Anthrax mainman Scott Ian says the band won’t ever be derailed by lineup changes or lack of record company support.
The guitarist says the band’s destiny is in their own hands and that they’ll decide when to call it a day – no matter what is going on behind the scenes.
Anthrax have survived a number of lineup changes, lawsuits and a difficult experience with their former label Elektra to find themselves once again as relevant as they were in their early days.
The band accused Elektra of not doing enough to support 1995 album Stomp 442 and they parted company soon after it release.
Ian tells Hangar 19 (via Blabbermouth): “Nobody can take away what we’re doing. The only way Anthrax ever stops is if we decide it stops. In the 90s, the business changed and things started to go awry for us, like at Elektra and then after that, all the way up to 2010.
“And it’s not like people were out there trying to get rid of Anthrax, but it’s just the business became a place where it was hard for a band like us to survive.
“And you know what, we just put put our heads down and we said, ‘Look, we were doing this before we were anything. Before we had a record deal, we were a working band, and that’s all we did.’
“We put our heads down and just went to work. And we just continued touring and we wrote songs and made records and just continued doing what we were doing. The strength of people all around the world who dig what we do, and who enable us to do what we do — our fans — they kept us alive all those years until suddenly in 2010, there was a little shift and things started to change again.
“All of a sudden your brand becomes something that’s, like, ‘Oh, everybody wants to see Anthrax again.’ And there’s a whole new generation of fans — two new generations of fans — so it was just a case of putting our heads down and staying busy.”
Anthrax are working on the follow-up to their 2011 album Worship Music and Ian has recently released his autobiography I’m The Man: The Story Of That Guy From Anthrax.
