Metallica announced plans this week to commemorate the terrorist attack at the Bataclan with a live album they recorded at the Paris venue in 2003. With a setlist featuring lesser-played gems like Leper Messiah and No Remorse, the archive release – entitled Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Metallica! – will be the Four Horsemen’s contribution to Record Store Day 2016 on April 16, with all proceeds going to the Give For France fund.
Metallica were also this week named ‘global ambassadors’ for the RSD event. “Independent record stores are part of Metallica’s DNA,” Lars Ulrich announced in a statement. “They have been pivotal in shaping each one of us into the music fanatics we’ve all become. We could not be any prouder to be Record Store Day Ambassadors for 2016 and are looking forward to screaming from every rooftop the next few months about everything independent record store and beyond.”
It’s rare to find a musician on the promotional trail for a forthcoming album openly admitting that he didn’t much like the music his bandmates wrote for it. Deftones co-founding guitarist Stephen Carpenter embraced this ‘soft sell’ approach with Ultimate Guitar, discussing the Sacramento quintet’s eight studio album Gore: “My proudest thing about my guitar playing on this record is just playing on the record because I didn’t want to play on the record to begin with,” he confesses. “It wasn’t until later once I actually got into it. I look at all the songs on the record and they were all a challenge for me to get in to… When we were coming up with ideas and writing the songs, the stuff that was being written – the other guys’ ideas – I wasn’t too interested in it. It wasn’t the style or the sound I was hoping we would take. It wasn’t what I was expecting or wanting.” Asked what the barrier was for him, Carpenter explained “I really like metal and I love all the metal that’s being played now.”
Throughout the interview he seems to place himself at loggerheads with the rest of the group, who have tour dates lining up until late summer, including a performance at Download festival in June. “My band is going one direction and I am going another one currently,” he states, adding “I would never leave the band that I started but the band started leaving me, I can’t control that.” Deftones have had a troubled time of late, losing their original bassist Chi Cheng in 2013 after a five-year coma and scrapping the still-unreleased Eros album in 2009. “I have a great time for the most part,” Carpenter insists. “This record has been a struggle and we have issues that I do not want to leave home. But how things will be in the future, I do not know. I know what I will do and what I will not do and there are some things that I will not do in the future because I just don’t agree with it.”
If Stephen Carpenter is the glummest guitarist in the news this week, Scott Ian is surely the happiest, as he contemplates flying alongside Iron Maiden on Ed Force One when The Book Of Souls Tour goes to South America next month. “We’re actually flying on a Boeing 747 that says Iron Maiden on the side – with Iron Maiden. I finally understand what I’ve been doing all this time. It’s all been leading up to this,” the guitarist gushed to TeamRock. “I saw Maiden support Priest on the Killers tour in 1981 in New York, and 35 years later I’m flying on a jet with them.” Watching Maiden perform in South America will be a particularly intense thrill for the New York rhythm king: “Ask any band where their best gig is, and they’ll say Chile, Argentina or Brazil. It’s so insane down there. From a fan’s point of view, you get to see Maiden in front of those crowds. Even if I wasn’t playing the gigs, just to be a fly on the wall on the plane and get to go to the shows would be enough for me. I’m very excited.”
