Professionally filmed footage of Savatage‘s set at this year’s Wacken Open Air festival in Germany has been published by “Wacken TV“. The band played the festival on July 30.
The video includes three songs:
- “Gutter Ballet“
- “Edge Of Thorns“
- “Hall Of The Mountain King“
Prelude To Madness Tour
The Wacken show was part of Savatage‘s “Prelude To Madness” tour of Europe this summer. Three days earlier, on July 27, the band performed with a live orchestra at the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy, one of the oldest of its kind still standing.
The tour featured singer Zak Stevens, guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton and drummer Jeff Plate.
Plate missed the first two shows for medical reasons. Blas Elias, who has played with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Slaughter and Ratt singer Stephen Pearcy, took his place for festival appearances at Sweden Rock Festival and France’s Heavy Week-End in early June, before Plate returned for the rest of the run.
Savatage were formed in Tampa, Florida, by brothers Jon Oliva and Criss Oliva. Their catalogue includes 1987’s Hall Of The Mountain King and the 1991 rock opera Streets.
Criss Oliva was killed in a car crash in October 1993, a few months after the release of Edge Of Thorns. The band continued without him and released Dead Winter Dead in 1995.
Savatage stopped touring in the early 2000s. They reunited for a one-off show at Wacken Open Air in 2015, performing alongside Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and returned to regular touring in 2025.
Earlier in August, Middleton said Savatage expect to play in the United States next year, and set out plainly why the band have spent two years back on stage without going home. The bassist told Metal Walt of “Metal Mayhem ROC” that the group are operating to a long-range plan and that American dates have always come down to arithmetic rather than appetite.
“We have a 10-year plan, so we’re on year two. So we’ve still got some time left. We have some more music we’re gonna release. We have a game plan. And we’re working on getting some stuff together in the States for next year. But, yeah, we plan on coming back to South America next year and in Europe again, and we’re trying to snake some stuff in the United States, whether it’s a package deal with a couple other bands or just doing some one-off shows with ourselves,” he said at the time.
Middleton was blunt about the reason, and it comes down to what the show now costs to put on.
“The problem is we never did get to the point of drawing enough people in the United States to warrant the money that we need to pay the 18 guys that I gotta pay to do a gig,” he explained. “And when we did the stuff back in the [earlier] Savatage days, we used a lot of our friends and stuff as crew guys. And it was, like, the music friends. Now the guys we use are the TSO guys, and they don’t work for cheap. So we have really good crew, but they cost a lot of money. And so we could make the guarantees in Europe that make it worth our time to do this, and we’re working on some stuff in the States right now that we’re… You’ll probably see us next year.”
