Rabidfest 2023: Listmania: Almost 40 years of Blaze Bayley in just 5 songs?!

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer which means winters coming and for that you need something to warm you up. Look no further than Oxford’s biggest Metal Weekender Rabidfest, which will take place at The Bullingdon over the weekend of 4th and 5th November 2023. It will be the fifth anniversary and so the powers that be have put together a line up so hot that the fire brigade are going to be on standby. Variety being the spice of life, there is something for all with six, seven and eight string mercenaries set to sling riffs in every direction like the gunfight at the Gunfight at the OK Corral. From Traditional Heavy Metal to straight up Deathcore, there will be singing, screaming and ears bleeding. Here’s the line up in full…

Bound In Fear
Blaze Bayley
Absolva
Ward XVI
Mortishead
Tribe Of Ghosts
Gutlocker
Imperium
From Her Ashes
Draconian Reign
Monasteries
Reveller
LestWeForget
Johanna Rey
Cage Fight
Stone Soup
Second Hour
Depolarize
Indecorum
Sworn Amongst

So you’ve looked at the line up, you can see Blaze Bayley is one of the headliners and you haven’t got a clue who he is?! How is that a thing? The man is an absolute legend. So here are five songs from him that you need to check out before Rabidfest… Blaze Bayley started his career back in 1984 in Birmingham, inspired by witnessing Ronnie James Dio on the “Holy Diver” tour and started out by forming Wolfsbane. A Traditional Heavy Metal act in every sense of the word, they released a trio of demos before their 1989 debut album “Live Fast, Die Fast: Wicked Tales of Booze, Birds and Bad Language” from which we’ve plucked “Killing Machine” as our track of choice.

After a decade in Wolfsbane, Iron Maiden came calling after the departure of Bruce Dickenson and Blaze Bayley jumped at the opportunity to front one of the biggest Metal bands in history, recording 1995’s “The X Factor” and 1998’s “Virtual XI” while touring around the globe. Between the two albums came “Best of the Beast”, the bands first best of record which features the single “Virus“, our cut of choice from his five years at the helm. We’ve always felt he didn’t get the respect he deserved at the time, simply because he was stepping into some big shoes.

Following his departure from Iron Maiden in 1999 Blaze created a solo project and began the churn out high quality albums with alarming regularity. The debut album from that project is “Silicon Messiah“, which surfaced in 2000 to be remastered in 2014 with the title track a regular at his live shows. A a real statement piece of an album, it features at least one cut that would have been destined for his third album with Iron Maiden had that happened, while one of the bonus tracks titled “The Day I Fell to Earth” lyrically deals with his departure from that band. We’ve chosen the Wacken Open Air rendition of the album title track from 2002 for this…

At first Blaze had something of a revolving door of musicians sharing the limelight but in 2013 he teamed up with Manchester based Absolva in part thanks to guitarist Chris Appleton who had been part of his live band for a year in 2009. That gave the project a different kind of chemistry and has been pretty fruitful over the last decade… so we’re going to fast forward to 2016 and the brilliance that is “Infinite Entanglement”, stunning album with a myriad of guest appearances including Luke Appleton of Iced Earth for “A Thousand Years“.

Last but by no means least, we’ve got “War Within Me“, the title track of the album of the same name. Once again written with Absolva the track has clocked up an incredible 352k of Spotify streams alone, proving that his new music still has people checking it out in their droves. For those that don’t know, back in August 2017 the precursor event to what would become Rabidfest was headlined by Blaze Bayley and so after the great man suffered a heart attack in March of this year from which he has fully recovered, we’re expecting his set to be a real celebration as well as something of a homecoming!

We’re proud to be a Media Partner of Rabidfest again this year alongside Red Death Media, Moomin Merchandise, Metalplanetmusic, Moshville Times, GraphicsFix, Unearthed Music and main stage sponsor Devolution Magazine. The Festival is all for charity and this year the profits going to the The Sophie Lancaster Foundation!

Rabidfest will take place at The Bullingdon in Oxford over the weekend of the 4th and 5th November 2023:

Get your tickets here -> https://www.rabidfest.co.uk

Get your merch here -> https://shop.rabidfest.co.uk