NAPALM DEATH vocalist Mark “Barney” Greenway was recently interviewed by Metal Nexus.
When asked for his thoughts on the current state of the world, he replied (as transcribed by Blabbermouth.net): “Everybody’s sort of jumping up and down at the moment that the world is really at a critical point. You know what? If that’s the case, it’s been a critical point for 200 years now. I just think we have very accentuated situations now.
“We have Trump, for example, who – in my opinion, personally – is a terrible human being. I think that the way he disregards people in general who are lower than him on the social scale, it’s really weird sometimes. It’s almost like a comedy show. It’s absurd.
“But he’s only one piece of several things going on that are not good. The whole environmental situation, for one thing, that kind of steps backwards away from trying to make things better is very, very worrying, because you can see the effects. It almost feels as if it’s nearly too late.
“With what the EPA is trying to do right now, or the guy that’s heading the EPA, he’s not helpful – for any of us…
“In Europe, we have some very worrying developments in south and east of Europe. We have almost like Hitler Youth sort of organizations in some of those eastern European countries who are legitimized by the government, who are accepted.
“It’s very, very weird times. You would think that Europe as a continent, collectively, we would have learned from this stuff, given the 1930s and 1940s. But it seems to be happening again, so yeah, it is getting worse.”
Barney also talked about NAPALM DEATH being part of SLAYER‘s farewell tour, saying: “This whole tour, it’s quite trippy… some of these venues, we’re looking at them going, ‘Uh, really?’ We’ve never really played this sort of thing before, in all the years.’ It’s just different. Most importantly, everybody’s been really friendly to us, because you never quite know how you’re going to be treated. It’s been great. It was nice to be asked, that’s for sure.
“We were kind of shocked that we were asked, but the thing is that we never intended to do anything other than approach it how we would any gig, whether it was a hundred people in some obscure town in the middle of Germany or here [in the US]. We always treat it the same. We’re really just doing our thing, as they say.”
