Let’s start the day off with Foo Fighters news! The Pulse Of Radio reporting frontman Dave Grohl said he originally had a different idea for how he wanted to record the band’s upcoming album Concrete And Gold. Grohl told the Evening Standard, “I had this idea that I wanted to write and rehearse an album, then build a recording studio on stage at the Hollywood Bowl and invite 20,000 people to watch us record.“
Grohl changed direction when he remembered that English singer P.J. Harvey had done something similar in 2015. He also decided that after doing a full-length documentary for the band’s 2011 LP Wasting Light and an entire HBO series on the making of 2014’s Sonic Highways, the Hollywood Bowl plan was a bit too much.
Grohl explained, “I think we were getting too creative with our ideas of how to make an album. What if we were to focus just on the music rather than some hyper-conceptual nightmare?”
Concrete And Gold was produced by the Foos and Greg Kurstin, who has worked in the past with pop artists like Adele and Pink. Grohl said, “I wanted it to be the biggest-sounding Foo Fighters record ever . . . Motorhead‘s version of Sgt. Pepper . . . or something like that.” Confirmed guests on the September 15th release include Paul McCartney, The Bird And The Bee’s Inara George, the Dead Weather‘s Allison Mosshart, saxophonist Dave Koz, singer Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men fame and one more yet-to-be-revealed person whom Grohl said “has been around a long time.”
The band just released a Grohl-directed video for “The Sky Is A Neighborhood,” the second single from Concrete And Gold following the chart-topping “Run.” Foo Fighters have lined up a fall North American tour that kicks off on October 7th in San Bernardino, CA with Cal Jam 17, featuring the Foos, Queens Of The Stone Age, Cage The Elephant, Liam Gallagher, Royal Blood, The Struts and more. The rest of the tour begins on Oct 12th in Washington D.C. Concrete And Gold, the Foos’ ninth studio LP, is due out Sep 15th.
Read the source item from UK’s Evening Standard here.
Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett opened up about being bullied in high school during an interview with San Francisco radio station 107.7 The Bone. Hammett recalled “local neighborhood hoodlums” who “picked anyone who was an easy target who looked different from them . . . They were people with very low IQs that had nothing better to do with their time, except on picking and bullying on other people.” He continued, “They used to terrify us all the time! And then we go to the other side of town, and there were the Mexican gangs we had to constantly worry about as well . . . we (would) just try and not to go anywhere near those guys.“
Hammett added that he started playing guitar around that time because “it was one of the only things I found that could calm me down when I was a kid, and give me some sort of — I was able to use it to ground myself and be more in the moment.”
He added that music “saved my life,” saying, “If I didn’t have music I would have just….who knows? I was on a pretty bad path when I discovered music, and music kept me going from further down that path.”
Metallica has been on the road in support of its 10th studio album, Hardwired…To Self-Destruct. The band just completed its first North American trek in eight years and will next begin a European tour on Sep 2nd in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Blabbermouth is reporting AC/DC singer Brian Johnson joined Muse on stage Sunday night (Aug 27) at the Reading Festival in England to perform his band’s iconic track “Back In Black.” Johnson appeared with the trio on stage at the start of the encore. Muse frontman Matt Bellamy told the crowd: “He’s back!” before they launched into the AC/DC classic. “Thank you so much. Thank you, boys,” Johnson said at the end of the song, hugging Bellamy.
The appearance was Johnson’s second time on stage since leaving AC/DC in March 2016 due to hearing issues. Back in May, Johnson and Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant joined Paul Rodgers for an encore performance of Barrett Strong‘s 1959 classic “Money (That’s What I Want)” in Oxford, England.
AC/DC postponed the last ten dates of its North American tour last year after doctors told Johnson he faced a total loss of hearing if he did not stop touring immediately. AC/DC completed the tour last summer, with Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose as a “guest vocalist” with Johnson apparently not returning to the group.
Johnson said in an open letter to fans that he intends to solve his hearing problem and continue recording and touring, although he pointedly did not say whether he would be rejoining AC/DC.
The vocalist wrote: “My entire focus is to continue medical treatment to improve my hearing. I am hoping that in time my hearing will improve and allow me to return to live concert performances. While the outcome is uncertain, my attitude is optimistic.”
It still remains unclear if Brian will return to AC/DC. A sad fact.
Also today from Blabbermouth, my friend Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil was interviewed by Metalholic. Lacuna Coil’s latest album, “Delirium”, deals with many issues surrounding mental health, and Cristina spoke about the social stigma that is currently associated with depression, addiction and trauma, particularly in the wake of the recent deaths of Chester Bennington and Chris Cornell.
“I think there is a stigma because we don’t know much about it,” the singer said. “And it’s just really hard to connect with people who are severely mentally ill. And also, if you think about mental illness, it’s such a deep and vast field — from depression to dementia to people that are damaged because they had cancer or they’ve been having surgery on their heads and radiotherapy, chemotherapy. There is so much about it, and it’s really, really hard to understand people who are severely hit by mental illnesses. So I don’t judge. Of course, I know what I know from my point of view, from my experience, but I will never talk shit about people who are depressed or committed suicide only because it’s hard for me to relate.
“Sometimes it’s easy for the people to judge other people just because, ‘Oh, I can’t understand why it happened. I would have never done this,’” she continued. “Yeah, you would have never done this, because you don’t understand what they’re going through. You’re not in their heads, you don’t know what they’re experiencing. So it’s a really, really hard topic to choose. And when we did ‘Delirium’, it was really important for us to treat it in the most respectful and delicate way possible. Because you can try to send a positive message and to try to tell people, ‘Oh, you should be positive all the time, you should be happy, you should overcome depression,’ and everything, but it’s not as easy as you speak. It’s way deeper than that and more complicated than this.”
Lacuna Coil is working on their first-ever book, titled “Nothing Stands In Our Way,” to be published around the world early in 2018. Co-vocalist Andrea Ferro recently told the Impact metal channel that fans will have to wait at least a couple of years for the follow-up to 2016’s “Delirium” album. “Next year’s gonna be twenty years of Lacuna Coil, so first we’re preparing some surprises for next year, and then after that maybe we’ll start working on a new record,” he said. “So I don’t think there will be a new record at least until 2019.”
In December, the band released a new song called “Naughty Christmas.”
And finally today, also from Blabbermouth, Lars Ulrich joined Volbeat on stage Saturday night (Aug 26) at Telia Parken in Copenhagen, Denmark. A sold-out crowd of forty-seven thousand witnessed the concert, which saw Ulrich sitting in with the band on “Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood,” as well as an electrifying rendition of Metallica‘s “Enter Sandman.” Meanwhile, Kreator‘s Mille Petrozza, Napalm Death‘s Mark “Barney” Greenway and Canadian musician Danko Jones — all of whom have guested on Volbeat recordings in the past — reprised their roles on the tracks “7 Shots,” “Evelyn” and “Black Rose” respectively.