In a new interview with “The Neil Jones Rock Show” on TotalRock, W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless spoke about his health, more than two years after he suffered extensive back injuries during the European leg of the band’s 40th-anniversary tour. Asked how his health is now, generally speaking, Blackie responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It’s fine. What happened after we played the Roundhouse [in London in March 2023], I was starting to cramp in my lower back and my left leg. And it’s a long story, but it was all from that break that I had had — that break in my right leg goes back 12 years now. And it was a residual injury that I had from then, and we had to get that sorted out. But what happened after we played the Roundhouse a few days later, we got down to Spain and I had a doctor, a chiropractor, working on me, and he ruptured a disc in my back. And he screwed me up really, really bad. And I ended up, one of the vertebras broke after that, and it was just a domino effect, but it was all ’cause of that doctor. But I’m good now. Everything’s fine. We’re back up to speed and ready to do what we do.”
Asked about the possibility of W.A.S.P. working on new music in the not-too-distant future, Blackie said: “Well, we’ve been working on new material for a while, but when this situation happened and that doctor wrecked me a couple of years ago, that put everything on hold for a while. But we’re still working on the idea [of making a new album], but quite honestly, for the last year, we’ve been pretty busy doing what we’ve been doing touring, and this next year is gonna be the same. So ask me that question in a year when I can come up for air for five minutes and I’ll give you a better answer.”
Back in August 2023, Lawless underwent a successful surgery to treat two herniated discs and a broken vertebra.
Because of the extensive back injuries Blackie suffered during the European leg of W.A.S.P.‘s 40th-anniversary tour, the band’s 2023 U.S. tour was canceled.
During a May 2023 appearance on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”, Lawless said that the injuries he suffered during the European tour that year were “a direct reflection of what happened” with his right “femur being broken” back in 2013. “Because I wore a lift for nine years, and come to find out I did not need that lift,” he said. “And that was only determined [in the] summer [of 2022], so the lift was taken out. But the spine had adjusted to me walking with that lift. And when we took it out, then that’s when the problems started. And it actually started at the beginning of the [2022] U.S. tour. And I was able to get through the U.S. tour okay, and we thought it had settled into place, but when we got to Europe, we quickly discovered, about two weeks into the tour, that was not the case. And what was happening is that the vertebrae were compressing some of the disks. I ended up rupturing a disk, and then that starts leaking out a gelatin that then wraps itself around the nerves coming out of the spinal cord. And that then creates this thing called nerve pain. And I don’t know if people understand what that is, because I had heard of it but I had never experienced it before. And it is pain that you cannot imagine. It is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.”
W.A.S.P.‘s latest release was “ReIdolized (The Soundtrack To The Crimson Idol)”, which came out in February 2018. It was a new version of the band’s classic 1992 album “The Crimson Idol”, which was re-recorded to accompany the movie of the same name to mark the 25th anniversary of the original LP’s release. The re-recorded version also features four songs missing from the original album.
More than a year ago, Blackie spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for W.A.S.P.‘s 2015 album “Golgotha” in an interview with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station. He said: “We still are [working on it]. What happened was when we came back from the European tour, I had to have surgery and stuff, about a year prior to that, we had been working on a lot of new stuff. And when I came back, I’ve had a long time to go through those early demos, of what we have been working on. Listening to it with fresh ears, some of it’s really good, but there’s not enough of it yet where I would be comfortable in saying, ‘Okay, this is finished, and let’s go with it.’ I’d like to go back and visit the drawing board, so to speak, and see what else is there. Because even from a two-year period of when we started working on that before to where we are right now, you’re gonna gain so much, you’re gonna grow so much.”
Blackie continued: “I’ve learned you don’t make records or I don’t make records anymore that are spread out over a two- or three-year period, because the guy you are when you first start making it is not the guy you are when you finish making it. Get in, six months top to bottom, get that thing cranked out, because, like I said, if you don’t, you end up running the risk of it kind of being a schizophrenic type of record where you’ve got one type of one thing and then the other half is something else and it has no real cohesiveness.”
2024 marked the 40th anniversary of the release of W.A.S.P.‘s first album. To celebrate this classic metal album, W.A.S.P., for the first time in 40 years, played the entire album from top to bottom, start to finish, on a fall 2024 North American tour, dubbed “Album ONE Alive”.
In addition to Lawless, W.A.S.P.‘s current lineup includes bassist Mike Duda, lead guitarist Doug Blair and drummer Aquiles Priester.
