Interview: Jeff Waters, Annihilator

LIGHTNING STRIKES

"We're definitely known as a band which changes its line-ups, I guess too frequently," begins ANNIHILATOR mainstay Jeff Waters when I question him on just why the Canadians have now released three albums, all with different personnel.

"Three years has passed since Never Neverland during that time we had a successful and non-successful tour with JUDAS PRIEST. Successful in the way that we toured with our idols, unsuccessful in that we weren't performing as well as we could have."

Much of the problems within the band stemmed from the demon alcohol, a curse which Jeff admits forced him to put the band on hold while he figured out the future.

"When I finally decided to put the band back together we were really lucky that Roadrunner were still behind us. They gave us a lot of time and money to write and record this album, they even had the faith in me to let me produce it."

Was previous vocalist Coburn Pharr still in the frame for the new album?

"After the Priest tour I let Coburn go, but he called up to write with me. Once he done that he flew home, phoned our manager and quit. His plan was to get some credits 'cos he knew that if I liked the songs I wouldn't scrap them."

Thus Pharr gets himself a few credits on the record, but it's Aaron Randall, a native for Vancouver, that sings on the latest Annihilator album Set the World on Fire, which, while in the main remaining true to Annihilator's thrash roots, does in part diversify to the point where shock! horror! the words "ballad" and "melody" are being bandied about.

"There's seven years difference between the first record and this one," reasons Jeff. "As far as lyrics go, I'm starting to deal with the ups and downs of life now, as opposed to mind disorders. We keep a couple of those themes alive, but we are putting a lot more emphasis on the lyrics and vocals. We've always been known as a riff-orientated band, but I learned a lot of tricks and songwriting techniques from Priest."

Jeff then turns to the question regarding the material on STWOF.

"'Phoenix Rising' and 'Sounds Good to Me' are definitely off the mark, especially if people were expecting the same as Alice in Hell or Never Neverland. I think older fans are expecting me to try different things. They know that I'm jazz and classically trained. Our roots are in thrash and that's always going to be part of our music, but we're going to incorporate a lot of rock and heavy metal influences, as that's what we listened to growing up."

The Crow

Riff Raff
July 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!