Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has called his band’s recent Grammy Awards appearance an “utter waste of time” and vowed never to return to the again. In a recent interview, Reznor also revealed details on a new reissue of The Fragile and scoring David Fincher’s new film Gone Girl.
“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,” Reznor told New Zealand’s 3 News about his ill-fated, cut-off performance debacle.
Reznor was referring to what was one of the most anticipated performances of the Grammy Awards evening a rock supergroup comprised of Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl, and Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham took the stage for the show’s final performance.
But before the supergroup could get through NIN’s Copy Of A and most of QOTSA’s My God Is The Sun, the Grammys and network CBS cued up the credits. The network ran an ad for its programming and for an airline sponsor, all with the music going on in the background. You can watch a full version of the rehearsal performance below.
“I can look now and say I should have expected something like that, you know? But, more than anything it was just insulting,” explained Reznor. “I invite my friend Lindsay Buckingham to come up on stage and it’s just ‘You know what, you’ve invited me into this place, fuck you. Fuck you guys,’ you know?”
Reznor said that although he has never been a fan of the Grammys, having never actually watched the entire broadcast, he and QOTSA frontman Josh Homme eventually decided to perform at the ceremony, in order to “stand out from the crowd” and reach a larger audience.
“What we weren’t expecting was that level of insult,” said Reznor. “In fact we walked off stage and I thought, ‘Hey, that actually went pretty well’, and I look at my collaborator Rob Sheridan, who I run into, and he’s like, ‘Oh my god man, you won’t believe what they just did,’ and… ‘What?’ ‘They cut this thing off in the middle and put a Delta commercial on.’ ‘What?’ We had no idea.”
Reznor also offered up a few details about the progress he and creative partner Atticus Ross have made in their film scoring project, once again working with The Social Network director David Fincher, on his upcoming adaptation of Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl, set to star Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
“We’ve written a pretty good sized first batch of stuff that we’ve turned over that they’re excited about,” said Reznor. “But we’re very early in the proceedings. You know, just as my mind was getting into that and excited… time to go on tour.”
“And now it’s just up to the discipline of me to take that extra hour or two that I might have off, and putting it into setting up a rig in a hotel room and working on an idea,” he continued. “We’ll see how it goes; it might end up with great results or it might be a failed experiment, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with David [Fincher] again.”
He also talked about the progress of the reissue of NIN’s 1999 album The Fragile. “We’ve done a lot of the work for that,” Reznor reveals. “Really what it’s come down to is with all the other stuff going on, The Fragile thing in particular, I want to make sure I get it right.”
“You know, we’ve mixed everything in surround, it sounds amazing, we have a great package ready to go,” Reznor continued. “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-fledged pieces of music, and I kind of feel like – something should happen with that.”
Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age, will officially start their co-headline tour dates for Australia this coming March, with special guest Brody Dalle joining the tour. Stay tuned to our NIN-QOTSA Co-Headline Feed for all the latest news and updates on this incredible upcoming tour!
Watch: Nine Inch Nails, Queens Of The Stone Age, Dave Grohl, Lindsey Buckingham Grammy Awards rehearsal
