Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. performs seated after surgery

W.A.S.P. singer Blackie Lawless performed while seated in the band’s first post-surgery concert after more than a year, at Sweden Rock Festival. You can find a fan-filmed video underneath.

The singer underwent a surgery nearly one year ago, to treat a broken vertebra and two herniated discs. Blackie Lawless spoke about it on the May 29 episode of SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation.

“It’s been a long road. Anytime you go through rehab, and we’ve done it for 35, 40 years, every time you have an injury, you’ve gotta go through rehab. And any athlete will tell you that it’s a lonely walk. Nobody can help you when you do it. You’re with your trainers two hours a day. That leaves you 22 hours of every day to just sit and think in rehab. And a lot of funny things go through your head when you’re doing that. And, like I said, it’s a lonely walk. And it’s incremental, the healing process — you don’t see it all overnight. And when you start with the trainers, they tell you, ‘Just be patient, just be patient,’ because, as any warrior will tell you, your natural instinct is to run, and you just cannot do that when you’ve gone through something that’s pretty serious like that. But we’re getting there. And we’re pretty much up to speed now.”

Blackie Lawless, frontman of W.A.S.P.

After these back injuries that Lawless suffered during the W.A.S.P. 40^th-anniversary tour in Europe, the U.S. tour of 2023 was cancelled. Now the band will do a 2024 tour through North America, still to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the release of W.A.S.P.’s first album “W.A.S.P.”. The band announced that they will play every song of that album on their tour.