Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian saves all the emails he gets from his heroes – but he’d still prefer the internet had never existed.
He’s currently at work on the band’s next album, which they’ve been teasing via their social media channels.
Ian tells RocksVerige: “Like everything there’s good and bad to it. I think about when I was a kid – if I could have sent a message to Steve Harris, and he’d written me back, even just to say, ‘Cheers, thank you!’ that would have been the coolest thing in the world.
“I’m still like that when I get an email from Gene Simmons or somebody. I save all those because I think it’s cool that I have an email from Gene Simmons.”
But he adds: “Kiss could never have done what they did in the 70s and kept their identities hidden now. Look at Ghost – how long did it take before there were pictures of those guys all over the internet? There just isn’t that mystique thing about bands any more.”
Ian believes another positive is the way in which the internet has meant bands need to rely less on middle-men. But he insists: “If a genie came out of the bottle and gave me the option of abolishing the internet, it would disappear like it never existed and nobody even remembered we ever had it, and things went back to the way they were – I would prefer the old way for sure.
“It’s just proven: people used to buy records and now they don’t. It makes a big different to our lives as guys in bands.”
