SAXON shares music video for 'Fire And Steel' from 'Hell, Fire And Damnation' album
08-10-2024
British heavy metal legends SAXON have released the official Paul M. Green-directed music video for the song “Fire And Steel”. The track is taken from the band’s critically acclaimed 24th studio album, “Hell, Fire And Damnation”, which came out in January via Silver Lining Music.
Watch “Fire And Steel” below.
SAXON frontman Biff Byford stated about “Fire And Steel”: “The original title was ‘Fire And Steam’ and the song itself is more thrash than classic metal. I was going to do it about something else, and then I had a bit of an epiphany and I thought ‘Fire And Steel’ was better. ‘Let’s do it about Sheffield.’
“If people were eating with a knife and fork back, say, a hundred years ago, that was something that sometimes was made in Sheffield. They invented stainless steel there, and there’s still a lot of steel in Sheffield but nothing like it used to be.
“Sheffield was one of my big stomping grounds when I was a teenager. We used to go to Sheffield and see all the bands at Sheffield City Hall, and the clubs and pubs there that had bands on.”
SAXON recently announced the “Hell, Fire And Steel” European tour which will not only see the band performing songs from “Hell, Fire And Damnation” but will also the whole of SAXON‘s classic sophomore album “Wheels Of Steel” (released 45 years ago next year) as well as other fan favorites and hits from across the group’s career.
The “Hell, Fire And Steel” tour kicks off in Bremen, Germany on February 4 and concludes on March 5 in Leipzig, Germany.
Watch the previously released official lyric video for “Witches Of Salem” below.
“Hell, Fire And Damnation” is an album which sees SAXON investigate all areas of history and mystery amidst ten of their most confident and thunderously powerful songs yet. In “Witches Of Salem”, lead singer and founding member Biff Byford explores the unjust condemnation of the women victimized at the Salem witch trials and the sheer bigotry and mass hysteria prevalent at the time.
“This is an American story, but the witch trials started in Scotland, spread into England and across the sea to the colonies in America. Those poor women in Salem,” explains Byford, “they weren’t ‘witches’ more than just unfortunate women, really, blamed for everybody’s ailments… whether your horse died, or the milk went sour, they blamed women. Maybe because they were jealous of them, or maybe it was because some guy had made some advances and she’d told him to piss off, so he’d declare that she was a witch. And once a person was declared a witch, I don’t think there was any way back from that; very few of them were found innocent.”
Produced by Andy Sneap (JUDAS PRIEST, EXODUS, ACCEPT) and Byford, with Sneap mixing and mastering, “Hell, Fire And Damnation” strides the perfect line between confident, current power, and gloriously irreverent flexing of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal muscle which SAXON co-created.
“I think this album’s one of the best he’s done sound-wise, and he’s done a lot of albums,” Biff declared. “It has a really raw, vibrant sound… if you compress the total time making this album, it was four weeks tops… you can hear everything brilliantly, nothing’s overcomplicated, nothing’s over compressed. The guitar sounds are fucking immense, they’re just great, raw guitar sounds. And we haven’t done a lot of overdubbing on there, it’s just playing. I really, really like it.”
SAXON will join forces with URIAH HEEP for the “Hell, Fire & Chaos – The Best Of British Rock & Metal” U.S. tour, set to kick off on April 23 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
BBC News, reported that founding SAXON bassist Stephen “Steve” Dawson has been jailed for repeatedly abusing a six-year-old girl in the 1990s.
The 72-year-old, who was a member of SAXON until 1985, when he was kicked out of the band, got the verdict at an earlier hearing at Sheffield Crown Court on March 21, and was given a five-year custodial sentence on April 11.
The officer in charge of the case, Detective Constable Robert Heath, said Dawson “thought he had got away with committing these horrific crimes against a young, vulnerable victim 30 years ago.
“She has shown extraordinary strength through coming forward,” he added. “It is clear that his evil acts have remained with her throughout her life, and I hope this sentence goes some way to allowing her to move on from these traumatic events.”
Discussing the charge, Heath assured that the case “demonstrates just how seriously we take these offenses,” urging others who have “been subject to any offense, no matter how long ago it happened, to come forward and report it to us.”
He concluded: “We are here to listen, investigate, and bring the perpetrators before courts.”
A few years ago, Dawson told Rhino about how he reacted to being fired from SAXON: “I was sort of sad and relieved in one hit, if you can understand that. I went straight into recording with a guitarist who Phil Lynott had been working with just before he died, and we started making music. Everything was going great, I’d really been enjoying myself, and then all of a sudden the money stops and you end up in court. It all just sort of fizzled out then. I was just getting back to being a well-known musician, but I was broke. (Laughs) Which is sort of a familiar story. So I just sort of bummed around a bit, and then after about two years, I just quit the music business. When it got to the point where the guys were turning up to take the house away and all me furniture, I just thought, ‘I’ve got to do something with real people instead of time-wasters.’ So I just gave the music business up, really, and I became a stripper. Not a stripper as in taking my clothes off. (Laughs) Removing paint from objects.”
In 1999 Dawson and fellow original SAXON member Graham Oliver registered “SAXON” as a trademark, maintaining that they had exclusive rights in the name and tried to prevent singer Biff Byford and SAXON‘s promoters and merchandisers from using the name. In 2003, Dawson and Oliver reached a settlement with Byford and guitarist Paul Quinn over the usage of the SAXON name and logos belonging to the original partnership.
OLIVER/DAWSON SAXON, consisting of Oliver and Dawson, acknowledged that the band featuring Byford and Quinn would continue to be known as “SAXON“, and have use of the logo. In return, Byford and Quinn acknowledged that OLIVER/DAWSON SAXON had a legitimate use of the name in that form.
Stephen Dawson: Saxon founder member jailed for child sex offences https://t.co/M96QJLCW3M
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) April 12, 2024
Social media