Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Uriah Heep guitarist Mick Box discussed the band’s September 2024 announcement that the British progressive rock icons would start a farewell tour called “The Magician’s Farewell” in early 2025 in a recent interview with Metal Mayhem ROC, as per Blabbermouth. Box clarified if “The Magician’s Farewell” is “truly a final tour or just another chapter in the road or a long goodbye” when asked.
It’s gonna take two or three years to get round to all the territories that we normally… We play, like, 64 countries, so we have to get out there in the world and do it. But I think, yeah, it’s a slow wind-down, because things have changed in the world, , as you all know, with flights and buses and everything else, after COVID, and especially in our political world over here [in the U.K.], we left Europe. Brexit, they call it. And that’s caused us — well, certainly in the musical world, no end of problems, because we’ve got carnets [international customs and temporary export-import documents] we have to have everywhere, with all our equipment that travel in and out countries. There’s all sorts of tax problems.
The buses are triple prices. Flights, I’ll give you an example, the one month, we were flying everywhere, but we had four flights canceled. And so now you write that into the equation, so you go in the day before now rather than the day of the gig and stuff like that, just to compensate for any of those problems. So it’s getting very difficult out there to do the long, long, long tours that we used to do. So we’re kind of winding it down, slowing it down gradually. But we’re never gonna stop. We’ll still do the festival. If festivals are coming up and ask us to play. What we gonna say? Yes. [Laughs] Because it’s in our DNA. It’s what we do. So, it’s more of a slowdown rather than an absolute ‘finish finish.
When asked if Uriah Heep might release a follow-up to their 25th studio album, “Chaos & Colour,” which was released by Silver Lining Music in January 2023, Box responded as follows.
Yeah, I’m sure. Well, it’s in my DNA to write. I mean, I write every day; I write something. So, yeah, we will. We will. We’ll find a spot somewhere along the line to put the brakes on and go in the studio, for sure. It’s just something we love doing. So, yeah, that’s definitely on the cards.
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