Interview With Kerry King 
  1. Despite releasing an album of punk covers, Slayer maintain they´re not jumping on a bandwagon.
  2. And hey, would you dare dispute it to their faces? SIMON FORRESTER  spoke to lead guitarist Kerry King to find out more.
  1. Are we witnessing a mass punk revival? If so, Slayer aren´t being led by the crowd - their new LP is a collection of early `80s hardcore, Selected & Exhumed. Reviewed last issue, it features delights from bands like DI, DOA, TSOL, as well as the less acronymical Minor Threat and The Stooges, all in a mince-your-granny Slayer-type way.
  2. Kerry King: "The record was supposed to be influences. Jeff Hanneman was on vacation for a while, so we just messed around and I tried to take all our influences and say ´this is what made Slayer Slayer`, obviously including bands like Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden and Rainbow.
  3. We played Burn and Gates of Babylon for a while and it just didn´t work - I couldn´t make them sound ´70s.
  4. In context with all the punk tunes we were playing, they just sounded out of place, so we shifted gears and started looking for more punk stuff to play.
  5. "We had a list of twenty and we played them all, but some didn´t pan out. We were playing a Kennedys song for a while, for example, but it didn´t work. There was also a Minor Threat song we didn´t do vocals on. My trouble was I didn´t want to have a big family of punk songs that you´ve got to pay publishing on.
  6. They´re only fifty seconds to a minute and a half long, so I was trying to keep the number of tracks down".
  8. SHORT, NOT SWEET
  9. As guitarists, we all know the joy of playing short, more intensive pieces - Slayer are well known for their intensity, coupled with the ability to write some seriously long tracks (as their late ´80s album Seasons In The Abyss demonstrated). They fared well with the change of pace that these hardcore covers demanded, though. Kerry: "Yeah, it´s easier, it´s not as technical - you can go off a bit more and make it your own. It´s not about being precise as Slayer is".
  10. So could this be the start of a more diverse band in the future? "It´s hard to say - now that we´ve done this I can certainly see something coming from it. I like the way it came out and if there´s a demand for it, that might sway me to have something come out writing wise".
  11. There´ll certainly be a demand for it; both punk and thrash fans alike (at our local - that passes for market research around here!) have taken to the album, though with vague trepidation. Still, everyone awaits the next album proper. Will the next one be as punk-fuelled?
  12. "We certainly aren´t planning on it, but then we didn´t plan on this one - we just came up to it and said ´hey, let´s do this´. That´s about all the reason for doing this
  13. was to put up something out in a quicker time frame than it would have taken for a real Slayer record.
  14. We want to stay in the public´s eye and put out something with credibility. 
  15. E-mail me at: [email protected]
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