Trent Reznor won’t play the Grammys again. That’s the line from the Nine Inch Nails leader, who’s still fuming that his closing performance on the night was cut short.
It was “an utter waste of time,” he tells New Zealand’s 3 News. Reznor had tweeted “f–k you” to the show’s organizers soon after his slot with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsay Buckingham was interrupted for a commercial — and abruptly ended. But he’s not about to forgive and forget.
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“I can look now and say I should have expected something like that, you know? But, more than anything it was just insulting,” Reznor tells the New Zealand title. “I invite my friend Lindsey Buckingham to come up on stage and it’s just ‘You know what, you’ve invited me into this place, f–k you. F–k you guys,’ you know? So, lesson learned. And the other thing is if we hadn’t have done it, I’d be thinking, ‘Well, what would have happened it we would have done it?’ You know. So I don’t regret that we did it, but would I ever – in any situation – ever consider possibly patronising that event in any form? Absolutely not.”
The tough-guy frontman gives some insight into how he and Homme arrived at their decision to appear on the awards show. The pair “spent a long time talking about the pros and cons. You know, ‘Do we want to be on a shit show on TV? No, not really. Do we want to be affiliated with the Grammys? No, not really. Would we like to reach a large audience and actually do something with integrity on our terms? Well, yeah.”
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When reminded that his performance looked and sounded great to TV viewers, Reznor quipped, “It was an amazing minute and a half, wasn’t it?”
Trent Reznor’s ‘F—k You’ to CBS for Cutting GRAMMY Performance
Reznor also provides an update on his recent work with Atticus Ross on their latest David Fincher feature film score for “Gone Girl” (a bit mellow, a bit noisy), he touches on his work as “chief architect” for Beats Music, and talks-up a forthcoming re-release of his 1999 double album “The Fragile.” “You know, we’ve mixed everything in surround, it sounds amazing, we have a great package ready to go,” he says of the “Fragile” reissue. “I just stumbled across 40-or-so demos that are from that era that didn’t turn into songs, that range from sound effects to full-fledge pieces of music, and I kind of feel like – something should happen with that.”
Reznor’s industrial rock group outfit will embark on a rare co-headlining tour of Australia and New Zealand in the coming weeks. The first headline band on stage each night will be decided by the toss of a coin.