In a new interview with 100 FM The Pike radio station, Accept frontman Mark Tornillo discussed playing shows in the U.S. and in Europe. The rocker defended his earlier comments about making more money outside of the U.S.
“It was, like, ‘Why don’t you guys play here more often?’ Well, the fact of the matter is that we can’t really afford to play here that often, because we make way more money in Europe, South America and the rest of the world than you do in the United States,” Tornillo revealed. “And if you think about it, most metal bands are playing smaller venues here, unless you team up together and you go out and you play the sheds, or you’re Metallica with Pantera and you can sell out arenas.
“The things that are being pushed is not metal,” he continued. “The music, not so much the radios and stuff, but the record companies in this country do not push metal. They push whatever flavor of the week it is and aim towards kids. If they aimed metal towards kids, I think it would sell. So it’s hard to say. But I certainly didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. I just meant that it’s very difficult for us to get to get a good tour together now.”
Tornillo’s current comments came a few months after he said Accept can’t sell out tickets in the U.S. but they can in Europe.
“No trouble selling tickets in South America. No trouble selling tickets in Europe or anywhere else,” the frontman said earlier. “So I think the United States is just not metal territory anymore. I don’t know why.”
And apparently, fans in Europe are ‘rabid for metal’ too. “They’re rabid! They’re rabid for metal! It’s crazy. They really are,” Tornillo said of his European fans in a different interview. “I mean, it’s a whole different ball game you know? The amount of noise that they can make and generate in the audience is just insane. But there are certain other countries like that as well.”
Accept is currently hitting the road with their Full Metal Assault Tour, traveling across the U.S. and Canada. The tour wraps up on October 7 in San Francisco, and then they will kick off their Humanoid European Tour just ten days after. They will start in Istanbul, Turkey, and finish up in Stockholm, Sweden on November 30.