Last month, American rock climber Alex Honnold made global headlines with his Netflix-screened free solo climb up the 11th-tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan.
In a subsequent interview given after he reached the summit of the 101-storey building on January 25, the 40-year-old athlete revealed that he had “mostly” listened to Tool while on his ascent, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by the band's frontman Maynard James Keenan, it transpires.
"Not everybody and their mother texted me every three seconds telling me about it or anything," Keenan joked on January 28 during an interview with ABC Audio.
Keenan admits that when he first heard of Honnold's free ascent up the skyscraper his immediate thought was, "Jesus, what balls!"
"What the heck were you thinking, dude?" Keenan added. "It's impressive! It's extremely impressive, but, I mean, I wouldn't make it past the first floor. I would fall to my death."
A climber since he was five years old, Honnold became famous in 2017, when he completed his unassisted climb of the 880m-high (2,887ft) rock formation El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. The New York Times called it “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever”, and Honnold was profiled in the Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo the following year.
Honnold hasn’t spoken about what he plans to do after the Taipei climb. Asked if he would support Honnold on a future climb, Tool's frontman joked, "I'll be the guy down below eating french fries making fun of him."
Keenan's side project Puscifer released a new album Normal Isn’t last week (February 6).
The singer admitted that he feels that the group have been "marginalised" compared to the attention paid to his other bands, Tool and A Perfect Circle. But he insists that this has only strengthened his commitment to the project.
“I’ve always been on the side of the underdog, that’s just kind of how I’m wired," he told Kyle Meredith With… "The marginalised underdog is always going to get my vote."
