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Saxon - Sailing To America Twice
By Martin Popoff

Veteran metal champions Saxon are set to do a little mini tour of Mexico and America after which they will return to England to begin work on the follow-up to the well-received Metalhead album. After that, it's back to North America for a more extensive tour somewhere around mid-2001.

Lanky vocalist Biff Byford gave us this update on set list changes to expect on the first tour. "There will be four or five songs off the new album and we're going to play some songs we haven't played for while, maybe do 'Heavy Metal Thunder' or 'Play It Loud', some things off of Power & The Glory maybe. And in terms of covers, we'll be doing 'Ride Like The Wind' and possibly our Judas Priest song 'You've Got Another Thing Coming', which we did on a tribute album. We're not that big on covers, but on the new album we're writing at the moment, we are covering 'In The Court Of The Crimson King'."

Why no Canadian dates on this tour?

"Well, to tell you the truth, we weren't really going to come to America at all. We had a couple of weeks in Mexico offered for reasonably good money. So we decided to do some shows in America at the same time. But we are coming back, sort of in the middle of next year and do a longer tour with some Canadian dates on the East Coast and Vancouver on the west coast as well. And we're hoping that the new album will be out by then. The working title is Killing Ground. No song titles yet, except the title track because we tend to change them a lot. The new album again will be a mixture of classic metal and a more modern feel, just like the last four albums have been. Because we're really popular again in Europe now, we have to write some songs for the European fans and they're a little more sort of darker, you know what I'm mean (laughs)? So we mix it up a bit really. We play some classic melodic stuff, heavy rock with melodic overtones for our fans who have been with us for a long time. I think it's the best way. We don't want to be a shadow of what we used to be, copy ourselves all the time. We don't live in the past. We do bring the past back with us when we play live but we don't live there, if you know what I mean; we don't hanker after the past."

Saxon - Sailing To America Twice Page 2