By Andrew Bansal
The New England Metal & Hardcore Festival, a massive annual event that takes place at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, is set for its 16th edition to be held April 17-19, and as always, the lineup for this ever-growing festival this year is enticing for anyone and everyone who claims to be a metal/hardcore fan. A couple of days ago, founder/organizer Scott Lee spoke to Metal Assault about the festival. Read the conversation below and check out the full lineup for this year’s NEMHF.
Scott, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. So, as always the New England Metal & Hardcore Fest is in April, which is coming up very soon. How is the preparation going for you?
It’s great, man! It can’t come soon enough. The festival is completely booked and we’re very excited about it.
I can imagine, man. You have so many tours coming together for this one, like the Metal Alliance Tour and there’s a few others as well. The fact that there are so many tours going around the States must make it easier for you to book the festival, right?
Yeah, it’s great! This year we’re having the Metal Alliance, The Best In Brutality and Mission Quest To Metalfest. It’s pretty exciting, and yeah of course, it makes things a little easier for us. Then there’s also the Iced Earth tour and a few others as well. It definitely helps to have these tours already taking place through the country and just have them do our festival along the way (laughs).
Right, but at the same time it can be hard too, because these tours have to go around your date because that’s already booked before these tours are announced, right?
Correct, yeah. A lot of it is about co-ordinating with everybody and how people want to tour. Most of them want to tour behind a record release. There’s definitely a science to it.
Year to year, the lineup is obviously different for the festival. How do you deal that? You have to present something new and different to people who come to your festival every year.
Yeah, absolutely. We try to keep it fresh. This year I’m really excited to have Nails, and we have All Out War who are doing a reunion. Nails haven’t played the festival since 2011 and All Out War haven’t played it since 2001! So that keeps things going in terms of keeping it new and fresh. Iced Earth played the festival at least 6 or 7 years ago. So we try to keep throwing in different types of bands and styles within metal and hardcore.
Six-seven years I think is enough of a gap. Some festivals start repeating bands every two years and that gets a little too boring.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that (laughs).
So, how long does it actually take for you to prepare for an edition of the NEMHF from scratch?
Basically a month after the festival is done, we try to get the dates locked in for the following year’s edition. We let people know and during the summer we start soliciting to see what people are planning to do.
What you do with NEMHF is unique to Worcester MA, and this kind of festival doesn’t happen everywhere in the US, so there something about the area itself that makes it successful?
Well, when you’re building a house you’ve got to build a foundation first. And the foundation for NEMHF is its fanbase which is incredible between metal and hardcore, and that built it up to where it is today. People travel from upstate New York, Canada, etc and that helps the whole situation. The fans here of extreme music, metal and hardcore are probably second to none when it comes down to it.
This is something that stays at the Worcester Palladium from year to year, but as an organizer and a promoter, are you involved or want to get involved in other stuff elsewhere, in the US or even outside?
We do another festival called Rock And Shock here at the Worcester Palladium which is basically a horror convention/metal festival. That’s in October, but in terms of doing festivals elsewhere, I don’t know about that and I’d prefer to stay in our own area. I mean, there’s other cool festivals out there like the Maryland Death Fest and the California Metal Fest. We’ve tried to do it outside Massachusetts. We tried in New Jersey one time. It’s just a hard thing to do. It’s just better to do it in our home base and that’s where we try to keep it at.
As a fan of metal yourself, do you like to travel a lot to see shows?
Oh yeah, I try to go to shows all the time! I go to New York City, Albany, Boston, Rhode Island and anywhere within a two-three hour drive, as much as I can. I enjoy the music, I enjoy the people and I enjoy the whole aura about it. You can’t beat it, you know.
Finally, what’s one thing you would like to change about NEMHF that you haven’t been able to achieve so far?
Having Slayer play the festival (laughs).
Even with their current lineup?
Yeah, why not? They still play the tunes. It is what it is.
Yeah, I like them with the new lineup but a lot of people don’t, that’s why I asked.
Well yeah, the thing about that is, there’s one situation you can’t fix, which is you can’t bring back Jeff. The other one (Dave Lombardo) will come and go, I think. Everybody reunites and figures it out. They did it once and they’ll do it again. So that’s one thing I’d love to have on my show and it would be a crowning achievement. We’ve had Megadeth, we’ve had Mastodon, Lamb Of God, Killswitch Engage and everybody of that size. Slayer seems to be the only one that haven’t come through yet. So I hope that happens someday soon.
Visit NEMHF on the web:
MetalAndHardcoreFestival.com
facebook.com/MetalAndHardcoreFestival
twitter.com/MoshFest
instagram.com/MoshFest