The second half of 2017 got pretty interesting pretty quickly for Devil You Know. The band announced it was recording a new album with a new drummer after the departure of John Sankey, and then about one month later Devil You Know announced it had changed its name to Light The Torch. Vocalist Howard Jones had said that there were some legal issues over the name Devil You Know, and now he says in an interview with The Jasta Show that the reason the band changed names was over legal issues with Sankey.
Jones says Sankey owns a portion of the name, and they're currently working on buying him out of the whole deal. Jones also says when Devil You Know was touring with fill-in drummers, Sankey wasn't technically out of the band, but things came to a bit of a head as the band was "just trying to deal with some internal stuff."
“Here it is, it’s like OK, we were having troubles with him and he was doing stuff. So we’re like: ‘Okay, well we’re gonna get a fill-in drummer, deal with what you need to deal with, but things are getting weird, but we gotta keep touring.’
So we gotta kept touring. Then we fired him. And we had to fire him by email because we just couldn’t reach him. We fired him and then it’s like: ‘Look, we got this tour coming up, we’re going to have to make an announcement that we need a new drummer.
So he then proceeded to email and said: ‘No, you can’t put that up without it going through me or my attorney first.’ So we fired him on the 22nd and on the 24th he put out a press release on PRP or whatever [see that statement here,] saying that he had decided to step down and move back. Nah, you got fired man.
And we just sat on it for a year because we didn’t want drama. So a year later we are still dealing with this guy trying to buy out his portion, because he had a portion of the name just like all of us, so we tried to buy his portion, he came up with a figure, we said ‘alright, we’ll cut a check.’…”
As of right now, Devil You Know is still named Light The Torch and they're working on a new album.
