John Bush on 80s Heavy Metal Podcast: Armored Saint, Anthrax Talk [1:52-6:56]

It is Chris Aiken Presents. I, of course, am Chris Aiken and today on the show. One of my favorite guys in all of Heavy Metal, as well as one of the best vocalists ever to do it. He of course is John Bush. He right now has two different projects that he's going to tell us about. He of course has the upcoming tour with Armored St which starts in about a month I believe or a few weeks, as well as a few shows that we have been talking about for at least a decade. That's celebrating the songs of Anthrax, his songs from Anthrax, that is. And it's going to be a fantastic time for those lucky enough to catch that as well. But let's talk all about it with the man himself, the mighty John Bush. John, how are you, man? What's happening, Chris? How are you doing, buddy? Good, man. It's great to talk to you. And I'm just going to say it, I like seeing that you're busy, man. It's been such a whirlwind with you and Armored saying, I mean, I know you guys stay busy, but when you're busy, you're busy, but then you guys always go away for a while. And then you come back and it seems like you're busier now than you've been in a long time, no? Well, yeah, we've really haven't gone away too much now since kind of like when hands down came out and we've been pretty much trying to stay in the public eye as much as we can. I mean, sometimes you go away a little bit because you know, it makes people yearn to see you again. And we've been recording a record. So that's what we've been doing lately and we're in the mixed phase of it and it's sounding awesome. We're real excited. We're going to come out next year, sometime around March, April, spring time. So we'll probably be busy again in 26. Sure. You know, you want to, you want to make people really look forward to seeing you again. So, but at the same time, we still try to stay somewhat in the public eyes, just to let people know what we're doing and keep people, keep people abreast about our lives. And I recently joined social media, which I was for a long time avoiding and trying my hardest to not do it, but I finally decided to cave and join. So I have an Instagram page now and that's keeping people informed about what are we doing and what I'm doing and sometimes just daily things that I do, like go to a concert or show some clip from a few months ago or whatever it is. It's just something that kind of says, hey, John Bush, this is what I'm doing. Sure. Do you like being on social media or does it drive you crazy? Not necessarily. No, I don't actually, I refrain for a long time, but eventually when I decided to do these shows, celebrating these tunes of anthrax, my agent, he was like, dude, you gotta have your own page. Right. And I was like, all right, reluctantly, so I keep it just music related and I don't really need to get too much into my personal life. Sure. I don't really, I kind of like to keep that separate. That to me is important. Although I did put a clip on my son playing hockey and getting a rad goal, but we put the hammer from Motorhead and the background so it feels so cool. Nice. Perfect, man. Well, John, let's talk about the anthrax shows before we swing back to armored saint. Probably the fans have been wanting this for a very long time and I'm sure you've heard that for the last 10 plus years, you've heard, you know, I know me, I've interviewed you three times, sent you left anthrax and all three times I've asked you the question and I'm sure that's every journalist that you speak to because of the love of that music. So I guess let's start there. What was it that made now kind of the right time for you to do it? You know, honestly, I don't know, Chris, if there's really a righty time, there was a little bit of free time and that was something that my agent and I had discussed. We actually had some shows planned for this summer in Europe. We had a bunch of festivals and we had a couple of headline shows and it, for one reason or another, doesn't really matter. We had to pull out of it, which is a bummer because it was like Valkyenne and Alcatraz and some pretty big shows. Maybe that's a good thing because I was still trying to finish the same record and it might have been conflicting and truth doesn't matter, it's probably always a little something conflicting. I don't think December is quite frankly, which is a good time to choose to do these now. But you know, that may be never a perfect time where there's nothing going on and maybe that's good because that means nothing is going on. So not nothing is going on if that makes sense. Sorry, that's early years, still I just woke up about a half an hour ago and then you're making the adjustment. Sure. But yeah, you know, I wanted to do it for a long time, it's really just coming down to making it happen and finally taking the cheese and doing it. So we're doing three shows, it's kind of like the beginning, that's the first step.