After 20 years, Dream Theater have finally come to Australia! During their whirlwind tour our resident metal head Lachlan Barclay managed to catch up with singer, James LaBrie, to discuss why it took so long.

Pretty crazy schedule!

Yeah I literally just got here! So I’m…. I don’t even know what this place looks like! Yeah, it’s a crazy schedule. We knew that, especially these three shows, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney were going to be really hectic. Because we’re flying in every day. We do a show, go back to the hotel, get up early, get on a plane, get here… anyways that’s rock and roll.

I’ve actually met you before… about 7 years ago in Boston. If you remembered me I’d be really impressed!

So would I!

Am I the only Australian you would have met?

Nope! You know what, it’s surprising, I would say that we’ve met quite a few Australians when we do Asia. And the odd Australian when we do places like Spain or Italy, we’d have people coming up.

And even in the UK. So no, we’ve met quite a few. And, when we’ve toured around in the states there’s been one or two here and there. I mean it was always our goal to eventually get here. It’s just been an elusive task or market for us, but we’re finally here.

Why has it taken 20 years?

I think it’s taken 20 years because – there’s a few factors involved. One is the fact that we aren’t your… y’know we’re not a commercial, viable band in that sense. People don’t hear us on the radio. A lot of people how they’ve become aware of us is through word of mouth, which is probably the most powerful, and then the internet.

[It] has been an incredible instrumental vehicle for getting our name out there and letting people being able to… (especially YouTube nowadays). I mean even leading up prior to YouTube anyone if they had the opportunity just surfing the net could come across a band like us.

The other factors are that while we want the label to be behind us and how we wanted the label to promote and market us, wasn’t necessarily their vision. So that was a bit of a juggernaut. It was basically us telling them that we could see ourselves getting much more exposure worldwide in a much bigger sense to the masses internationally if they did this, this and this. But unfortunately that never happened.

So those are the factors mainly. And then, even though we knew we had a lot of fans here… it’s to convince the promoters. Because it’s a business like anything else, they have to be wise with it. They have to research it and make sure that it’s going to be profitable at the end of the day.

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