It is an exciting time to be an old school metal fan in Australia at the moment. It seems every week we get another email telling us that a band that we grew up listening to has reformed and now plans on hitting our shows. The latest band to make such an announcement is Vio-lence are American thrash metal band that rose to fame in 1985 from the San Francisco Bay area thrash scene. The band recently re-united and HEAVY Mag had a chance to chat to Phil Demmel (who most would know from Machine Head) about the reunion and the tour.
“Well this whole thing has kind of happened slow since I quit Machine Head and did my little thing with Slayer,” he explains as we begin to talk about the reunion. “Sean (Killian – vocalist) reached out and we did a couple of little reunion shows and he was stoked. Basically all the guys in the band work so we can’t really tour but doing something like an Australian run which would only take a week and a half, two weeks tops, that is something we can do. Everybody is super excited about doing it and I am to because Australia is one of my favourite places to tour. They are crazy fans down there and I always get a bunch of Vio-lence requests when I am doing there so I am excited.”
“The Machine Head decision was a big decision,” he says when we talk about his change in band. “I’ve talked a lot about that so people know why I made that decision. The Vio-lence decision though, that was pretty easy. My only concern was Sean and how he was physically. I thought everything else could be put into play easily but there is no Vio-lence without Sean Killian, so I just wanted to make sure that he was going to be good and that he would be able to pull it off. I didn’t want to go out there and prop him up, I wanted this to be quality because we have always put on a pretty quality product.”
You can hear our full interview with Vio-lence on Spotify.
