SAXON - Biff! Bang! Pow! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

Says Biff, on locking in Glockler, "Well, all five of us wrote the music, and we usually write the music first. And I usually take it away and do some melodies and rough vocals to it, and then come back and change it all. But yeah, I think his big song, his major contribution, would be 'Red Star Falling'; he played all the keyboards on that. I mean, we wrote that song as a five-piece, I played bass and he plays keyboards and Nibbs played drums. But you can hear the more keyboard-oriented style on that song, because that's what he's into - as well as his drumming, he's into keyboards. That brought a new element into the band. So his contribution is good. On the last album, Lionheart, Nigel didn't contribute anything to the writing. He contributed to the performance."

"Nigel rejoining the band was basically... we did this 25th anniversary tour in Germany, of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, yeah? Basically Jorg (Michael) went back to Stratovarius, to play violin or something, I don't know. Sorry, stupid joke. And we asked Nigel if he wanted to do the tour, and that's where that came from. And we really liked it. And it got to the point where we asked him if he wanted to rejoin the band. He didn't say yes straightaway, by the way. He thought about it for a while, I mean, we have worked with a lot of drummers now in the last ten years. Before this, he'd been writing keyboard-y, atmospheric stuff, really. He's got quite a lot of music on TV in England."

On picking The Inner Sanctum as the title for the new record, Biff says, "We had a few titles, and State Of Grace was one; Bloodbrothers was another one, but that song didn't happen. The thing is, we were doing this huge TV documentary in England, a bit of a fly-on-the-wall thing about us, and I'm writing my new book - I'm writing an autobiography at the same time - so I just thought The Inner Sanctum was a great title, because I like that religious stuff anyway. The Inner Sanctum, the secret place where you're invited; it was just a cool thing for the album at this point in our careers."

And how would you classify the roles of Doug Scarratt versus Paul Quinn - your two guitarists - on here? Who is writing more; who is playing more?

SAXON - Biff! Bang! Pow! Page 4