W.A.S.P. Frontman BLACKIE LAWLESS On Forthcoming Anthology - "I Want To Make It As Complete As A Musical Discography Could Be" 
Inside Out 666 recently spoke to
W.A.S.P. frontman
Blackie Lawless on Australian leg of the band's Crimson Idol Tour 2008. The following is an excerpt from the interview:
Q: Can you tell my why fifteen years on you have decided to go back and reflect largely on The Crimson Idol album?
Lawless: "Well, as you said it was the fifteen-year anniversary of this and we had never done it in it’s entirety before. A lot of the reasons for that was you want to wait for the right moment, you don’t want to do it two or three years .. you’ve just toured it. You want to put it to bed and move on with the other things you are doing. Some of it had to do with the technical aspects of it, there was technology that exists now that didn’t then which enabled us from doing it. At the same time, I knew something that the average person didn’t when it come to this. People would stop me and say 'Hey man, are you ever gonna do that record in its entirety live?' What these people did not know is that we had shot a full-length film. In my mind, it wasn’t complete until that film accompanied it.
Finally, I felt the time was right and I went in last summer, spent a couple of months editing it, and got it ready to go. It was certainly one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever done. Once it was edited I went into our first day of rehearsals, and we had this giant screen behind us, we were playing the songs and I turned around and started watching the film and I became the spectator. It was the most rewarding experience; I got high off it and couldn’t believe it! This sounds exactly like the record when you hear it and we went into preproduction to make sure that a lot of the little things are right! We took the samples off the records of things we couldn’t do live like the orchestration. When you see it and hear it, it’s pretty amazing. So many times in our lives we fantasise how something’s gonna be, but it never ends up being exactly what you wanted, this was exactly how I thought it would turn out."
Q: Are you currently working on any new material?
Lawless: "No, we’ve got so much on our plate right now; I’ve turned that off in my head. I learnt something when I made Dominator and that’s not to try and get too far ahead of myself. I’ve got a couple of things that I’ve been threatening to sit down and play with but I have resisted it because our schedules full for the next two years, filled with things that we are gonna do!"
Q: And what of those plans?
Lawless: "Well, we are coming to see you guys, then we do the summer festivals in Europe. When we get back we are going to film for the DVD for the band stuff. We are looking at a box set that hopefully we will have out next year, which will be an anthology. What I’m talking about is purely audio There are things that we did a long time ago that people have never heard. We demoed the first album four times before we recorded it for real! If I had to do it over again, I would have told EMI that we were not going to re-record it that last time. I would have gone with the demos because they are far more representative of what we were as a band at the time. They are far more aggressive, brutal, and ruthless. When you do an anthology yes it has the highlights of your career, but I wanted to put more into it than that. I wanted to show people where it really came from. There will be outtakes of other things as well from where the career has progressed. I want to make it as complete as a musical discography could be."
Go to
this location to check out the complete two-part interview.
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