Road To Bloodstock 2015: Armored Saint

Our next edition of Road To Bloodstock 2015 comes from Armored Saint’s John Bush. Surprisingly, their Bloodstock appearance this August will be the band’s first ever UK festival show – so what’s in store for the thousands of heavy metallers?

Hey John! You’re playing the Ronnie James Dio stage at Bloodstock. How do you feel about that? “We’re excited. Can you believe that it’s our first festival appearance in Britain? It’s only taken us 32 years, and what a great way to start – at something like Bloodstock, with all those metalheads.”

How much do you know about Bloodstock? “I know it’s small – only has about 15,000 people, right? I know where it is in England, roughly. Also some great bands have played there. Alice Cooper, Motörhead, Saxon. We’ve played with them all over the years, and to be able to follow them into Bloodstock… that’s an honour.”

What sort of set will you play? “We always try to play at least one song from all of our albums. But whether we’ll have the time to do that at Bloodstock, I don’t know. But we’ll get as close as we can to representing our large catalogue in full.”

Are there any other bands playing you’re gonna check out? “Well, I know Rob Zombie’s doing it, and he’s always worth seeing. Trivium are headlining on the day we play, and it would be good to see them. Also, Nuclear Assault and Overkill. Like us, they’re from the ‘80s, so we feel like we’ll be with friends.”

Will you be sampling the general atmosphere at Bloodstock? “That all depends on what time we have to leave the site to get to Belgium for a festival the next day. But we’ll make sure we get there early enough to do a little sight-seeing before we go on. Because we’re playing early on the first day, I assume the fans won’t have had the time to get off their faces, so everybody will be more coherent. Or am I being naive?!”

In one sentence, why should fans check out Armored Saint? “Let’s go for a cliché: Can we deliver? Yes we can!”

Weekend and day tickets for Bloodstock are available here.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.