Fear Factory’s Burton Seabell Reveals Why U.S. Fans May Not Get to See the Demanufacture 20th Anniversary Tour
Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of Fear Factory’s seminal album, Demanufacture, and even though half the band’s line-up is different now, they’ve been celebrating by touring Europe and playing the album in its entirety. Y’know, standard procedure for seminal album anniversaries these days.
But when oh when will fans on the other side of the pond get to experience the Demanufactour? Very possibly never, according to vocalist Burton Seabell. He tells Rreverb.com:
“We’d like to. We’re going to figure something out. We’d still like to do a ‘Demanufacture’ tour of the United States, but it’s up in the air. The promoters aren’t interested… It costs money. But hopefully we’ll see that change in the next couple of months.”
That’s a bummer for ‘Murican Fear Factory fans (and presumably Canadians, too), but it’s also a cold splash of water in the face of Fear Factory: the money people think this tour is a lousy investment, at least at the price Fear Factory’s booking agent is asking. I don’t know what Seabell thinks is going to change in the next few months; unless something happens to suddenly make Fear Factory and Demanufacture more relevant, the band’s choice will be to either lower their guarantees (which would obviously suck for them) or not do the tour here. The metal touring industry is definitely in a weird place right now, but still, this basically boils down to Fear Factory’s popularity in the United States in 2015.
That being the case, I guess the question is this: are the U.S. promoters wrong? If enough of FF’s fans make it clear that they’d wanna come to one of these shows, maybe that would encourage the promoters to book ’em. But my gut tells me that Demanfacture just exists in a weird middle ground where it’s not popular enough to guarantee the promoters will make their money back, but not unpopular enough for Fear Factory to consider doing the shows “for a price,” as they say. So unless there’s some intel I don’t have here, I don’t see anything changing in the next few months.
[via]
