JOEY BELLADONNA’S JOB IS NOT SAFE

An actual screen-cap.

The Big Four Comedy Tour rolls on!

Scott Ian gave a video interview to zee German edition of Metal Hammer earlier this month, and when pressed about Joey Belladonna’s status in the band, he was, well… let’s just say “non-committal.” I can’t embed the video, but here are some choice quotes…

When asked if Joey is the new singer for Anthrax:

“Yes. As of today, June 4, 2010, yes, Joey is the singer of Anthrax.”

When asked if Scott is “one-hundred percent sure” that Joey is the new singer of Anthrax:

“You mean for these upcoming shows on Sonisphere? It certainly is Joey. I can’t predict the future. But we have every plan and every intention of moving forward with Joey.”

When asked if Joey will sing on Worship Music, or whatever it ends up being called:

“I hope so. If not him, then I don’t know who. We’ve run out of ideas.”

“As of today,” “I hope so,” and “I can’t predict the future” aren’t exactly phrases that instill confidence. I understand that at this point Ian is probably just covering his ass, but you gotta admit – this is pretty hilarious. To watch this interview, you’d think that Neil Turbin might be re-joining the band any second now.

But in all fairness to Ian, it does sound like all this drama has been pretty rough on him, too:

“We never wanted to make any line-up changes. Making line-up changes is the worst thing in the world. It sucks. if you think it sucks as a fan of a band, think about it from the band’s point of view sometime. It’s the worst thing to have to go through, just changing a member in a band. It’s fucking horrible. There’s nothing good about it.”

Now, someone even more dickish than I might point out that it’s not very nice to say “there’s nothing good about” line-up changes when your old singer just returned to the band — which is supposed to be good news — but, y’know. I’m not saying anything.

There are some other really interesting parts of the interview, too, including these little nuggets of info:

• According to Ian, the Dan Nelson situation “almost broke up the band,” but they realized they couldn’t call it quits just “because this guy [Nelson] went crazy.”
• Belladonna joining the band after they’ve already written and recorded an entire album mirrors the situation they were in when they first hired Belladonna to sing on Spreading the Disease in 1985. This isn’t exactly news, since Turbin has a couple of songwriting credits on Disease, but I guess I never realized how far along in the process they had been when Belladonna joined the fold.
• Ian addresses obsessive fans and bloggers (both of which would accurately describe the staff of MetalSucks), saying “I don’t think people should worry so much about what’s going on in a band,” “There’s bigger things to worry about in life [than the status of a band you like],” and “I don’t care about the internet… I don’t care about the good stuff or the bad stuff.” Which is the right attitude to take. And I know Scott isn’t speaking specifically about MetalSucks — fuck, I have no idea if he knows who we are — but I would like to reassure him that we’re not actually losing sleep or anything over this whole situation. But it’s our job to think about these things beyond a reasonable level… and we do love our job!

Watch the entire interview here.

-AR

Thanks to Kristoffer Infante for the tip!