Zoltan Bathory says he never considered firing Ivan Moody, calling him uncorruptible and as punk rock as it gets.
Zoltan Bathory has been asked more than once whether Five Finger Death Punch would be better off without Ivan Moody. Speaking in the new issue of Metal Hammer, the guitarist gave the same answer he has given for years, in language that has not softened much either.
Asked whether the turbulence around the band had ever made him think about ending it or replacing the singer, Bathory was unequivocal.
“Never,” Bathory said. “Because I always respected that Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring. That’s who he is. I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible. I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘F**k off, I don’t care. I don’t give a s**t.’ So he’s hard to manage, but I could, because I respected that he’s as punk rock as punk rock can get.”
He then went somewhere darker, though anyone who has followed the band will recognise the register.
“Sometimes I want to kill him,” he continued. “Sometimes I’m making plans, thinking about what supplies I need, where I hide the body. But then I’m like, ‘Man, then I don’t have a singer who can do all these things.’ So you stay with the fantasy. And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…’ We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”
This is not new territory for him. In 2020 he described the years of Moody‘s drinking in similar terms, that he had wanted to choke him many times, but that this was his little brother and he was struggling. In 2018 he called the singer a hand grenade without a pin. Eight years on it is a hand grenade with a loose spring. The metaphor has held.
The friction has been public. In May 2015, at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis, the band played a handful of songs before drummer Jeremy Spencer walked off following an argument with Moody, and the rest followed. The show was abandoned.
Bathory has said that night changed things, that the stage had always been sacred to them, and that afterwards they looked at Moody as though he had drawn a sword in a church. A year later in Worcester, Massachusetts, Moody apologised to the audience mid-set for a poor performance, citing his mother’s illness.
He is now sober, and has been since around 2017. Bathory, who has said he was always the sober one in the band, has described Chris Cornell‘s death that May as part of what pushed him to it — Moody looking at the musicians who were no longer there and deciding he did not want to go the same way. He has a phoenix tattooed on his head marking his first year.
The most recent public disagreement between the two was not about drinking at all. Moody objected to the video for the 2020 single “Living The Dream“, which Bathory directed and which drew criticism for its handling of pandemic restrictions.
Whether he has any regrets from the band’s more than two-decade career, Bathory said: “Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%. People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it’s all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn’t stressed, maybe it would’ve worked out anyway. But then again, it’s a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be me; I wouldn’t be here.”
Legacy, the band’s tenth album, arrived on 31 July through Better Noise Music. Five Finger Death Punch stream their Red Rocks show free worldwide through Veeps on 8 September, part of the 20th “Anniversary Tour”.
