Gene Simmons talks Download Fest , EOTR Tour & more with Metro UK !
By Chris Lord / Metro.co.uk
Welcome to Metro.co.uk‘s The Big Questions, where we ask the biggest of big questions (and the smaller ones too) and this week we’ve had a sit-down with one of rock music’s most enduring legends, Gene Simmons…
It’s the end of a rock ‘n’ roll institution. With a career spanning 50 years, American icons KISS are calling it quits with their End of the Road World Tour. The band is bringing their fire and flames to Donington Park’s hallowed grounds for a UK swansong at Download 2022.
One of rock’s more colourful personalities, Gene Simmons – or The Demon, if you know him by his fire-breathing, face paint-wearing stage persona – 72, has fronted KISS alongside Paul Stanley since the beginning. Born in Israel, Simmons emigrated to the United States with his mother, settling in New York at the age of eight. He discovered The Beatles, and the rest is history.
In 2020, KISS broke a pair of Guinness World Records during a pyro-charged livestream concert in Dubai. One for the highest flame projection in a music concert, and another for the most flame projections launched simultaneously in a music concert. A crazy, crazy night, indeed. Simmons reckons theirs is “the greatest show on Earth”.
Ahead of the band’s final concert in the UK, we grabbed Gene to chat about his weekend habits, retirement, the KISS spectacle, money, the state of the music industry and more.
What are your fondest memories of performing in England?
There’s a resilience to the fans. At Download and the other big stadiums, the English fans are simply unaware that it’s raining, and that the ground is muddy. We’ve played at Download and Monsters of Rock when it was raining cats and dogs, and nobody moved. Hardly an umbrella in sight. Whereas in California, if it rains it’s a catastrophe.
