Anthrax Guitarist Scott Ian Talks New Music, Touring + Desire to Rock Out With AC/DC

Scott Ian of Anthrax was the guest on Full Metal Jackie’s radio show this past weekend. The guitarist spoke all about the band's recent touring and expressed his aspirations for playing with AC/DC. Ian also talked about upcoming tour dates and new material. If you missed Full Metal Jackie’s show, check out her interview with Scott Ian below:

Anthrax performed all of ‘Among the Living’ on the Metal Alliance tour and you’ve got a new EP that highlights some of your heroes of your youth. Do you think revisiting where you come from will in turn impact the new music you’ll make next?

[Laughs] That’s a good question. I don’t think so, it’s nothing new for us. We’ve been listening to these songs it’s not like we just suddenly revisited these songs on ‘Anthems’ – we’ve been listening to them nonstop so if they were going to affect anything we’ve written it’s probably already happened.

Scott, you’ve been part of a lot of package tours throughout your career. Ideally, what are the key elements that make a really good bill?

Well being able to say the Big 4 has to be the best package tour we’ve ever been a part of so having great bands [laughs] makes a great package tour. With the Big 4, obviously you’ve got the four of us together on it and it makes it awesome so just having a bunch of great bands that kind of make sense together and that you know are really going to give a great show every night and give people their money’s worth every night.

Do you think it’s good to have a variety of different styles of metal bands together on one tour?

Either way, it works. Look at Mayhem Festival we did last year where you had us and Slayer and Motorhead and then you had Slipknot and a lot of other younger bands and that all worked. You had kids going to see bands like Whitechapel and then coming to see us and vice versa. I think anything works – I prefer to have bands of different styles of music together on the same show just because it becomes more interesting for me that way. Either way, we play on shows where it’s all metal, we play festivals in Europe. We’ve literally played a festival on the same stage with Midnight Oil so things get pretty eclectic too sometimes.

Over the years, musicians from other bands have stepped up to fill in with Anthrax like Snake from Skid Row, Jonathan Donais of Shadows Fall, from your perspective as a fan, what band what you love to call and ask you to fill in?

Me playing with them? Oh AC/DC for sure. Yeah if Malcom [Young] ever needs a night off I’m just putting it out there right now, if anyone from AC/DC’s camp ever hears this – if Malcom ever needs a day off, I’m your man.

Metal Alliance is done, You’ve got the Revolver Golden Gods performance coming up, what’s after that?

A couple days after that we go to South America for two weeks, then we get another break. In May and June I go to the UK and Ireland to do my talking tour and I get home after that and we’re on break until the end of July then we head over to Europe. We have a bunch of shows with Iron Maiden, a bunch of festivals, some headlining stuff and then we’re done.

August 18 in Germany will be our last show and then we’ll probably take a short break and then get right back in and start writing, there’s a lot of ideas floating around. We’ve just had a really good run over the last almost two years since ‘Worship Music’ came out. I should say by the time this tour ends in August it would be almost two years and over two hundred shows and we just want to keep it going. There’s no reason to have any long down time, we’re all really excited about getting in and getting some new songs together.

This coming weekend, Full Metal Jackie will welcome Suicidal Tendencies frontman Mike Muir to her show. Full Metal Jackie can be heard on radio stations around the country — for a full list of stations, go to fullmetaljackieradio.com.