Kick-starting their current world tour on April 23rd in London, and making it coincide with St. Georges Day—the English national day—Saxon stuck to an extremely busy tour schedule throughout this summer, playing at festivals and venues all across Europe. Talking to Biff Byford at Graspop festival in Belgium on June 27th, one of the first things I asked him about was the opening show of the tour. “It was a good show,” Biff says. “A bit politically incorrect.” I sense a glint of jokey mischief in his smile as he says it, and assure him that this wasn’t the feeling the majority of people took away with them after the show. I, for one, found the atmosphere positively uplifting, seeing children with St. George’s flags wrapped around their shoulders and streamers hanging off the balconies of Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre, a 2,000-capacity venue which on the night was packed with punters of all ages. “We might do it every year, actually,” Biff tells me. “We just haven’t started thinking about it yet.” Asked if he sees hard rock as a part of traditional English culture, and Biff says he thinks heavy metal is a very English invention. “I think that all British bands feel as though they are in the forefront of the music that we play. And there are always Scandinavians too, of course. But yes, Britain is special in this respect,” he says.

With Saxon’s version of metal now solidified into a canon that is not only a part of the national heritage, but of the universal modern culture, I ask him if there is anything he would have done differently or given more thought to at the time when the band was still in the process of shaping and creating the NWOBHM in the early ‘80s. What would he write to his younger self if he had a chance to send a letter that would travel back in time? “Don’t experiment,” Biff says, laughing. “It is difficult, because if you sent a letter saying, ‘Don’t sign the contract’, you might not be here today. You know, there’s only really three bands left from our days--Maiden, Leppard, and us.”

With both Iron Maiden and Def Leppard playing at the same festival, but Maiden headlining and Leppard playing on the main stage with their name high up on the bill, you suddenly can’t stop thinking that Saxon, while going stronger these days than they have done for decades, could still be entitled to a bigger slice of fame. And this was the exact sentiment expressed by Harvey Goldsmith before making an episode with Saxon for his Get Your Act Together TV show which aimed to subject the band to a drastic makeover in a hope to propel them into a bigger league. An influential rock promoter known for his work with Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, and Madonna, Goldsmith told Saxon that they should and could be as famous as their mega-successful contemporaries Iron Maiden. Aired on one of the British public service channels in 2007, the show exposed the turbulent wrangling between Goldsmith’s blunt commerce-savvy approach and Saxon’s insistence on sanding their ground. I ask Biff if he had any reservations about whether the band should our shouldn’t have taken part in the show. “Yeah, we had a lot of reservations on whether we should or we shouldn’t,” he says. “And the general consensus from the management and the record company was that we should do it because it would lift our profile in Britain, and it certainly did. And pretty early on I quickly understood what it was going to be. So we were just very defiant. We stood our ground, and that’s how we played it. Or how I played it, bolder than anybody else. That we weren’t changing, we were playing our music, people loved us, and that’s the way it was. And if you want to put us on national TV, you can, thank you very much.”

I wonder if the band has taken away anything from the experience that it hasn’t been aware of before. “Yeah, the thing is that you mustn’t ever really trust the producers when they tell you it’s going to be a certain way because the editors are the actual people manipulating the footage. Because actually we’ve been having a great time. The film crew travelled all over the world with us, and they only used a minute amount of that footage. Because obviously they didn’t want us to look too good in the beginning.”

I put it to Biff that given the context of the programme, it can be described as a makeover show that has to stick to the routine of the genre. “Yeah, definitely,” he says, laughing. “But this was unique in a way because it didn’t work with us. So in all respects it was an anti-makeover show. But it was good. I don’t think Harvey came out very well out of it. He looked a bit lost with us, actually.”

I then ask Biff about his take on the reality TV culture, especially when applied to the rock world, where stars previously seen as inaccessible and unknowable can now invite any viewer into their private life. “I think fame is a strange thing,” Biff replies. “For me, I’ve never been comfortable with that side of the fame. You know, magazines coming in, watching you brush your teeth or getting in a shower. We did quite a bit of that in the ‘80s. Because we were obviously on TV a lot. But I was never happy with it. I’m more at home being a singer, playing music. I don’t think there are very many big bands that let the public that much into their private lives. Metallica did a film that looks quite in-your-face, but it didn’t focus on their private lives, it was more about writing songs. And it was pretty good. I don’t think we really let people too far into our private lives. And I think that all what fans really want to know is out there.”

One thing that Goldsmith’s show did achieve though was the exposure given to the latest Saxon album Inner Sanctum released in March 2007. Sounding not only strong and self-assuredly convincing, it is also a very modern record which drew a fantastic response from the press and was described by some as Saxon’s best album of the last 20 years. With the album sounding so up-to-date, I ask Biff if the band keeps in touch with the modern trends these days. “We do,” Biff says. “There are all sorts of things we listen to, but our guitarist, Doug, is particularly very aware of the modern sound, more so than Paul. Paul is more ‘70s and ‘80s orientated, Doug is more into the ‘90s. So it’s good. But I give them a lot of shit about writing great guitar riffs. I give them a hard time. Every riff has to be great, no time-wasting. That’s the criteria. It has to be good. So we are really self-critical.” I then ask which of the newcomers on the metal scene Biff personally rates. “I love Testament’s new album,” he says. “They’ve been going for nearly as long as we have, but they have come back with this great album and it’s good, I like it. I like the Bullet for My Valentine album, it’s nice. But I like many things. I like the new Nightwish stuff as well, it’s really powerful. They could have blown it big time but they came back good, so it’s great.”

I ask Biff if the band has started thinking about the new material, and he reveals that the new album is 70 percent ready, although its title is still being kept a secret. “We have thought of the name,” he says, “but we are not telling anybody. Even the record company doesn’t know. The single is coming out on the 17th of October, and then the album comes out on January 29.” I can’t wait for him to tell me what the new material is going to sound like. “Great!” he says. “It’s a bit like Inner Sanctum--it’s a mixture of really frantic metal and rock’n’roll. That’s were we’re at. We all stand on that. On a line between playing things like ‘Wheels of Steel’ and then ‘20,000 Feet’. Those are different styles completely, but we do that quite well.”

The recipe seems clear, having been tested before and proven to be reliable. This makes me to wonder if there is anything that Biff still hasn’t done musically, a direction he hasn’t gone in, but would like to. “As a musician and a singer you can go along many different paths,” he says. “I think it’s dangerous though because you move away from your fans if you experiment too much. I think that you move away from your fans and they don’t really understand what you’re doing. On a solo album you could sort of expand a bit, but no, we are not really planning on doing anything different in the future.” I ask him if he has any plans to release a solo album any time soon, and the response is negative. “They have always been asking me to do a solo album, but I really haven’t got time,” he says. “I am very busy at the moment. Ultimately busy. I’m quite knackered, actually. We’ve been working on the album for two months now, and we are doing festivals every weekend. It’s hard work. But it will be OK in the end.”

Keeping busy and working hard surely not only keeps this legendary act afloat, but ensures their progress in this business. In an amazing twist of events, ever since last year, Saxon’s fortunes have been revived—certainly not in the least due to Harvey Goldsmith’s clumsy efforts, but still largely thanks to the band’s latest album which proved Saxon a perfectly modern band, a band not only capable of making a valid statement, but also shaping and influencing the present-day music scene. Provided their upcoming record turns out as vibrant and exciting as the pervious ball-breaker, Saxon could soon be taking their career one step further. And the journey which began all those years ago with innovation and young enthusiasm still continues, these days defining them as dignified standard-bearers—figures of fortitude and resolve which, among other qualities, make Biff Byford and his band such a quintessentially English phenomenon.