Zoltan Bathory dishes all the details on what fans can expect with the live stage show for the bands upcoming tour dates, plus all things DMC and ‘AfterLife’ deluxe.
5FDP’s Zoltan Bathory recently caught up with Jesea Lee of The Jesea Lee Show ahead of the release of ‘AfterLife’ deluxe to talk about what fans can expect from upcoming tour dates across the globe – including a brand new stage show (!), how the song and music video for ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’ came about and, the bombshell hidden ‘easter eggs’ that fans have discovered on Five Finger Death Punch album covers.
On building a brand new stage show for the upcoming tour:
We’ve always been progressing and trying to build a bigger show so this time we actually, another bucket list item, we managed to get, I don’t want to use the word poach, but we’ve got Brian Hartley to do the stage design, [who] is somebody who is legendary in the scene. He’s known for doing the stages for KISS and Trans Siberian Orchestra, so he does, big, big shows and for us, its always been a goal, that I want to have the audience have an experience, sort of a tribal experience, sort of an experience where you have to say ‘I was there when this happened’.
Like Woodstock. Nobody says ‘I went to see Woodstock’ you say ‘I was there!’. So what’s the difference? The difference is that this was an experience and if you look at bands like Rammstein, like you don’t even understand the lyrics, doesn’t matter, you’ve got to go, you gotta see them because this is just insane. The same thing with so many bands, the Iron Maiden’s of the world, giant, giant shows. Trans Siberian Orchestra is insane. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them but holy cow, right!
So that’s kind of the direction. We always wanted to go somewhere where it’s not just, obviously we have the songs to play, we have a lot of hit songs, but I wanted to create some insane experience for the audience, so we are working on that.
So that’s going to be on the road basically starting in May, in England – we start in Wembley – so we have a Europe tour, a couple of Metallica dates in stadiums, a bunch of headliner [shows], some festivals and back to the States. We have this tour with Marilyn Manson and Slaughter To Prevail so that’s going to be a pretty insane bill.
On Slaughter To Prevail:
Slaughter To Prevail is another band that we really like, and if somebody wants to catch an “Easter Egg”, we actually put Alex Terrible’s mask in our ‘Welcome To The Circus’ video that we released in May a year ago, so we put the mask there so that was already a little “easter egg” that one day we’re going to get these guys on the road with us.
On fans discovering ‘Easter Eggs’ across the bands back catalogue:
So we always do these little tricks that you find your Easter eggs on all the record covers, even putting out the deluxe edition, I already started to see that fans are sending me these snapshots that they’re finding certain things like ‘Oh wait a minute there’s the numbers for the golden ratio’ then ‘there’s the spirit molecule written in small letters.’ so they’re finding these “easter eggs”.
On the how the band got Hype Williams on board to direct the music video for ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX:
That’s an even bigger question mark. How do the hell are we going to do a video for this? [DMX passed prior to the song being put together].
So in that conversation, we originally were like ‘well we can’t really do a video for the song because how!?’ and that became a bigger question of respect and legacy, and then in that conversation we ended up reaching out to Hype Williams… it’s an insane resume that he has, like the biggest hip-hop videos there are, there was a waiting list to work with Hype Williams.
Hype was a very good friend of DMX, they were collaborations, Hype put him in the movie ‘Belly’ that Hype directed, so we [knew] that they were very tight, connected, good friends, and we reached out to Hype and we asked him, like ‘Hey, what do you think? How should we do this?’ and that was another amazing moment in this journey.
When Hype Williams goes like ‘my brother, I have to, this is not a question of anything, I have to direct this video.’
Hype was on a plane, three days later, to Vegas, like ‘we’re doing this!’
On whether the band will play ‘This Is The Way ft. DMX’ live:
Yes! I mean this is a conversation, like some one just said this, who was it, maybe Run DMC, somebody just said that, ‘Man, you guys better get the hologram!’
So that’s another question mark. We want to play this song live, we have to figure out how, obviously. That’s going to be a question mark but we’ll attempt to, we’ll figure this out.’