Anthrax tour without Charlie Benante, Scott Ian recalls poker onstage
Anthrax’s European run put Charlie Benante’s absence under the spotlight, while Scott Ian’s onstage poker story gave the tour a strange, road-weary edge.
Anthrax’s European run has turned into a live test of identity: when Charlie Benante is not behind the kit, the band’s snap, chemistry and fan confidence all shift in real time. For a group built on precision and speed, the drummer’s absence is not a side note, it is the show.
That is why Scott Ian’s latest comments land as more than a backstage anecdote. In a PokerNews interview, Ian said there were times he would bring his laptop on stage and keep playing online poker while Anthrax performed, with his guitar tech sometimes making decisions for him between checks on the game. Ian said the obsession traced back to the 2006 VH1 Classic Rock ’n’ Roll Celebrity Poker Tournament, where he played alongside Ace Frehley, Sully Erna and Vinnie Paul, and that he signed a sponsorship deal with Ultimate Bet in 2008 before playing professionally for about four years, until around 2011. It is a vivid glimpse of a band that has long treated the road as its own kind of ecosystem, with odd routines, split attention and a lot of downtime between the noise.
The current tour has made the lineup question impossible to ignore. Anthrax’s website shows the band in its Europe 2026 cycle, and the Athens stop brought a last-minute change when British session drummer Darby Todd filled in for Benante. The reason was practical: Benante could not make the date because of his parallel commitment with Pantera. That does not read like a rupture inside Anthrax so much as a sign of how modern metal touring now works, with veteran players often balancing major commitments across more than one band at once.
Even so, Benante’s absence carries extra weight because of what he means to Anthrax’s sound. He joined in 1983 and has spent decades as one of thrash metal’s defining drummers, known for fast double-kick work and for helping push blast-beat techniques into the genre’s vocabulary. When a band that dependent on rhythmic attack moves into a show without that engine in place, every fill, every tempo shift and every transition gets a little more scrutiny.
Ian’s poker story adds personality to the picture, but the bigger question is the one the current tour keeps raising: how much of Anthrax lives in the riff, and how much lives in the exact hands that have driven it for more than four decades?
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