negatives at all. The drummer at the time, Steve Grice, were both into metal bands. We both loved Motörhead in particular. He was a massive Iron Maiden fan, and I liked more Sabbath type stuff. Coming from different places, we were both into punk music. Particularly, we were massive Discharge fans. As I said earlier, we were novice musicians at the time. We’d only just been playing for a year or so. It was a thing that grew as we became more proficient musicians. It enabled us to bring a more metal edge into our music.
Metallica were just breaking and Anthrax were breaking around that time. A lot of the punks were getting into this kind of metal as well. It may have seen a quick transition for people outside of the U.K., but people living in the U.K., seeing us at shows, could see what was happening over a 2 year period. As I said, we’d been playing. We kept the thrash influences in there, but it was something that we wanted to push on, bring out Motörhead influence a little bit stronger into the influence, and Discharge as well. It was a natural way to go for us. We brought a lot of punk fans with us, and we were still playing punk shows in Bristol.
That’s a great point you make about the advent of thrash. Something I think many metalheads tend to forget is it’s a genre in which Discharge is as important as Judas Priest. Between the riffs and the energy and the attitude, you can’t have thrash without punk.
NR: No, you can’t. Metallica have cited Discharge. Anthrax, Megadeth, Exodus: Virtually every one of the big thrash bands have cited Discharge as a major influence. Motörhead also. Just a combination of the two for me is perfect.
Featured on Power from Hell is the now legendary song titled “Death Metal” which, alongside Possessed’s song of the same moniker, was one of the first uses of the term in a widespread manner. Had you personally heard that terminology used to describe a specific band or sound beforehand, or did you think it up yourself?
NR: It was something we came up with, the imagery. We’ve got the “death” side and the “metal” side on the album. I think we wrote that track around mid ’84. I think we recorded Power from Hell in October or November. It was one of the mid-tracks that we wrote on the album. There was no intention obviously to create a new genre of music. It was just a cool sounding name for a song *laughs*. Following the story behind the lyric, the story behind the song, it just worked great to do that “death” side, “metal” side and the whole “Death Metal” thing. We were completely oblivious to anything that was gonna come very soon after. We still don’t know who came first or where it came first: The chicken or the egg? *laughs*
It sure is fun to ponder!
NR: Yeah, of course it is! It’s always an interesting conversation.
Expanding upon the last question, Onslaught has influenced a slew of bands in the worlds of black metal, death metal, hardcore, and beyond, with one such band being the opener on this tour, Haunter. What are your thoughts on Onslaught’s role in the evolution of extreme metal, and are you amazed to see that impact nearly 45 years since the band first formed?
NR: Yeah, of course. If you said to me back in 1982, “You’ll be jetting off to America in 2026, chatting to Joe in a Zoom meeting, doing an interview.”, I would’ve just laughed and said, “Nah, no chance man. No way that’s gonna happen.” It’s still a great honor. Some of the people that we’ve spoken to who say, “Onslaught were a big influence to us back in the day. I love the band. Power from Hell made us want to be in a band.”, is incredible. You wouldn’t believe some of the people we talk to. I know Nergal from Behemoth is a massive fan.
We played in Bangkok just before Christmas. We were just about to go onstage and (drummer) James (Perry) said, “That’s the guy from Arch Enemy over there!” “Nah, we’re in Bangkok!” “No, it’s Michael (Amott)!” “No, it’s not!” *laughs* We played the show, get a knock on our dressing room there, and there’s Michael standing at the dressing room door. He lives in Thailand now and he came to the show. He was blown away. He said it was so great hearing the Power from Hell stuff. It was incredible. We’ve become good friends now. It’s nice. He bought a big bag of merch *laughs*. So cool! It’s an honor to have so many talented, great musicians that said they’ve been inspired by us. It’s very humbling.
Two more you can add to that list are Max and Iggor Cavalera from Sepultura. When I saw them a couple years ago playing the first two Sepultura albums in full, before the show, they played a whole mix of songs from 1985, the year they formed. Amongst the songs that were played was Bathory’s “Total Destruction”, Anti-Cimex’s “Victims of a Bombraid”, and Onslaught’s “Onslaught (Power from Hell)”.
NR: Cool man! Funny little story. I mentioned the guy who was running our fan club before. If I remember correctly what he said, Max was either #1 or #2 of the Onslaught fan club when it opened up. That was very cool to learn!
Onslaught will be playing the WC Social Club in West Chicago, Illinois on Monday, April 6th. For tickets, click here. For more information on Onslaught, click here.
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