Whetting their fans’ appetite for
new material, Nine Inch Nails are back to blast us with their dark-hearted
anthems – including a phenomenal four nights at Brixton Academy.
Frontman Trent Reznor is looking forward to hitting the road and giving the
people what they want.
Considering the gaps between tours
in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, it feels like you were just here…
Trent: “Yeah, we were in
Europe
comparatively recently and we’ve done another tour in the States since then, so
we’ve been on the road a lot. Overall we’re more popular in the States than
anywhere else and that’s partly because we’ve never properly toured abroad, for
a number of reasons. So when this opportunity came up, we thought it was time to
start doing some legwork and not make it just every five or 10 years, which
isn’t fair to the fans we have over there.”
Is the live show still as important
to you as when you were a younger band?
Trent: I don’t like to
think about things from a marketing perspective, but when a record’s done I
have to think about how we’re going to alert the world to its existence. We
don’t get played on MTV or the radio anymore, and I don’t even care about that,
but the live show is something that I really think is good and I just want to
get out there and work on it.”
Is the new material going to lend
itself well to a live setting?
Trent: Probably not
(laughs)! The tour that we have coming up will have a little bit of new stuff
but it’s not the focus of it and there’s a couple of reasons for that. The
first one is that the record won’t be out yet and ultimately, I do want to give
people what they want. As a fan who goes to see bands, certainly when I was
growing up, it’s kind of a bummer when it’s all just new album stuff. There are
songs people expect to hear and I want to give them that.”
With the new record recorded pretty
much on your own, is this the right line-up for playing it live anyway?
Trent: “After the
summer, when we continue this thing I may put together a different kind of band
or different instrumentation that might incorporate a better way to play the
new stuff. I’ve always thought of the record and the live band as separate
things and it’s been rewarding for me to treat the studio as an instrument and
do it that ways this time around. The next step is for me to see if the songs
are strong enough to reinterpret into a live setting – we don’t just try to
sound like the record, we try to make it it’s own thing, it’s a visceral,
engaging experience.”
Do you have to build in an extra
budget to cover all the damage you wreak?
Trent: “I guess we do, I
don’t like to think about that but someone figures those things out. Accidents
happen, so we try to plan for the accidental bumping of a guitar here and there.”
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