SAXON - War Is Coming! Page 2
by Tim Henderson
The split - "When we sacked Graham Oliver, he started a band called Son Of A Bitch and released an album called Victim You, meanwhile he sued the members of the band for an accounting because we sacked him. Because in English law, basically when a partnership dissolves you have to give an accounting. When you write songs it's a fairly artistic sort of thing, so it's debatable whether there is any sort of partnership. If five people are in the band but only two people write the songs it's not much of a partnership. And within that structure he sued us for how much the name Saxon is worth. So when we sacked him, he's claiming an accounting and he's claiming some equipment, bits and pieces of equipment, he's claiming a fifth share of the big silver eagle we had, and he's also claiming a monetary share of the name. The court case is not about the ownership of the name, the court case is actually about what his share of the name is in monetary terms."
The name - "Now, in 1978 Steve Dawson registered the name with Company's House, and it's completely invalid because they changed the law in 1982. Basically we own the commercial interest in the name Saxon because we have a recording contract for the next five years to release albums under the name Saxon. And those albums are a direct connection with the album we first released in 1979. So Graham Oliver's brought this court case as a nuisance thing and because the English legal system is so long and drawn out, and their lawyers keep stalling and stalling, basically the court case is in October - and then it will be sorted out once and for all. We may have to pay Graham Oliver some money but money's not the object."
Graham Oliver:
"Well there isn't (a legal problem) with us. We never envisioned doing live gigs with SOAB, it was just an album project. We all fancied doing an album because as you know the original Saxon was called SOAB and for obvious reasons we had to change it, when they signed us up for the deal with Epic Records in America we changed it to Saxon. We did do a few shows as SOAB, and people were just going... cause me and Steve had not played together for 10 years and so everybody was shouting for all these songs and so we put one in, and another one, and another one and it was such good fun and then in Amsterdam we just got totally mobbed on stage, you know, we did 'Crusader' the whole thing and they went crazy."
