Tom Morello Reveals Who Really Sabotaged Rage Against The Machine

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Former Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello discussed the band’s campaign a decade ago to get to number 1 in the U.K. and knock off The X-Factor in a new interview on BBC’s The First Time With, and how their label sabotaged them. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.

“That’s why it was so great. It was a manifestation of the idea of Rage Against the Machine wholly independent of the band or the song. It had a tremendous amount of momentum before we ever, I even got the email that something was happening. And then we got in at the end and made a little push but the celebration of, it was so pure at the end. It was the most downloads of a song in the history of the UK.

You know it was sweet because Simon Cowell was also on Sony which Rage Against the Machine was on so Sony did not return our calls or emails during the entire time. And put zero physical copies of albums in stores during the week because they wanted us to lose. Our record company wanted us to lose. Because Simon Cowell was the cash cow. And just for pure people power, defeated X Factor, defeated sort of the corporate monolith that was sort of trying to suppress one of their own bands.

very penny that we made from those 580,000 that were sold that week we gave away to charity. The show itself, we promised that it was going to be a free show- absolutely free. We paid for every port-a-potty at that show. And it was just a completely pure celebration of like the goodness of man kind.”