Intervista Armored Saint (Jeff Duncan)

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After more than 30 years of career Armored Saint are playing for the first time in Dublin, Manchester, Birmingham and Wales; how does it feel to be still going to new places and why, in your opinion is it happening? Are you getting more popular?

I don’t know, I mean, I hope we are, but we are doing more touring now than probably we have done since “Symbol of Salvation”, I think we are actually doing more now than back then in 1991.
I think the goal after we did our last record “Win Hands Down” was to do that, to go places we hadn’t gone in the past, where we knew there are people who wanted to see the band, so it’s been real fun, we’ve been to Japan for the first time, we are here in Manchester for the first time, Birmingham as well, a lot of places we hadn’t visited before, so hopefully we can just keep doing that.

Your latest album, “Win Hands Down”, sold double what the previous one, “La Raza”, did; in the era of music piracy and streaming that’s quite impressive.
Why do you think it happened?

“La Raza” I think was a bit of a transactional record for us, the band hadn’t done a record since “Revelation” which was in 2000, so a long time has passed, we kind of reconvened after many years to do “La Raza” and I think that album was a little more experimental, which is good, but we really didn’t tour on that album much.
I think that “Win Hands Down” kinda returns a bit more to the classic Armored Saint sound but has a little bit of the sophistication that “La Raza” had, so “La Raza” was an important stepping stone to get to “Win Hands Down”, we kinda found our place finally, but I’m glad that’s done well, we’re very happy about that.

So you say it’s both the style and the more touring that improved the sales for “Win Hands Down”

Oh yeah, definitely, I mean I don’t know what happen had we toured “La Raza” more but I think, my personal opinion is “Win Hands Down” is a stronger record, although “La Raza”, again, was an important stepping stone to get to “Win Hands Down” because it’s a nice combination of the sophistication of “La Raza” and experimentation and growing and the classic Armored Saint sound, it’s a nice combination of the two which is where we’re at musically now.
You don’t want to keep making the same record over and over, so sometimes you have to experiment to find out where the band stands down and I think we did that.
The album had an amazing critical reception, on TrueMetal it got an 80/100, were you expecting such an enthusiastic reception?

Well, I don’t know if we were expecting it, but I know that when we finished to record it we were really happy about it and the fact that it was a very strong album, it definitely sounded like Armored Saint.
I personally felt that the fans would receive it well because of that, it had more the classic elements, but sure, I mean, you never know what to expect but the reception has been so positive and the reviews have been good, and the fans received it very well, they really dig it and that’s the most important thing.

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The album was released 5 years after “La Raza” why did it take so long?

Between “Symbol of Salvation” and “Revelation” was 10 years, and between “Revelation” and “La Raza” was another 10 years, I think that…there was a lot things going on with the band, personally, you know, John had two children he was raising and he didn’t want to go out tour and be an absent father, which I completely respect, and everybody was doing other things but fortunately it took half the time than the other records [laughs] but the next record will be a lot sooner than that, but you know I’m just very thankful that the people who support Armored Saint were willing to wait, out of sight out of mind usually, and fortunately it hasn’t been the case with Armored Saint and I don’t know why that is.
So that’s why, there were a lot of personal things going on with the band, not bad things, just life things that were pressing over the band at the time.

Are you already working on the next album?
No, sure there are some ideas laying around, but we haven’t discussed that or pursued that yet because we just put out a new live record so I think we are gonna support that for a little while and then after that we’ll see what’s happening.

This was going to be my next question, you recently released “Carpe Noctum”, your second live album, through PledgeMusic; why now, and why using the crowdfunding?

The reason for that is, we were originally gonna do a live DVD but there was a problem with…we filmed some shows in Germany and were going to use them for a live DVD, unfortunately a lot of the audio got corrupted during the process, I don’t know where that happened, so we still had some material we could salvage and we though to put out a live album with what we had and that’s why we did it.
The PledgeMusic thing is something that  came up because we thought it would be cool to offer things to people that were usually unavailable from us, to give more of a personal connection.
We made some really cool exclusive items, plus, you know, it definitely helps with generating sales with the record, it really generate an excitement about it, so that’s what it was all about.
Of course it helped us as well to keep on touring, so that was really the motivation behind it, we thought that it would be cool, you know, Armored Saint has always been a little elusive, there hasn’t been many things offered from us other than records, so we thought it would be good to set this crowdfunding and offer our fans whatever we could and it went very, very well, extremely well.

Going back a few years, Armored Saint split up for most of the 90s after John Bush joined Anthrax and were very little active for part of the past decade for the same reason; have you ever thought of going on with another singer?

Replacing John? No, that was something that was never gonna happen.
It wouldn’t work, John Bush is a very unique singer and a very, very important part of Armored Saint’s sound; and, plus, he’s our friend, you know, we’ve been friends for years and years, Armored Saint is a very close family: John, Joey, Gonzo and Phil, they went to grade school together, so they’ve known each other since they were children, and I met them in 1983 so I was friend with them since before I joined the band for quite some time.
It’s a very close family, so there has never been a thought of replacing anybody, I don’t think that would ever happen, when John joined Anthrax I knew that that was it, we weren’t gonna do anything, at least at the time, not until we made “Revelation” in 2000 and he was still in Anthrax at that point…but now he’s all ours [laughs].

A few months ago there has been a bit of a mess on social networks when Gonzo Sandoval wrote a post in support of Trump and later the other members of the band distanced themselves from it; what happened exactly?
Well, you know, politics are a sticky subject, Gonzo had his enthusiasm for who he wanted to vote for, I respect that, that’s up to him, but we didn’t want to represent the voice of the band as a whole, because we don’t talk about that stuff, I could go on and on about what I think about the current state of politics, but that really has nothing to do with Armored Saint and with what Armored Saint does, so, yeah, we distanced ourselves from that and we just let it fade away.
That’s what he thought like doing at the time, that’s what he believed and I respect that, but I know in the future there won’t be any more of that [laughs].

Just stick to the music.

Yeah, just stick to the music, I’ll leave these things to people like Bono or whoever, all the actors who want to voice their political opinion, but it’s really a circus as it is and we don’t need to bring that into the world of Heavy Metal and Rock N’ Roll, I think that if anything Rock N’ Roll and Heavy Metal music is a way to escape from all of that, so, you know, live free and fuck the man, who cares…you know, it was a little strange but we got through it just fine and as I said I highly doubt you’ll see anything like that from any of us in the future.

Do you think musicians should voice their political ideas? A lot of great music is very political, I’m thinking of Bob Dylan, the Pink Floyd…

When you have a band like Rage Against the Machine who was all about that, if that’s what the band is about, if that’s the voice they have, that’s fine; but I don’t believe that a band like Armored Saint is about that.
John writes lyrics about a lot of different subjects, more about human condition and things like that, so if somebody chooses to do that and make their band about that it’s fine, I just don’t think that’s something that I want to do, I don’t think that Armored Saint is or ever has been about that.
I think it’s really about the individual if you want to do that, but it can be a bit tricky because people get mad about it [laughs].

After this UK tour you’ve got just a few gigs in the States planned in May, have you got plans already for the next tour?

So far these gigs in May are the only thing we have booked right now, but with our agent there are always things being worked up.
I know we are definitely not done touring, in summer Joey is going for a while to tour with Fates Warning, but I’m sure summer/fall we’ll go out again, we’re gonna keep playing.
I love touring, I’ve always loved touring, we’ll surely do something soon, but so far those are the only dates confirmed.

Davide Sciaky