Wacken TV has put professionally filmed footage of SAVATAGE's July 30 performance at this year's Wacken Open Air online. Three songs made the edit, and they are the three you would pick: "Gutter Ballet", "Edge Of Thorns" and "Hall Of The Mountain King".
The set was part of a European run that has quietly become one of the more improbable second acts in metal. Three days before Wacken, on July 27, SAVATAGE played the Amphitheatre of Pompeii — one of the oldest surviving Roman amphitheatres anywhere — accompanied by a live orchestra.
The current lineup is vocalist Zak Stevens, guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton and drummer Jeff Plate, with touring keyboardists Paulo Cuevas and Shawn McNair. Plate sat out the first two shows of the "Prelude To Madness" spring/summer 2026 European tour for medical reasons; Blas Elias — previously of TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA, SLAUGHTER and Stephen Pearcy's band — covered the Swedish and French festival dates in early June.
It is worth remembering how long this took. SAVATAGE were founded in Tampa, Florida by brothers Jon and Criss Oliva, and made their name with 1987's "Hall Of The Mountain King" and the 1991 rock opera "Streets". Criss Oliva was killed in a car crash in October 1993, months after "Edge Of Thorns" had given the band its biggest record to date. They carried on regardless, through "Dead Winter Dead" in 1995 and "The Wake Of Magellan" in 1997. The last studio album, "Poets And Madmen", came in 2001 — and then the touring effectively stopped for the better part of two decades while Jon Oliva poured himself into TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA, the project he co-created with the late Paul O'Neill.
The Legion — SAVATAGE's famously immovable fanbase — never stopped campaigning for a return. A one-off reunion set at Wacken in 2015 drew 80,000 people and settled the argument. It still took another decade to act on it: four South American shows in April 2025, ten European dates that June including Hellfest and Graspop Metal Meeting, and, on April 21, 2025 at Espaço Unimed in São Paulo, the band's first non-festival headline concert in more than twenty years.
Stevens joined SAVATAGE in 1992 as Jon Oliva's replacement and sang on "Edge Of Thorns", "Handful Of Rain", "Dead Winter Dead" and "The Wake Of Magellan" before departing in 2000. Both singers took part in the 2015 Wacken reunion. Pitrelli, for his part, left around "Poets And Madmen" to join MEGADETH — and is back on the stage below.
Watch the Wacken footage here.