Five Finger Death Punch’s Zoltan Bathory spoke live on Italy’s Radiofreccia ahead of the bands show at I Days Milano as special guests to Metallica.
Five Finger Death Punch continues to move throughout Mainland Europe on their tour mixing headliner shows with M72 World Tour dates as well as festivals. Amongst all the tour dates Zoltan Bathory took the time to speak to the Italian radio station, Radiofreccia.
In this interview Zoltan shares what fans can expect from the tour and from the sounds of it, it isn’t just the headliner dates that are getting to witness the bands new laser stage show (!).
Also covered are more insights into the ‘AfterLife: Deluxe’ release, life on the road with Five Finger Death Punch and discussing some of the bands and artists that 5FDP has collaborated with including DMX, Brian May, Brantley Gilbert, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Rob Halford and Tech N9ne.
Keep scrolling to listen to or watch the full interview with Radiofreccia and check out a few extracts [transcribed by FFDP UK] below.
On how excited the band are to play new songs from ‘AfterLife’ and why the band released the deluxe version of the album:
The live shows [are] obviously the strength of the band anyway.
The reason we actually released the deluxe version [of ‘AfterLife’] that we that this song with DMX that we recorded [‘This Is The Way’] and at the time we were ready with the album unfortunately DMX passed. We had to go through a lot of red tape kind of contracts and talk to everyone who was involved in the process. It took a minute to get that ready and we weren’t sure that we could release the album on time so we ended up releasing [the album] without that song. Every song is important on the album. It was part of that album so we wanted to release it so so now that album is finally complete with that song on it.
So that’s why we did it and since we had to re-release the album anyway we figured okay let just throw some goodies for the fans so we put a couple of acoustic versions of some songs so they could enjoy some new material as well.
On life on the road with Five Finger Death Punch and the best part of touring:
I’m a Hungarian. I’m a Hun. We are nomads. It’s in my genetic setup. I like the motion, I like the fact that I’m travelling, I like the fact that I’m on the road. That’s interesting to me. To keep moving, keep moving. I prefer that compared to being stagnant and staying at home.
I actually like travelling even when I’m home when I’m not on tour I keep travelling. I just like moving around in the world, seeing new things, that’s just how it goes. As I’m going I do the things that I like to do. I do a lot of car rallies. It’s the same thing. I drive my car across America or across Europe. As I travel I train martial arts wherever I go in the world, so then there’s a reason for me to travel to all of those places. So even when I’m not on tour, I am basically on tour.
On what it was like to work with Brian May on ‘Blue On Black’ and collaborating with other artists:
That’s really fun for us to collaborate. We did a lot of different collaborations before. We did a collaboration when we did LL Cool J’s song ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’, we had Tech N9ne in the studio, when we did ‘Lift Me Up’ we had Rob Halford recording that piece from Judas Priest, and so all these things… and then when we did ‘Blue On Black’, it wasn’t just Brian May, who is an absolute legend, but we had Kenny Wayne Shepherd singing on that song and playing on guitar, who wrote this song years and years ago. So we originally covered his song and he heard it and he fell in love with the cover so he came over and re-recorded with us his own song on the cover. Then Brantley Gilbert, the country artist, heard it, he got excited about it and he jumped on a verse and then Brian May got in. This is what music is supposed to be. I love these things and if we can do more collaborations in the future, we’re absolutely going [to do it]. This is really fun for us.