Derrick Green reveals who had the idea for the Sepultura farewell tour

Derrick Green, the frontman of Sepultura, discussed the band’s decision to embark on a farewell tour more than 40 years after the group’s founding with Neil Jones of TotalRock earlier this month at the Bloodstock Open Air festival at Catton Park, Walton-on-Trent, United Kingdom, as per Blabbermouth. Derrick agreed when Jones expressed his belief that “this is genuinely it for SEPULTURA,” in contrast to numerous other hard rock and heavy metal bands who have previously embarked on “farewell” tours only to change their minds.

This is our last tour, this is what we know in the moment. This is all I can predict. This is all that I can really change and maneuver and move around is what’s happening now. That’s the reality of it. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future, but this is what we wanna do right now, and this is where we’re at, what we prepared for for the past two years or three years that we’ve been touring and wanting to do a tour of the entire world, as many places as possible.

With the history of Sepultura, we played over 80 different countries, so we needed that length of time in order to do a proper farewell, and so our last show being November 7th, I believe, in São Paulo [Brazil], that’s it, and that’s what we know. That’s what we’re focused on, to that date. And so this is our last show for the U.K. And it’s emotional. But at the same time, it’s a celebration, and that’s what we’ve been doing this entire farewell tour, is celebrating the history of Sepultura.

Derrick said this about how the choice to end things came about.

Well, it actually came about from Andreas [Kisser]. And the idea was just — the timing of everything, of what was going on, it just seemed to really make sense. We had gotten to a point where we had done the cycle of go in the studio, write some songs, record them, do press dates and everything, then do a tour for two years, and then, again, write new material. We’ve done that cycle over [and over]… And so then it gets to a point where it’s… For us, doing music and playing music is about having fun and having fun with it, and we were fortunate to be able to do that for so many years. It had just gotten to the point where we didn’t want it to be something we had to do. We wanted to be something we wanna do, and we wanna take a break, we wanna stop, and we wanna stop on a very high end, a high note, so to speak, where everyone’s getting along. Nobody’s stopping because of something physical or health reasons, knock on wood. And this is an honor to be able to call when you wanna call it. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of heart, I believe, to stop and be, like, ‘You know what? We’re at a great point, let’s leave it at this, and leave on a high note.’ And there’s something very beautiful about that, and it’s becoming something bigger than we imagined. It actually is becoming harder to leave, just the fact that things have been going so well and the turnout of many people who’ve been fans for many years have been following the band. And it’s a great feeling. It’s an incredible feeling when you have people come up and say, ‘Don’t stop. Keep going.’ And I think we made the right choice in doing this and to step away at this point in time. So to have that control is something that’s a very unique opportunity, and this is what we’re doing in this moment.