Biff Byford – Saxon – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Sunday, 24 March 2013 03:00
British metal legends Saxon have just released their twentieth album, ‘Sacrifice’. With the album getting rave reviews for being one of Saxon’s best in years and with an extensive UK tour starting in April just on the horizon it seems like the perfect time for Uber Rock to catch up with frontman Biff Byford and get the lowdown on the current Saxon climate…
Biff, thanks for taking some time out of rehearsal today to talk with Uber Rock. First of all, congratulations on the new album.
Thank you very much.
Album number twenty and if anything bigger, better and a lot louder than ‘Call To Arms’. How happy are you with it at the minute?
Yeah, very happy. I produced it myself this album, so I wanted it to be a bit heavier and a bit more intense. We went back a little bit to the eighties style for a couple of the songs.
How did you go about making the progression from ‘Call To Arms’ to ‘Sacrifice’ then? Did you do anything different in terms of preparation?
Well ‘Call To Arms’ is a great album but with this one I just wanted it to be just a little bit more like the eighties. How we were different back then to other bands. So we just wrote a couple of the songs, ‘Warriors Of The Road’ and ‘Stand Up And Fight, they’re a bit more thrashy than we’ve been doing for the last few years. We just kept it fairly straight really. Gibsons and Marshalls. I wanted the guys to play naturally. You know, how they play. We brought back a few twin guitar parts into the songs again which I wanted to do and just make it very interesting. Try to be a bit more groundbreaking on this album.
Yeah I was listening back to ‘Call To Arms’ but this new one just seems to top it. The production for one is sounding just spot on. You did that all yourself this time I believe?
Yeah I did it and I got Andy Sneap to mix it. He did a great job in the sound and everything.
Would you say working with Andy brought more of that metal sound into the equation as opposed to working with Toby Jepson on the last one?
Yeah, he’s a bit of a classic rock fan really is Andy on the quiet. But yeah I like his work with Killswitch Engage and some of the heavier bands. He knows how to keep it all under control with the sounds. I mean I recorded everything very loud and it’s not something easy to do but he’s a very good guy and keeps it under control. It’s a great sound really. Not a lot of things like compression on there. With some bands everything just sounds the same, no highs or lows, no dynamics. We didn’t want that we wanted plenty of dynamics in there.
If we could talk about a couple of the songs that are on there then? One of my favourites that you’ve mentioned already is ‘Warriors Of The Road’. Could you talk us through how that one cane about?
Well ‘Warriors Of The Road’ was, and I’m sure Doug will correct me if I’m wrong, was a Paul Quinn riff to begin with. That’s one of those times when I told him to go back to some of the stuff he wrote on the earlier albums like ‘Motorcycle Man’, ‘Princess Of The Night’ and ‘Backs To The Wall’. The type of fast songs that the guys from Metallica loved so much. So he came up with that riff and I had a chorus already written. So we fitted them both together and then the rest of the band played around with it a lot and came up with ‘Warriors…’ really.
Another one of my favourites on there is ‘Guardians Of The Tomb’. Again in an eighties sort of sense it’s very heavy on the visuals with the storytelling unfolding in the lyrics. Are they solely your domain?
Yeah. The thing is when I’m writing these I like them to be like little books, you know? Little pamphlets that tell stories. But the original idea for that was Nigel coming up with the sort of oriental part at the beginning. Then Paul and Doug came up with the main riff and it fitted together really well. Again, the chorus was written off my melody really. Yeah I just do the lyrics. I have done it with members in the past but these days I tend to do them on my own. Usually the other guys have left already and I’m left there on my own banging away. But yeah I will write some lyrics while we’re all in the room. They give a good picture good lyrics. Really conjure up some strong pictures in your head some of these things. I don’t really go down the rock ‘n’ roll cliché lyrics road very much. Occasionally we do but not every song. We like each song to stand on its own really. That’s Saxon’s style.
Another with that classic sort of Saxon straight-ahead hard rock style is ‘Stand Up And Fight’…
I wrote that song actually. I wanted to write a song in the same vein as ‘Backs To The Wall’, ‘Never Surrender’, ‘Hell And Back again’, ‘Stand Up And Be Counted’. All those early sort of songs. So I came up with this simple riff and put the lyrics to it and am quite happy with the way it turned out.
Finally the one that ends the album, ‘Standing In A Queue’.
A bit of a tongue in cheek song. Obviously it’s not serious but I like doing songs like that now and again. Like I say lyrically I go to places not many people go so it’s quite good to have a bit of fun sometimes with a song. I don’t think the band particularly like it on the album but everyone else I’ve talked to thinks it’s fantastic so I think I made the right decision. It’s a very English song. I suppose it’s not as musical as they would have liked, not sophisticated lyrics but I like it.
Yeah, I think it’s great though because it puts a smile on your face and that’s what you want music to do.
Yeah definitely yeah. The thing is I wanted to close the album with a bit of a smile. Some of the tracks are quite heavy aren’t they? Quite intense, it’s a heavy album with songs like ‘Wheels Of Terror’ and ‘Night Of The Wolf’. So I think it was good to finish with ‘Standing In A Queue’. Me and Andy Sneap loved it so we thought we’d put it on the album. I think the rest of the band thought we should have had a bit more sophistication but hey, that’s how it goes.
It’s definitely got that old school vibe though which so many people like.
Yeah definitely and we’ll probably have to play it live too. It’s been getting quite popular, getting radio airplay and everything.
Do you feel a responsibility to the fans to deliver that classic sound/style or is it something you genuinely want to do for yourselves?
Well we have older fans and we also have a lot of younger fans. We’ve got fans who have no idea who Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson are. They’re into albums like ‘Lionheart’ and stuff like that, so I suppose we have to keep one foot in the past and one foot in the present really. It’s a little bit difficult but I think we’ve achieved it on this album.
You do have the UK tour coming up in April/May. We’re getting back to seeing some quite extensive UK tours for Saxon.
Yeah, it’s good that. We’ve worked hard to get ourselves back in the frame in the UK and the magazines have got behind us. Radio stations, the internet is fantastic too, so we’ve got back to a really great point where we can go into every town and play, which is what we really like doing. It’s OK playing these huge gigs and what not out of town but we like going around town. We like pulling into a new town in the tour bus. It’s a great feeling and I think people like it. So yeah, we’ll be doing that and then we’re off into Europe.
Cool. Well I’m hoping to catch you in Falmouth, down in Cornwall.
Yeah that should be a good one. We’ve just added that. We played Falmouth a couple of years ago and it sold out so we’re looking forward to going back. We’ll see how it goes, sometimes the first time you go into a town it sells out and the next ones a bit difficult so we’ll see.
So other than ‘Standing In A Queue’, what else can we expect from the new album to be fitted into the setlist for the upcoming tour?
Well we’ll be doing six or seven songs, definitely. ‘Made In Belfast’, obviously ‘Sacrifice’ will be in there. I’d imagine ‘Warriors Of The Road’, ‘Stand Up And Fight’, ‘Night Of The Wolf’. I mean we might put them all in, who knows? We’re rehearsing now so we’re just trying them all out, seeing what they sound like live.
One of the special editions of ‘Sacrifice’ comes with a bonus disc of some of the re-recorded classics. ‘Crusader’ is sounding immense with the orchestration! How long did it take to get all that arrangement sorted?
Yeah it’s good. We’ve had a few songs done with orchestration. We had ‘Call To Arms’ done as well, but yeah it sounds great. Really epic. We sent it off to a friend of ours in Germany that does all this sort of thing and we had a rough version back within about two days. Then he did it properly and I think it took about two weeks in total actually.
A couple of the others on that bonus are done with acoustics, namely ‘Requiem’ and ‘Frozen Rainbow’.
Yeah they worked well those two songs. There’s no ballads on the album so having these on there gives you a chance to sort of mellow out a bit.
‘Frozen Rainbow’ is particularly great. Any chance you might be breaking out the acoustics on the forthcoming tour?
Well there could be, yeah. We just have to work it out really. It’s a logistics thing I suppose, but yeah we could do that. We’re thinking about it. My voice has to be in excellent condition to do that though. Obviously if you’ve just got two acoustic guitars then there’s no loud guitars to hide behind if you need to at times, you know?
I got to speak to Neil Murray recently and we talked a bit about the decline of HMV and record sales on the high street. Would you say that has affected your sales much in recent years? The fact that older fans really like to have a physical product and the outlets for those are getting less and less.
Um… Well it’s sad to see the demise of record stores, especially HMV. I always used to go in my local HMV. I was probably only in there a couple of days ago so yeah it is sad really that you can’t go in and pick up an album and just check it out. I suppose the supermarkets and online have pretty much destroyed it but at least you still can get the product. The only thing you can’t do is browse around and find something that you hadn’t gone in the shop for. You might go in there looking for something specific and you might come out with something totally different. That’s the beauty of it. You might see a box set of Motorhead that you hadn’t seen before and you buy it. That’s the beauty of shopping on the high street isn’t it? So it’s a bit sad that’s going but they haven’t all gone yet. As far as downloading goes you just have to make the product so special, with the packaging, that people have to have it. Our last six or seven albums have all had vinyl releases and every time we release one we do more and more prints of it. I think people just like them you know? They like the artwork and we have a fantastic art team that work for the record company that do the sleeves. They’re always great. They always photoshop us into something cool. We usually find that people will download it and then buy it. I think that speaks for itself.
Definitely, that’s certainly how I got into a lot of different stuff, just browsing. Looking through the old Iron Maiden covers, Saxon covers and Judas Priest. The artwork doesn’t have the same impact when it’s just a thumbnail on Amazon or iTunes so it’s good to see that resurgence in vinyl carrying on. Well, I think that’s our time up for today. Thanks again for talking with us Biff and best of luck with the tour.
My pleasure. Thank you.
Saxon return to the stages of the United Kingdom this April and May when they play the following shows:
April
18th Leamington Spa Assembly 0844 854 1358 www.leamingtonassembly.com/
19th Nottingham Rock City 0845 413 4444 www.rock-city.co.uk
20th Newcastle O2 Academy 0844 477 2000 www.o2academynewcastle.co.uk
21st Glasgow O2 ABC 0844 844 4747 www.o2abcglasgow.co.uk
23rd Manchester HMV Ritz 0844 478 0898 – www.hmvritz.com
24th Leeds O2 Academy 0844 477 2000 – www.o2academyleeds.co.uk
26th Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall 0844 478 0898 – www.wolvescivic.co.uk
27th London* O2 Shepherds Bush Empire 0844 871 8803 – www.kililive.com
28th Bristol O2 Academy 0844 477 2000 – www.o2academybristol.co.uk
May
1st Dublin Academy +353 1 877 9999 www.theacademydublin.com
3rd Belfast Mandela Hall 02890 971 062 – http://www.qubsu-ents.com/events
5th Oxford Academy 0844 477 2000 – http://www.o2academyoxford.co.uk/
6th Falmouth Princess Pavillion 01326 211222 – http://www.carrickleisureservices.org.uk/
Tickets for all venues are priced at £18.50 except for London* where they are £20.00 (all subject to booking fee). Tickets available at Kililive.com Tel: 0844 871 8803 and usual outlets. Doors for all venues open at 7pm.
