Martin Walkyier Sabbat Interview
The Clan Destined Singer Martin Walkyier on Sabbat Reformation
An interview with former Skyclad and current The Clan Destined front man Martin Walkyier on the live reformation of influential pagan metal band Sabbat.
In an exclusive interview with Suite101, Martin Walkyier talks about surviving lightning strikes and Sabbat's live dates and explains why there are no plans for a new album with the seminal pagan thrash metal band.
Reformed Sabbat US Tour
Suite 101: How have the shows been going with the reformed Sabbat?
Martin: “Brilliant! It’s a right laugh, it really is. We went to America about two weeks ago and I’m still suffering from jetlag now – I think I’m a bit too old for this rock ‘n’ roll (laughs). I went out a few days earlier because I’ve got a friend in Florida who did the merchandising for the tour and I married him and his fiancé, if you get what I mean – I did a pagan hand-fasting ceremony.
"On the way out to Florida the weather was so bad we were circling Milwaukee and the plane actually got struck by lightning. It was the scariest thing – I can’t even describe it. I heard the loudest percussive crack outside the window of the plane and you felt the percussion shock through the fuselage and then this bright blue spark as thick as a leg or something like that went down onto the wing, across it for a couple of feet and then out the bottom. My heart literally jumped out of my chest. Coming through American immigration I was shaking and sweating and the customs guy pulled me out and said: ‘You’re looking a little nervous there, sir’. I said: ‘Of course I do, my plane’s just been struck by bloody lightning’ and his whole demeanour changed then.
“As far as the actual tour goes, there was a lot of travelling involved, not a lot of sleeping but it was amazing to meet the people over there that have actually waited for 20 years to see the band live. The audience response was amazing – they knew the lyrics better than I did.”
No New Sabbat Album in the Pipeline
Suite 101: Did you just slot into the music and the role as if those twenty years weren’t there?
Martin: “Well, yes, we’re getting quite good at it now. It’s a shame in a way with Sabbat that we couldn’t do a third album but me and Andy Sneap have talked about it at length and we seriously couldn’t. The age we were and the mindset we had when we made that music – if we tried to recapture that now, it would be forced. The only thing we could do if we did a third Sabbat album was to make it what we’d be doing now, which would probably be more like The Clan Destined than Sabbat. It would have evolved over the past twenty years and would be something completely different. If we were to do an album like that now, I don’t think people would accept it as the same band.”
Former Prodigy Guitarist Gizz Butt
Suite 101: Is Gizz Butt still part of the Sabbat line-up or is he concentrating on his own band The More I See now?
Martin: “I think The More I See is probably his priority. They’re really good but the beauty with Sabbat is that we’re not planning any lengthy tours. We’ve all agreed that we’ll play shows that are in interesting places or places we’ve never played or that are for a worthy cause or if somebody offers to pay us a stupid amount of money, obviously because we’re not daft (laughs). But we can also do that without interfering with anything else that anybody has going on.”
Click here for more from Walkyier on his current project The Clan Destined.
