The interview was given to Eddie Trunk
Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French gave an interview yesterday to journalist Eddie Trunk where he revealed that Iron Maiden refused to play after Twisted Sister at some European festivals during the American band's "Forty And Fuck It" tour in 2016.
The tour celebrating Twisted Sister's 40th anniversary featured the band consisting of vocalist Dee Snider, guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda, bassist Mark Mendoza, and drummer Mike Portnoy.
In yesterday's interview on Eddie Trunk's "Trunk Nation" show, Jay Jay revealed:
“The best time to play at a festival is at 10 pm because if you play after that, at midnight, it doesn't matter who you are, really, the energy is already largely fading, so Iron Maiden and these other big bands wanted us to close the festivals, for various reasons, and one of them is that they don't want to play at midnight. And also, they don't want to play after Twisted Sister because we steal the show.”.
The guitarist concludes:
“The truth is, if you watch videos of our shows in Europe with crowds of 100,000 people, the fans are singing 'We're Not Gonna Take It' between songs by other bands. And that's very uncomfortable for them, they must feel like rubbish. So twice last year, Iron Maiden came and told us [imitating a British accent], 'Oh, we have another show tomorrow. Can you close for us?'. This happened at two really big festivals. And we said, 'Okay. If you want us to close…'. They didn't want to play after us.”.