Nearly 50 years into SAXON, Biff Byford was asked the obvious question: how is he still passionate about this?
"Well, we love what we do, for starters," the frontman told Poland's Mystic Festival. "We love what we do, and we love writing songs. Our focus is on writing great music still, stay relevant to our fans and new fans. So I think we've grown through the bad times — good times, bad times, good times, bad times. It's like a rollercoaster of rock and roll. So, you just have to ride the storms, really. I mean, our motto is never surrender, which is like the song."
Asked what the coolest part of being in SAXON actually is, Byford put his band in the company it earned. "I think it's the same as being in IRON MAIDEN or JUDAS PRIEST or SAXON, any of those bands that have been around since the '80s and '70s. We feel privileged and lucky to still be here writing music. We wrote some massive songs that went around the world and changed people's thoughts about music a little bit. We started a new sound, and I think that still resonates today, especially with younger fans as well."
He credits social media with part of that survival: "It's very easy to connect with the band, very easy to connect to me or the guitarists. So I think social media, for us, has helped to bring our music back to a lot of people again."
Byford is unsentimental about whether the scene has improved. "In 1980, it was vinyls and magazines. It was vinyls, magazines and audience, word of mouth, radio stations. And now it's just different, but it's the same people. The same people that love rock music, heavy metal music, heavy rock, hard rock, hardcore, death metal."
"I look out at the audience and I don't really see a difference between 1980 and now, really," he added. "I mean, it's maybe a little bit darker, and people are more knowledgeable now, I think, about what they like. But I think it's just a way of life for people, and it's a family, isn't it? And we're just part of that family."
SAXON's 25th studio album, Gods Of Thunder, arrives in January 2027 as the follow-up to 2024's Hell, Fire And Damnation. Longtime producer Andy Sneap finished mixing it earlier this year.
That the band is here at all is not a given. Byford completed his final round of chemotherapy for bowel cancer last October, following surgery that forced the cancellation of ten summer 2025 shows. He also underwent a procedure for atrial flutter in 2024 and survived a heart attack and emergency triple bypass in 2019.