Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said in an interview over the holiday weekend that the band would like to bring back their Orion Music + More Festival for their upcoming tour cycle for their new album Hardwired… To Self-Destruct (Blackened Recordings). The tentative plan being discussed is to make more of a moving festival, perhaps the same as Knotfest has become for Slipknot. More details below:
Ulrich told Canada’s iHeartRadio about the prospect of bringing back Orion Festival:
“Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully. We sort of put that on the backburner when we dove into the record. But I think that we’re gonna tour for years on this record. We just put most of ’17 together, but we’ll be out on this baby at least up through ’19, would be my guess. So I think we’ll try to get another Orion in. We did two Orions in the States. Maybe do one in Europe, maybe look at Canada, maybe look at Mexico, just to vary it a little bit.”
“The one thing that we talked about doing would maybe be to do something that was a little smaller an do something that was more… I think the word… What was the word that came up? Hmm… Like a boutique, where it’s more full-on Metallica. Maybe it’s just Metallica and some stuff, like museum stuff, and just maybe making it only Metallica for a whole weekend, but making it smaller. We haven’t really dialed it yet, but we’re looking at all the different options.”
“Listen, obviously, anybody that knows the members of Metallica knows that our tastes are far and wide and we’re not… we don’t live and breathe metal 24 hours a day. And I know people, maybe, were a little bit surprised at that, but the people that really know Metallica know that that’s not really our thing so much. So we’ll see how it plays out. Right now we’ve got a pretty active ’17 lined up, but I think hopefully Orion will come back maybe in ’18 or ’19, so we’ll see.”
James Hetfield said that the band “lost millions” of dollars by staging Orion, cast doubt they would ever bring it back. This was corroborated in the recent book Into The Black Part II.
The June 2013 Orion event at Belle Isle in Detroit drew at least 40,000 people over the course of two days to see Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Deftones, Silversun Pickups, Rise Against and more.