Steve Hogarth’ writing has always been really personal and this new project with Richard Barbieri is no exception. Every song is an excuse to confide his opinions on our world, on human nature and psychology, or to tell an anecdote. By the way, the one which inspired the song “Your Beautiful Face” is really worth it.

Discover what Hogarth wants to tell us.

Radio Metal: Apparently, you and Richard [Barbieri] had for a long time the desire to work together. Wasn’t it frustrating in a way not to be able to do it sooner because of your respective schedules?

Steve Hogarth (vocals) : It was frustrating. It used to bug me constantly if I’m honest, because I was a bit worried that I’ll never get it together and never have the chance to do it. I’m very conscious of the fact that when I was 22 or 23, if somebody had said to me back in the days when I was listening to Tin Drum I could be working with Richard, I would have been thrilled beyond measure. So it was frustrating not to just get on with it, but in a way it was a good thing because it gave Richard time to send me a lot of music. He would send me instrumental music every few months, and at one point, I think three or four came in right at the beginning of 2011. Quite a few came in at once, and I was listening to them all and there were all different to each other but all really brilliant. It was frustrating, but I made a CD nice to drive around in the car listening to his ideas, so I had plenty of time to live with the music before I’d really got around to developping it. That wasn’t a bad thing. Marillion decided to take a month off in August last year, and so I went, I made a little studio in the top of my house, went up and recorded all the vocals completely alone. It was a lot of fun. I’ve been making notes, I’ve been muttering and singing into my iPhone when I was driving around as well if ideas came to me, so that I was playing all those back to find out what I’d gotten and then trying all that is in the sound. So the time helps.

Didn’t you have to much ideas for this album since you’d wanted to do this for a very long time?

I always have ideas, and they all go in my laptop these days. It’s not like in the old days where you had books full of scribbles and toughts… I try to transfer anything I have now into the laptop so I’ve got them all in one place. I have, I don’t know, it must be 50 lyrics at least just floating around. The way I write with Marillion is we get together in our studio, the band jams and I look at lyrics and try to make them work. So some of what I used on this album were things that I’d even tried with Marillion and that didn’t work out. On certain instrumentals that Richard was giving me there was a really high energy, one that eventually became the song Crack. I’ve been adding to that lyrics for years, but I never found a way of using it. I found a way of using it in this, so it wasn’t like I got a lot of things specifically written for the case I have to work with this person or that person. That’s my inner thoughts really that create the lyrics, and then if I enter into a project with someone, I just have a look at what I’ve got. I also wrote some of the lyrics on this album that were directly inspired by the instrumentals themselves, like I was driving around listening to the music Richard had made and that became Red Kite. Those words grew out of listening to that music, it didn’t all come of the shelf.

By the way, will there be a second album?

I hope so. I wouldn’t want to start one now though, it would be nice to have a period of time that passes. Who knows what the futur brings? If Richard has the time at some point maybe in 2 or 3 years, if he has time again in the future just to send me some music, I would certainly make the time to work on it, because I’m conscious of what a success artistically this album has been. It’s been a real creative burst for me, and it was such a lot of fun writing this record that I’d certainly want to do another one if I could.

This album is called “Not The Weapon But The Hand”. What do you mean with such a title? Is that some kind of a pacifist message?

Well it’s a little bit like that old cliché that guns don’t kill people but people kill people. Any weapon is only as dangerous as the hand that carries it. But it’s an extract from one of the lyrics for that album on the song called “Your Beautiful Face”. In fact the very last song is a reprise of that song which contains that line. I guess it’s not the weapon that does the damage but in whose hands it rests. I was thinking specifically of a woman who I encountered maybe 20, 25 years ago. She was incredibly beautiful and knew it. She was also very ambitious and quite cold and calculating, and she knew how to use her beauty to get what she wanted. Last year, at some point in the spring I run into her daughter who has more or less the same face right now, because she’s probably nearly the same age as the woman I encountered 25 years ago [laughs]. But she’s a very different person, she’s a much softer, sweeter character. She has the same weapon but she chooses to use it in a different way. That’s where the title came from.

Do you think that too much conflict are solved with weapons instead of talking, shaking hands etc.?

I think we all do that, don’t we? We all get ourselves into a kind of hot or angry state about something or someone when really if we were just to go and talk to them then we might save ourselves and them a lot of conflicts. I think most conflicts come out of a failure to understand another person, and I think conflicts between countries almost always come out of a failure to understand one another’s culture. So stupidly you go and wage war against another human being when everybody knows we’re all the same, we’re all made out of the same flesh and bones, and we all have basically the same needs. You know, I have written about this many times as well.

It also looks like it’s a very personal album, you’ve got some intimistic songs like “Naked”, am I right?

Yeah, you’re kind of right… “Naked” is really about the fact that everything that we do and everything that we are comes through a kind of filter or a veil of fear, self-defense, and self-consciousness. In fact perhaps the underlying theme in this album is that as I say, only love’ll make you free. There’re only two real emotions, love and fear, and everything we do is a result of one or the other. Everything we do is either out of love or either out of fear. That’s probably the underlying theme in this album. All my works are personal, I mean they’ve been for 25 years… I don’t really write fiction. I write about my innermost feeling, things that has been happening to me, my own love and fear I guess.

Do you think that you have more freedom to write personal lyrics than with Marillion since it’s kind of a solo project?

No, it’s exactly the same. I have total freedom within Marillion to write whatever I choose to, and I have had ever since I joined the band in 1989. They just let me do what I feel like doing. And you know, the five of us then become a judge of what is and isn’t working, so that’s slightly more… The quality control for us in Marillion is quite involved and sometimes it’s a bit frustrating. Whereas the process with Richard was very different. He would send me an instrumental piece of music just by email and I would live with that for a while, then in August last year I would settle in my room on my own with a microphone and just experiment with words and approaches. Sometimes I’d just be talking or whispering or screaming or singing, and in some songs all of those things at once! So it was great fun just to be completely alone. I suppose that’s a kind of freedom that you have when you’re alone, that you don’t have if even one another person in the room, no matter who it is, because as soon as there’s another human being in the room, you will be conscious of them hearing and making a judgement, maybe hearing something that isn’t right yet, or isn’t finished yet, as well as when you’re on your own, you don’t show anything to anyone until you feel you’ve arrived at the vision. So that was very liberating, and I’d like to work like that again, I might even work like that in the future with Marillion. Why should I stand in a studio with a producer and sing the vocals? Why not take it all home and do it on my own? I think I’ll definitely do that.

By the way, can you update us on Marillion’s future? The latest Marillion album was an acoustic record, Less Is More, and was released three years ago. The last real studio album was released four years ago, so… Why such a long time?

Well there’re probably two reasons: first of all, the way everything worked out over the last two or three years… We’ve been touring when perhaps at one time we wouldn’t have toured. We were offered the tour in Germany with Deep Purple the November before last one, and we decided we would take a break from writing to do that tour. Then we had a convention, we decided to take a break from writing to do our convention in Holland and so… We kept being dragged out onto the road where maybe in the past we’d said “no, we’re not coming up, we’re not doing anything, we’re making a record.” So that dragged the whole thing out a bit. Also, I think back in 2009 when we first started jamming for the next studio album, we weren’t really ready, but we’ve been working in between the touring. We’ve been jamming, working and arranging, and we had a meeting in December and had a listen through what we’ve got so far. We have some really strong things, I’m excited about what’s gonna happen now. We’re actually going down to real work to studio, to Gabriel’s place on January the 30st to live and work together for a while, to pull all of these songs together a bit. Then we’ll go back to our own studio and I’m pretty confident that by the summer, we’ll have an album recorded and ready for release in the autumn. So it’s going well, it’s sounding great.

Interview conducted on january, 20th, 2012, by phone
Transcription : Chloé (with Julia)

Steve Hogarth’s Website : http://stevehogarth.com/
Marillion’s Website : www.marillion.com

This interview with The Red Rocker was an opportunity to talk in greater detail about various themes related to Chickenfoot that we already mentioned to his bandmates, plus other topics. One of these topics the medias haven’t actually covered that much until now, has a clear political aspect. Through poignant lyrics, Hagar indeed evokes the question of the economic crisis and his personal disappointment towards politicians in the songs “Three and A Half Letters” and “No Change”. It was therefore a good opportunity to let him outline his own vision of the current socioeconomic context.

However, it was definitely impossible not to talk about Van Halen. Since the ex-singer of the band has never been at a loss for words when it comes to the inactivity of his previous band, we had to know what his feelings were on the eve of the release of their new album, whose first single “Tattoo” is already available. And, once more, he doesn’t mince matters! “If you don’t have anything good to say about someone, you’d better shut up” declares Sammy in response to one of our first questions. A precept that doesn’t apply to Van Halen yet. But who could hold it against Hagar for answering us, all the more so as he did it sincerely? Not us, of course…

Sammy Hagar (vocals) : Hi Philippe!

Radio Metal : Hi, how are you doing?

I’m doing good, I just made a margarita…

Because you need some inspiration to answer to the questions of the interview?

I just made a very beautiful cocktail for a guy at the bar at the Hard Rock Café (note : the interview was made at the Hard Rock Café in Paris), so…

Okay, and can you describe the content of it?

Sure, it’s Cabo Wabo tequila (ED: Sammy Hagar’s brand), cointreau, fresh lime, blue curaçao and salt. It’s called a margarita, but it’s my specialty, it’s called a Waborita! [laughs]

I must admit that I’m not as Rock’ n’ Roll as you are, because I’m just drinking some coffee.

[Laughs] I had my coffee hours ago! Are you in Lyon right now? And that’s where there are some good restaurants in France, there’s good food from Lyon, correct?

Yeah!

I’m in Paris, there’s good food from here too, but I know Lyon has really good food!

Okay, so maybe we can start the real interview now! You did a couple of concerts since the release of the album, so how are the new songs doing in the live context?

Oh, fantastic! That’s a very good question. They’re doing great, it’s sweet. We’re just mixing up the two albums, and the new stuff is holding up great against the old stuff. I think that by having more material from the new album to add to the first album, it makes the set so much better than the first tour we did. You know, because for the first tour we only had one album so we had to stretch those songs. Now we have more material to put together a really, really great night of music. I’m really proud that we can go out and play songs from two albums and just give people a couple of hours of great Rock’ n’ Roll! It’s been really great having those new songs.

One of the characteristics of Chickenfoot is that the band is not taking itself seriously – I mean the band name is Chickenfoot and the video for Big Foot is so stupid and fun – do you think this is one the keys for making good music?

Well, we really do take the music seriously, and I think that by having the name Chickenfoot, it was a weird situation, I can’t even explain how it happened [laughs]. We take ourselves very seriously but we don’t want to be over-serious about the music because the bottom-line is that music is about fun. And if you’re not having fun… I don’t know, I don’t think it’s cool. So we just wanted to express the fun side of the whole thing and everyone knows that we’re accomplished musicians, so I think we can kind of make fun of ourselves because everyone knows the music is good. That’s my opinion: we can have more fun because we don’t have to pretend like we’re great musicians. We are great musicians, so we can have fun with that.

Do you think nowadays bands tend to forget that and that they’re taking Rock’ n’ Roll and music too seriously?

Sometimes. Not all the time, but some bands I think don’t have enough credibility. I don’t want to say who they are but there are some bands to me that are not accomplished and they go out and act like a joke or something. It ain’t like a joke, but when you can play like Joe Satriani, I can stand there next to him with a big smile on my face, laughing. Like “this is fucking funny!” he’s so good it’s funny, you know? It’s a different kind of thing. We’re not making fun of ourselves or anything. You know, my favorite band is Pink Floyd, and they’re very serious, all the time. And I like that, but I couldn’t be in a band like that, I just have to have fun.

When we had the chance to chat with Michael we talked about his vocal capabilities and he joked that lead singers were the loud mouth of the band and that, therefore, he didn’t want to be one. So are you the loud mouth of the band in Chickenfoot, or even when you were in Van Halen?

[Laughs] I’m trying to calm down in my old age. I used to shoot my mouth off a lot, before Van Halen, and in Van Halen I’d shoot my mouth off a lot, and after Van Halen I’d shoot my mouth off a lot. But now what I want to do is, since I wrote my book, now I just want to concentrate on being a positive person and have the attitude that if you don’t have something good to say about someone, just don’t say anything. I’m trying to be like that in my life now.

By the way, it looks like you give more space to Michael in Chickenfoot, vocally speaking…

The vocals, for some reason – we talked about it after our show the other night – how great our vocals bind now. It’s like two lead singers. It’s crazy because originally I always sang really high. I had to sing so high that when Mikey had to go above me, it just sounded like this thin little voice on top, and it was powerful but never ‘in your face’ powerful. So on Chickenfoot III I’m singing in a much lower register sometimes, and Mikey’s singing in a lower register and all of a sudden his voice sounds rich with mine, and it’s really great, our two voices together.

Chickenfoot is made up of four strong personalities, how do you guys manage not to walk on each other’s toes and not get into conflicts?

No problem whatsoever. You know, in Chickenfoot, everyone has his role, and we don’t get in each other’s way. So when it comes to the music, Joe and I will write 90% of the songs. Everyone knows that, we frame the ideas and write the music. Then when it comes time to tweak the music, when the band is rehearsing the songs, Joe is in charge. I just step back, if I have an idea, I bring it up, but it’s Joe’s territory. And then when it comes time for the vocals, and write the lyrics and do the singing, that’s my territory. I’ll get Mikey to come in and sing some parts with me, and do this and that, and no one gets in my way. It’s really diplomatic, everyone feels that they have their job and they’re confident enough to step back when it’s not their turn, and let the person that’s good at that do this job. I don’t see us having any problems. The only problem that Chickenfoot is ever going to have is that I don’t want to tour for a year, or months and months at a time, because I have a hard time doing that as a singer, I want to sing great every night. And Joe is an instrumentalist, he can play seven nights a week. I can’t. We’ve never had a problem with it yet, but I could see where that could be a problem someday. That’s about all I could see coming, and it wouldn’t be that we’d be upset at each other, it would just be the way it is. It could be one thing where we’d both have to compromise. But it hasn’t come to that yet.

The lyrics to the song “Three And A Half Letters” seems very much influenced by the crisis that the United Stated and other countries are currently going through. This subject sounds very important to you, what is your feeling about the current situation?

The reason why it’s important is because I have a philosophy that I developed through reason and it’s that if someone has the opportunity to help another person, they should do that. And that would solve a lot of problems. You must know a hundred people yourself that could help someone. And they probably know a few people that could need help. If everyone just reached out and helped, we could solve a lot of hunger and things like that in our own communities. I don’t believe in reaching out too far. You know, I’m concerned that in America there are so many people out of work and there are so many children in the street that are hungry. I can’t stand to see that, and I can help. I have the ability and the finances to do something about it. So I’m trying to do that and I hope to be an inspiration to others. We can’t fix the whole thing but we can make it better if people reached out and helped their neighbor. It’s as simple as that.

There is another politically oriented song called “No Change” which points out the fact that governments are always lying to us and that this is not changing. You seem to have very little faith in politics, or at least politicians… Do you think nothing will ever change with these people?

I think it’s really hard. I found out how hard it is to get people to do things that demand changes. I don’t believe the government can do it, I no longer have faith in my country. I don’t have faith in the government to do the right thing and to do the right changes. That’s why I say that the people should take it upon their own hands and make the changes. Not in a violent way, I don’t believe in that, but they should make the changes by helping others. You know, if they see a homeless person, if they have the means to help them, help them. Give them some shelter, give them a blanket, buy a sleeping bag and give it to them. If you see a hungry person, a child who’s hungry in the streets, for God’s sake, give that child some food if you can afford to do that. So I think it’s time for people to step up and do it themselves. I don’t believe in the government anymore. I’ve lost all faith in the governments. They overspent, they cheat and they’re self-serving. I think some politicians may be willing to help the people but I don’t think it’s being done.

In the last line in the song you’re announcing “the end of the world”. Is this what you believe, that we’re heading toward the end of the world?

[Laughs] You’re taking that song pretty seriously. But yeah, I don’t think it’s that’s far off. I think it’s closer than anyone’s going to admit. It seems to be on a downward spiral. As I said, I don’t believe any governments are going to fix it, I don’t know who’s going to fix it so it just seems like we’re not doing so well. It’s part of the reason why I don’t want to tour right now, and just go unconscious and put on shows for sale and have people pay money because I think we could use the money for other things, and I’d rather them help themselves and help other people. Even though if I can bring love and joy to them, I’m happy to do it. I’m a very positive person, but I don’t feel really good about the state of the world. All the riots in every country, and the « Occupy » movement is crazy. And number two, most of them are just people causing trouble. There are a few people trying to make a statement, and then there’s a bunch of wild looters and people who just throw bricks in windows and rob Mom’ and Pop’ grocery stores. That’s not good, that’s not positive. I feel like John Lennon with the song Revolution sometimes. You know, if you want to talk about destruction, you can count me out.

By the way, why didn’t you include “No Change” in all editions of the album? Some people say it’s because it is actually too much politically oriented…

I think we took care of that element when we did « Three And A Half Letters », as a political statement, and I don’t want to lay too much on the people at once. We wrote those two songs and we just decided to put « Three And A Half Letters » on the album and not « No Change ». I think we would’ve weighed the album down with too much heaviness. Like I say, my goal in music is to bring joy and happiness to people and fun and entertainment, and inspire them, not use it as a political platform completely. I think a song like « Three And A Half Letters » will inspire people to try to get people jobs and to try to feed kids.

These past years, you and Michael Anthony have spoken out about how disappointed you were by Van Halen and you’ve both been criticizing the band for not putting out new music, at least Michael mentioned it to us. So now that Van Halen is officially about to release a new album, what is your feeling?

Oh I’m okay with those guys doing whatever they want to do. What I’ve heard so far, I wasn’t impressed with at all, personally. I think in Chickenfoot, we’ve raised the bar a little bit on what a four-piece rock band can do, and I think they chose to take the easy route and take some of their old stuff and and re-record it instead of writing new songs. Who is Van Halen today? I don’t know, I don’t think the fans are going to be happy with it. I couldn’t care less if it’s the biggest album of the year, that wouldn’t be important to me, what is important to me is that, as artists, why would you do that? They haven’t released an album since my last album in something like 1991 or ’92, and then they just go back. To me it makes a strange statement, it kind of says « We don’t have anything, we’re not a band anymore, we’re not creative ». Isn’t it a strange statement to you?

Do you think this was intentional? I mean, as a band it’s normal to have some habits, some patterns, some ways of composing that come back, so do you think it really was intentional?

I don’t know. To be honest with you, the last time I was around those guys was in 2004 on the reunion. It was a disaster, it was horrible, Eddie was in a really bad shape, I wrote about it a lot in my book. And I don’t know what they’re thinking to be honest with you. Because if they were thinking at all, they would certainly have Mikey in there playing bass. So I don’t know what they’re thinking. I believe it was probably intentional because I don’t think they had any choice. If they had had a choice they would’ve done all new stuff. From today. They would’ve written together like a band.

So you think they don’t have any inspiration today?

I don’t think so. I think there’s zero inspiration and zero creativity. If there was any, they would write new songs. What does the band do? When Chickenfoot got together for our first album, we were four new guys and we got together and wrote ten, twelve songs and made an album. When we decided to do our second album, we didn’t go back and take the two songs that were left over from the first album, we wrote all brand new songs. Because we’re new people, we’re inspired. Here’s what we have to say, here’s what we want to play now, here’s who we’ve become since then. And you present yourself to the fans as who you are and what you’ve become. And if you don’t have any idea of who you are or what you are and what you’ve become [laughs], then I guess you have to go back and show them what you used to be. I don’t know, does that make sense?

Michael told us that he was totally open to have Chickenfoot going on tour or at least making a couple of shows with Van Halen. What about you?

Hell yes! [laughs] Are you kidding? Right now, for free. They wouldn’t even have to pay me.

Anyway, does that bother you when you hear people comparing Chickenfoot and Van Halen?

Oh no, I think it’s fantastic. Really, it’s fantastic, are you kidding me? If you take Joe versus Eddie, you take Dave versus me, Wolfie versus Mikey, Chad or Kenny versus Al… I mean, come on! You know what I mean? Man for man, who can sing the best? Dave or I, today? Who can play the best? Joe or Eddie, today? Who could play or sing the best? Wolfie or Mikey? I think it’s a joke, sure I love the comparison as long as it’s fair. Not because you’re a big Eddie Van Halen fan, you think that he’s God therefore you think that he’s better than Joe, you have to be bipartisan and just listen and watch both of them play. Listen, I played with them both, I can tell you right now: there is no comparison today. Never mind the innovator that Eddie was. I’m talking about what they can play today.

So in other words, Chickenfoot is way better than Van Halen?

As individuals, absolutely! I’ve been in both bands, I can tell you right now. Take the new albums and compare them track-by-track and then tell me.

Kenny Aronoff is replacing Chad Smith in Chickenfoot while he tours with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Aren’t you afraid to become too much attached to Kenny at one point?

Well, I love Chad Smith, he’s maybe the greatest drummer in the world, and Kenny is the guy that Chad handed the sticks to and said « he’s your man ». Kenny plays great, but they’re two different players because Chad is so crazy and reckless when he plays that sometimes the songs suck a little bit but there’s an excitement to it which compensates for the lack of playing the song perfectly every-time. With Kenny, we’re playing the songs better now, but no one can outdo Chad when it comes to excitement, in Chickenfoot. He plays differently with the Chili Peppers than he does in Chickenfoot, we all know that. And when he’s playing with Chickenfoot, he’s a fucking monster, and we will make the next record with Chad, he’s the drummer in Chickenfoot. He can’t be there now, so he chose Kenny as the guy that he thought was best for this band and I think he did a good job by choosing him because Kenny is doing a great job. I mean, if I couldn’t make it and they had to get another vocalist, I’d like to be the guy to say « that’s your guy right there », « pick this guy » or « pick that guy ». I think each guy would know who could fill his shoes best.

Since Chickenfoot seems so important for you guys do you think the question of making a choice will be one day brought to Chad Smith?

Oh Chad is the drummer in Chickenfoot, that’s all there is to it. We didn’t replace him, he just can’t be there and we had to go play a tour so we were forced to use another drummer and Kenny is awesome.

Okay, but do you think that someday you may want to ask Chad Smith to choose between Chickenfoot and the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Oh no! That’s one thing we’ve all made clear in the very begining: we all have projects and other careers, and we do Chickenfoot when we can. This was the first time that we did it without someone. We would never ask him to make that decision, number one, and number two, I don’t think he would. I mean, you wouldn’t quit the Red Hot Chili Peppers for Chickenfoot, would you? No.

Interview conducted on january, 16th, 2012 by phone by Metal’O Phil
Questions & introduction by Spaceman

Transcription : Stan (with Julia)

Chickenfoot’s Website : http://www.chickenfoot.us/

These questions are at the core of this interview. How did Blind Guardian go about devising Memories Of A Time To Come, this compilation covering twenty-five years worth of music, which will be released on January 20^th ? How does the band consider this record? Is it an assessment? The end of an era? Is Blind Guardian opening a new door with this best of? This interview with Hansi Kürsch also revolves a lot around the band’s future, this “time to come”. And according to him, this time has already come, since the band is working on an upcoming orchestral album (whose “Blind Guardian-ish” nature is still under question, as you will see) and on a new traditional album.

Hansi Kürsch (vocals): 25 years is a very good reason, I think! When we were first asked to do that by our old record company, EMI, three years ago, I thought it was about time we did it. We had a good discography, with a lot of good songs, but we’d never done it so far. But on the other hand, I felt that if we were to do it, we would need some additional time to do a proper mixing, proper technical preparations, and even rework on some of the stuff. We were looking for the right moment, and that happened in 2011, when we played a lot of shows and went on a lot of tours, but still had some time in between to work on the tracks. In the end, it took us over four months to get everything done. But the result is a best of that feels like an organic, regular studio album.

Since there’s a link between the songs on each album and every album has its own story, wasn’t it frustrating to pick out singles and mix them up on a compilation?

No, it was not frustrating. It was more like a rollercoaster through our career, with some stops and some frustrating decisions to make. I would have loved to add some more songs to the best of, or see other songs on it instead, but we were looking for the perfect mix, to present what Blind Guardian has been about over the past 25 years. I found it very interesting to see how a song like “Majesty”, for example, interacts with newer songs like “Ride Into Obsession”. It was more a challenge to us to give justice to the songs that we finally decided to put on the album, and treat them in the most accurate way, so they could shine in their full glory.

What’s interesting about this compilation is that you didn’t just pick the best singles or the best commercial successes of Blind Guardian; you picked ballads, speed metal songs, very epic and progressive songs… It’s like you didn’t want to do a best of out of the singles, but rather to sum up your career, the story of Blind Guardian.

Yes, that was the intention. I would say a song like “Fly” is still missing, because that would feature the more modern direction of the band. But we felt that “This Will Never End” would do more justice to the album A Twist In The Myth, which is why we decided to go for this song. In general, it was the idea to show how diverse we can be. Of course, it also makes it obvious why sometimes people are disappointed when we come up with a new album, because you don’t know what to expect. This makes the band interesting for young people as well as old people, and for us as well.

I wouldn’t say that. It’s a question of how you choose to do it and how you relate to a best of album. If you do a best of single album in a proper way, if you remix it or if you have a concept to present it, then it’s fine. But if it’s just a compilation, then it doesn’t make sense. It’s really a question of how much a band gets involved and is dedicated to the output. Of course it’s a in-between solution to propose old material, but if you do it the proper way, it doesn’t matter. If it’s the single versions or what we consider to be more diverse stuff, it’s not important.

Since you’re a band that loves to tell stories in their albums, can you say that the story you wanted to tell with this best of album was your own?

Yeah, you can see it this way. I also think it explains a lot about our characters and our music through the music itself. There was a very clear vision among the band members from the very beginning, and even though the song differ a lot from each other, the core elements can be seen in the early achievements of the band; in this case, “Valhalla”, “Majesty” or “Follow the Blind”. There were obvious differences when it came to songwriting. You can see there’s no pattern. All the songs have a different handwriting, and you never know exactly how a song is built up and what will follow next if you haven’t heard it. This is something we tried to represent with this album.

Are you as passionate about releasing this compilation as with every studio album?

If it comes to the re-recordings, definitely. There’s the same passion. If it comes to the remixes, it’s the same dedication, but of course, it’s a little more difficult to feel passion for a twenty-year-old song you revisit but have no chance to rework on, to fix things which you think could be improved.

This must have been a very nostalgic experience, listening to the songs from the early days?

It was a very nostalgic feeling. But on the other hand, it showed us that the songs remain the same. If you listen to a song like “Valhalla”, for example, which we have re-recorded, you will feel the same energy, even if we’re over twenty years older compared to the first recording. But the song revealed the same beauty and the same strength. Music is timeless, and that’s a great thing. That’s something I can say about Blind Guardian’s 25 years: at no point does it feel like 25 years. If you asked me about the first time we went in the studio, I couldn’t count the years. I would say it was not too long ago, maybe ten or fifteen years. Even that would appear as a long period to me, but the fact that it’s that much longer proves that we really enjoyed what we did. It was never what we had to do, it was what we wanted to do.

I consider them to be things from the youth. There are many elements in there which we wouldn’t treat that way nowadays. But it’s still a legacy of our very first steps. Musically, even if you can observe that we’re not on the same path nowadays, I believe there’s a certain strength and energy in these first attempts to become a professional musician which still makes it interesting for me to listen to it. Even though there were some elements that were related to great bands that were our idols back then, there was that individual approach from the very beginning. That makes me really proud. It had a personal touch, and luckily we kept that.

Do you see Blind Guardian at a turning point right now, so you had to release this to close a chapter?

Interesting point of view… But no, I don’t think so. I think we’re in the middle of the second period of the band. I believe a new era started with Night At The Opera, and this era is not over so far. I would say it’s more to look back because of nostalgic feelings. It was the right time to do it. But I don’t think we will change drastically, even though one of the next albums – maybe even the next one – will be the orchestral album. This will be a definite change. But since it has been designed and scheduled over the last years, it’s not connected to the best of album.

The title of this compilation is interesting. What do you mean with this title, Memories From A Time To Come?

Again, we’re dealing with time. The impression we had when we revisited these 25 years was that of a timeless flow. I believe that, even though these are documents of the past, they give a preview of Blind Guardian’s future as well.

Could we have an update on your work on this orchestral album which is expected to be released in 2012?

(huge sigh) I would say 2012 is history already! (laughs) That’s how far I can go. We worked on the orchestral stuff as well as on stuff for a regular Blind Guardian album between our tours and the finalizing of Memories From A Time To Come. My goal would be to release either the regular Blind Guardian album or the orchestral album in 2013. It is doable, but it’s tough work for us. There are so many elements involved in the orchestral album, as well as in the regular album, all the way from songwriting to production… I’m really cautions when it comes to guessing release dates. But as I said, I assume it will be late 2013, possibly in the Fall, before another Blind Guardian album.

I’m not exhausted, but it’s so much work. It’s fun doing it. We did like six songs in a concert hall already, and we recorded them, but I still have to do the vocals. I did a pre-production for these songs already. But we also have to complete the other songs we have done, and it takes a lot of time, in terms of finalizing the scores and all that. If we don’t feel the time is right to work on this, we prefer to work on the regular Blind Guardian stuff. That’s on the same priority level. Both are too important to rush. We never did that in our whole career, and we certainly won’t start after 25 years, even if we would like to release something next year. It’s not important to be as quick as possible, it’s more important to keep the quality.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but at the beginning, this was meant to be a side project, and then you decided to release it as a Blind Guardian album, right?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. But I have to say that even now, we’re not sure how we are going to present it! (laughs) We have so many options with this album, we’re jumping backward and forward. The music is so good and diverse. It is a Blind Guardian baby, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a Blind Guardian album. We’re not sure. It depends how much the rest of the band will be involved. At that point, they’re not involved so much apart from songwriting. It will be my singing and the orchestra. We’re not sure if that’s enough to call it a Blind Guardian album. If we involve the rest of the band, it will become a Blind Guardian album. This is something we’ve been considering for the last twelve months and the discussion is still open.

I guess it must have been very difficult to change your way of writing songs, since it’s a completely different exercise compared to writing songs for a band?

No, we haven’t changed here, not at all. It’s a different approach in using different instruments and using slightly different structures. But it’s not as difficult as many people probably think. We have to have Charlie Bauerfeind involved in case we’re faced with a dead end; he can get us out of there and give us instructions to make another attempt in another direction. But so far, it’s been going smoothly. The most difficult thing was to find someone who was able to transpose the arrangements we’ve composed on a computer into a score that remains as close to our original intention as possible. It’s been a lot of trouble and took a lot of time, but since we’ve had these people, it’s been more a question of doing the right songs at the right time.

Do you think you’ll promote this orchestral album live, and most importantly, is it possible for you, financially speaking?

Financially speaking, I would say it could be beneficial! But the problem is to find the right occasion, the right venue and the right orchestra to do it. You cannot do something like this in a regular concert hall. Depending on the country, the audience at our shows is between 500 and 7,000 or 8,000 people. Finding venues that can accommodate these different audiences would be very, very difficult. What I think would be possible would be a small festival tour with an orchestra, or a very limited number of Blind Guardian concerts, like four in Europe or so. That’s something we could consider, especially in connection with a regular Blind Guardian show. This might be an option. But we’ll deal with it when we’re there. Right now it’s more getting all the composition out of the way, then finalizing the various elements. Once this is done, we’ll be a big step further, and then we’ll need to consider how to promote this album and how live situations could be organized.

Your albums are based on Tolkien’s books, as well as other writers. Don’t you want to write your own epic story, maybe for an upcoming album?

Not for the orchestral album. We have already agreed that the concept for that would be Markus Heitz. His sort of writing perfectly fits the music we’ve come up with so far. But for one of the next regular Blind Guardian albums, that could be done. We could have a conceptual album, going in the direction of Imaginations From The Other Side and songs like “Bright Eyes”, “Imaginations” or “And The Story Ends”. Something like that would be possible, yes.

I didn’t even realize, in the beginning. Most of the bands are more connected to the pagan or death metal scene. It didn’t really bother me, and it still doesn’t today. Some of them tackle different aspects, and if it’s a good aspect, I appreciate it. I never felt these bands were jumping on a trend train. It was like they’d been woken up or attracted by the movie, then started reading the books and figured this was something they could connect to their music. I don’t really much care about that. There were bands dealing with Tolkien before Blind Guardian. It’s up to everyone. You just need to have a concept and the right tools to come up with something personal. The good thing about Blind Guardian is that, whenever we deal with Tolkien, we give it a personal touch. I believe this is what people appreciate.

We talked with André Olbrich last year and he told us that you weren’t in contact with Peter Jackson. Has this changed, did you try again recently?

No, I definitely have not tried anything like this. I’m sure André has not either. What we tried to do, and what we still look for, is a closer connection to the World Of Warcraft game. That’s more on André’s mind, I would say, doing a cooperation there. Being involved in “The Hobbit” is something we do not consider to be interesting for us.

Jusqu’en 1998, tu jouais de la basse. En joues-tu toujours ? Si non, est-ce que cela ne te manque pas ?

I don’t miss it. I don’t play too much. I play acoustic guitar from time to time, to improve the composing or to come up with ideas. Just for inspiration, I also play a little piano. But the bass guitar is not my favorite instrument. It might change, I’m not saying I’ll never, ever play bass at home again. But I don’t feel the need to use the bass for composing.

Interview conducted by phone on december, 19th, 2011 by Metal’O Phil
Transcription : Saff’ & Isa
Introduction : Animal

Blind Guardian’s Website : www.blind-guardian.com

Life is made up of encounters. Among those, there’s the ones that will touch you and make you grow. On December 14th, I was extremely lucky to talk privately and at length with the great Devin Townsend. We talked about the reason that led him to a vegetarian diet, his childhood, his passion for cows, his philosophical point of view on free will… and I even had the pleasure to offer him his first raw food meal in three months. To see him so touched by the dishes I’d cooked specifically for him was extremely gratifying. Yes, I’m decidedly a lucky guy.

On that day, I also learned a lesson in humility. Devin presented his way of getting his convictions through, without conflict or violence. He also confessed to the direct impact food has on his music and his daily actions. I met a humble man, highly intelligent, courteous, attentive to others and… at peace with himself. This particular interview will be divided in two parts, with a third video in which I will give you Heavy Metal Food Signature “Devin Townsend” recipes.

EDIT : The third and the last part of the interview is online.

Stay Hungry. Stay Metal.

Gilles LARTIGOT
« The Heavy Metal Cook »

Interview conducted the 14th of december 2011 by Gilles Lartigot
Venue : Foufounes Electriques – Montréal (QC)
Thanks to Stéphane Mackay and Nathalie Vogl

Even if the band took the time to communicate about these departures – claiming family reasons for Hallgren’s –, even if had talked about this with drummer Léo Margarit, several questions remained, especially regarding Hermansson desertion. We took advantage of the band’s stay in Paris on November 16th to ask a few questions to the captain, Daniel Gildenlöw. Particularly tired that night, he was nevertheless talkative and went very deep in his answer.

Since the interview, new musicians have been hired, at least for the shows: Daniel Karlsson, the original bassist, who, as Daniel explained, had already replaced Hermansson behind the keyboards for a few shows before going back to the bass, then to the keyboards when Hermansson left for good (phew!), Gustaf Hielm, Meshuggah’s former bassit, and one Ragnar Zolberg on guitar.

Radio Metal : Johan Hallgren announced a few weeks ago his departure from the band. The reason given was that he wanted to be more with his family. According to you were there any other reasons?

Daniel Gildenlöw (guitar/vocals) : Not that I know of anyway. He wanted to spend more time at home, basically. Not getting away so much on tours. It’s not like we can force people to stay in a band (laughs). He wanted to quit once before… Actually I think this is the third time he quits the band, but this is the one time where he’s really doing it. But he had a girlfriend two or three years back, he wanted to stay more at home with his girlfriend, so he quit back then too, but he came back after about two days (laughs). Being in this industry, you have to make a lot of sacrifices, and I wouldn’t say that it’s easier for me to make those sacrifices, but it’s less of an option for me, since I’m basically making the music, regardless. I don’t feel like I have an option of quitting doing this because this is what I do. This is what I am. So well, I guess I could quit and then form another band, but it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, so I can’t really ask for others, year after year, to have the same level of… I would not want to call it insanity, but let’s stick with that word for now. So that’s basically it.

He’s been there since 1998, for the fans I think that he has become a very, very familiar face. But I think what people need to keep in mind – if they want to, they don’t have to – but they could keep in mind that in 1998 he was the new guitar player and I had been playing an equally long time with the previous guitar player. We just didn’t make as many albums. And it seemed impossible at that time to replace Daniel (Magdic) who was the previous guitar player. And if we had stopped at that, all the albums with Johan Hallgren wouldn’t have been made. So I think from our point of view, every time someone leaves the band, it feels impossible. I can’t say that I’m happy right now with this situation, trying to sort everything out, but it’s happened many time before so we know it’s possible. Usually, when you get someone else, you’d be surprised how quickly that person, as long as you’re really careful with the process of choosing the right person, the right musician, it’s amazing how quickly that new person will become a part of what you consider to be, in many ways, your second family. So we’ll see what happens.

You also mentioned that Fredrik Hermansson would be leaving at the conclusion of the current tour. Does this have anything to do with Johan’s departure?

Yes. I mean, not that was like a main reason, but I think that he’s been bouncing the same issues, not with family in his case, but I think the general feeling… We’re sort of spoiled in Sweden, and we want everything we do to be fun and interesting. He felt he didn’t feel the same energy, he didn’t feel as motivated anymore. He said it was related to everything in his life. But the whole thing is that, of course when Johan is leaving the band, he probably felt more like “okay, since the band structure is breaking up anyway, I guess it’s a good time for me to step back too and have someone else take over who’s more hungry.” I talked to him and I said that of course, we really want him to say, but I understand. It’s difficult; it’s not an easy thing to be going through, for them or for me. But it’s not as new to us as it is to the fans. With Johan’s departure, we’ve been talking about it for a long time, so it’s not new to us, but it doesn’t make it easier anyway.

Leo Margarit told us that the thought of stopping the band came up to your mind. Was it the case?

I can only take this from my personal point of view but I’ve done that every time somebody leaves the band. I was thinking about that when we asked Daniel to leave the band, back in 1997. But in retrospective, I’m glad that it didn’t happen. When Johan left the band, I mean drummer Johan Langell. I guess this is like being in a sort of very intense relationship. You need a period of time where to deal with the loss and I don’t want to have feelings of them letting the band down, because I think that is a small thought. But nevertheless that thought comes up every time someone is leaving the band, except for the ones we’ve kicked out, of course (laughs)… That was harsh, wasn’t it? Sorry… But the thing is that feeling always comes up, I thought that we were going all the way, but I just have to push through and keep on going.

Especially since I understand the whole family thing, I really do, I have a family, I have three kids at home and I hate that, I hate every second of it. I hate every second of not being with my family, and at some level, even though I try not to get those feelings, I feel like “why the hell did I make all these sacrifices all these years if it’s that easy, if you can just say I want to spend some time with my family?” Where does that take me? Why am I here? Those feelings, you have to deal with, every time. So I think it’s the same thing when you’re breaking up with someone in a relationship. You go through all these periods of being angry, feeling sad, feeling lost, and then sort of getting to the acceptance point where you are sort of like “okay, this is how it is, I need to deal with it.” It takes a while, you have to go through a few different steps until you get to the moving on point. And with the band, that process really needs to be compressed into a really short time span because basically you can’t give it five years. You need to get on and get things going, so you’ll have to deal with some of it while you’re still actually in this sort of family situation with the other guys, and that’s always a difficult time.

Do you actually have any musicians in your mind that would fit, and have you already received any applications from musicians who are interested in playing with you?

Yeah, we’re having a new line-up for February that’s going to be interesting, but we’re still lacking a guitar player, and we would love to find one in Sweden but we’ll just have to see. First and foremost, we need a really good guitar player / vocalist / person. So we’ll see. If we could find one in Sweden, that would be really good. But we did have to import Leo from France, so we never know what’s going to happen with a guitar player. Anyway, that’s our intention. We’ve had a lot of people already applying. Just yesterday, we put on the homepage that it’s time for people to send in applications or whatever, but even before that, we’ve had many guys managing to find a way of contacting us. We’ll see what happens.

[Note : A few weeks after this interview, the band recruited Ragnar Zolberg on guitars]

Both you and Michael today seem to have a common passion for the music of the 70′s. Have you two ever talked about doing a project together in that vein?

I have no idea, the thought struck me, it would be nice, I guess. The thing is that we don’t really have time to hang out a lot because our schedules are completely inverted so we’ll probably talk about it, I guess. But from what I’ve heard now is that they’re more sort of the prog rock seventies, which I’m trying to get away from, actually. I’m trying to distil things down to a very… I come from a tradition of very long songs, especially before Entropia. Because I started off very early. I made the band when I was eleven, and at that age you progress really quickly, and you’re trying to find new challenges all the time. So you’ll end up playing arty music pretty fast, I think. At least if you’re interested in musicianship, and I guess since that time I’m trying to fight my way back from that to something where I feel that my guts are really being torn. Because in the end, that’s the music I tend to revolve around, when I listen to my own favourite music, the songs are rarely more than three or four minutes, my all-time favourite songs in the history of music. Whereas when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was really into that. Long songs, complex rhythms… I guess you could say that if I would be a girl in an American movie, I would be that odd girl saying that I’ve been loved for my intellect for so long that I want to be loved for my breasts just for a little while.

You’re currently on tour with Opeth. When speaking with Michael Akerfeldt he told us : “I wasn’t a big fan of Pain Of Salvation until their last album came out. I really like that album. It clicks with me better than the other stuffs that they did. I thought they were a good band before but this album really is something that I listen to, which was not the case with previous albums.” so what’s your opinion about Heritage, the latest Opeth album?

It would be much, much better if I had listened to that album right now, I feel… (laughs) I’m going to listen to it and then you’ll have to get back with that question. I’ve been so involved in the Road Salt albums and being on tour now, I genuinely didn’t have time to. I’ve really been annoyed because I really wanted to watch at least one of the Opeth shows, but during the Opeth show, after our show, we really need to get food, because that’s the only time of the day where we have a chance to eat, so I’m missing it every night. I can say one thing; I think that his voice is extremely comfortable. I really like listening to his voice, and personally I’m really happy that he’s sort of not doing the growling anymore. But I understand that probably a lot of the Opeth fans are really annoyed by that fact.

On the song The Physics Of Gridlock from Road Salt Two you sing a part in French. Apparently Leo discovered this part when it was done. Why didn’t you ask him for any advice before recording it?

That would have been a smart thing to do. The thing is that I thrive in challenges. I’ve been approaching the lyrics for this song for such a long time, it was one of the earliest songs. I wrote the main bulk of the song very early in the process, we’ve been recording and re-recording some parts because I thought the sound wasn’t right. I was really working on the details. I knew what I wanted to express, I had pages and pages and pages of written text. When I have a problem with a song, that’s basically what I do, I write five essays. And then I try to sort of cast the essence of that and boil it down to a lyric. But I couldn’t find the proper approach to certain parts towards the end of the song. Not until at one point I was in my car and I was playing the song without vocals as I usually do. I’ll have the latest mixes of all the songs and I’ll just play it over and over and over again, so when the album is finally finished, I can’t listen to it anymore. But anyway, I started to do this fake French, and I was like “Yeah, that’s it” and all of a sudden it just fell into place.

The problem is that I don’t know French. I did study French for a very short while when I was twelve or thirteen. And I never really had to study anything. It’s been sort of a blessing and a curse, because that makes me not spend the energy because I don’t have to. It was the same with guitar, I remember having lessons with my guitar teacher, I couldn’t play something, so I put my guitar under the bed and the next week, I could play it. I never had to sort of sit down and actually practice and learn stuff. Which of course it’s bad too, same thing with reading music sheets, I had the same problem that I didn’t have to learn it because he played it and I just memorized it, I could play it the next time. It was not until also when I was thirteen, I was playing a classical piece, and at one point I guess I wasn’t turning the page correctly or something and he was like “Are you reading the music?” and I was like “not really…” I thought he’d be angry, but he was like “you memorized all that” and he stopped a teacher friend and was like “this guy memorized this whole piece” I was like “okay… that’s good?” So I did the same thing when I studied French, I thought “it’s going to come to me”.

And of course, you’re picking up on all the nouns, the verbs and everything, but all the small prepositions, they just like slip by. And then after two months you’re like “I don’t know how to tie the words together. I have all these words and I don’t know the glue, all the sort of not so important glue that is pretty necessary in a language” and it didn’t just come to me as I expected it to. So I changed to music drama instead. My French teacher was getting my mother in for a meeting, saying “he should really continue French, he’s got very good possibilities”. But I went to music drama, I think it was a good choice. This would be the one occasion where I actually thought I should have stuck with French [laughs], because I had no idea of what I was doing. So what I did was that I basically brought up the odd words that I still remembered and tried to put them together. And I had sort of a feel for the language, I sort of had the feeling that I made a sentence and then “I bet that adjective is going to be after the noun in this sentence, it just feels right, and that means the rhyme is going to be all fucked up… I have to start over again.” And I checked with dictionaries, translators, applications, and of course, they’re sort of wrong sometimes, and again you just get a feel for “this doesn’t look right, I bet this is wrong.” So I’d been working for weeks with these few French…

I knew what I wanted to express, and I wanted it to rhyme, and I wanted it to be in French, it was like an impossible combination for me. But I kept working on it, as I said, I thrive on challenges. The clever me would have just called Leo up, and we would write something together, but I had that idea that it would be nice to do this and then present it. And in the end, when I thought I was done I sent it to him by e-mail, expecting to get sort of a patronizing pat at the head like “It was a good try but…” I was sure he would find tons and tons of mistakes. But he came back like “this is all correct, how the hell did you do this?” and then of course, my next stupid choice was to actually record it first and then ask if it was correct. So I recorded all the vocal harmonies and especially for the word “donne” he was like “it could have been a better pronunciation” so he was trashing me on a few points in the pronunciation thing but it was already recorded, what could I do? I wasn’t really in the mood to re-recording it.

Interview conducted at a press conference in Paris en November, 16th, 2011, by Stan lors d’une conférence de presse à Introduction & Questions : Spaceman
Transcription : Stan et Isa

Pain Of Salvation’s Website : www.painofsalvation.com

For “Ghost Walking”, Lamb Of God offers a video in the shape of a manga-style, futuristic cartoon.

We hope to see a lot of reactions in the comments, since, as we learned recently, Randy Blythe loves to read comments (especially the most aggressive kind) on the Web regarding his work. Resolution will be out on January 23rd.

In the present case, Mick Mars, Mötley Crüe’s guitarist, is neither the most talkative, nor the most committed of musicians when it comes to interviews. When we ask him the meaning or the reason behind the sudden re-release of the band’s albums, his answer is a terse: “I don’t know”. He couldn’t even tell us what the atmosphere’s like during his own band’s tours, since, on his own admission: “When I’m on tour, what I do is, I come in, I play, I leave”. In this instance, we wanted to know more about the atmosphere during the shared Mötley Crüe/Poison tour, given that the relationships between the various members of the band were a little tense. Most notably, Nikki Sixx, bassist for the former, and Bret Michaels, vocalist for the latter, had violently bashed one another on Internet in the months leading up to the announcement of this shared tour.

But we’ll forgive his answer to the next question, regarding Vince Neil’s (the Crüe’s singer) strong presence in the media in the past year, due to his legal setbacks and sometimes violent love affairs. “How are the other members of the band living this situation? Do they talk together about that? Aren’t they a little upset about being associated with all those problems?” Mick Mars’ answer: “No comment”.

Nevertheless, we did manage to learn a few things regarding the band’s future, as well as his own current affairs.




We started by commenting on a statement made by Tommy Lee, who considers that the time for studio albums is now over due to the evolution of the record industry. Mick Mars had this to say about it: “I would say it’s back to the way it was in the sixties, singles, EPs and things like that. When you go on iTunes or whatever, you can see what’s downloaded. A lot of bands ruin the other stuff… You would have to buy a whole record just to have one song. It’s so much better and so much easier the way it was back in the sixties: you hear something like the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, you would go out and just buy that, you know? Without having to have all the rest of the stuff.” Despite this, Mötley Crüe will continue to release studio albums. The next one could be released “possibly in 2013”.

We also got a little update on his activities outside of Mötley Crüe. For the man is rather busy: “I’ve been working with a lot of people, like Crashdïet and James Durbin, of course, with Twiggy [Ramirez, Marilyn Manson’s bassist]. Lots of different people. Terry Bozzio as well. That takes us back a little bit! [laughs] That sort of things. Trying to play a lot of different things with a lot of different people, in a lot of different styles, approaches of their music not to break away, but to expand on what I already know. I know how to play guitar, but I want to know even more different styles. I’ve been playing weird stuff, like flamenco or Hispanic music, on guitar solos, when I had to do that, like finger picking or Gipsy kind of style. I’m trying to expand on that. Even though I’m an old geezer, it doesn’t mean I can’t still learn! [laughs]”

Regarding his participation to former American Idol contestant James Durbin’s album, he declares, in a more detailed way: “I think he has a very good chance of making it, like big time. But he has to persist and to keep listening to what’s going on. I think he’s pretty hip to what’s going on, as far as current music and stuff like that goes. Actually, I think his next album will be harder that this one”. With such a career as his, does being involved in a young artist’s first album make if him young again, if only during the recording? “Ah, no, I still feel like I’m as old as I am! [laughs]” It was also a good opportunity to compare the working methods from the two eras: “Recording in the 80s was a lot different, ‘cause we were recording to tape. So we had to cut the tape for the best drums track, as we’d go through the songs several times. We’d cut the tape up in sections for the best drums track. Then we would go back, and I would record my guitar parts. Maybe Nikki would record the bass part first, or I would do the guitar parts until we got it right. We didn’t cut the tape on me, I just had to keep playing it again and again, until it was the way that I was happy with it, the way the producer was happy with it. Today, with Pro Tools, we kind of pass the hard drive around. If I was to go to DJ Ashba’s place, he’s got some stuff that we’ve written, so we can go there and just put in on hard drive then send it to James and Nikki, and they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s cool, but could you try this?’ We just play around with different ideas, and it’s so much faster and easier.”

As for his solo album, about which he insisted he wouldn’t enter the studio before finding the perfect musicians, his search seems to be doing well, even if he can give no name as of yet: “I still got to talk to my lawyer and to the people themselves. I know who I want to get involved with, but I don’t want to say who it is, because if I do, that would be a rumor, wouldn’t it? I don’t want to start a rumor thing. But I’ve pretty much picked out who I want to play with. And I’m sure they’ll want to play with me, I’m positive”.

To conclude, on a lighter note, we broached the subject of the band’s demands on tour or for a concert. Mick Mars confirms that the band did ask for seventy towels on the occasion of their performance at the Hellfest: “But we do worse stuff, we’re Mötley Crüe! [laughs] It depends on where we play. If we’re in the US, we do some whack stuff, but when we’re over here, we get pretty limited. We have limited time, and we don’t do a lot of headliners here. We’re mostly playing festivals and stuff. We have little extra stuff. We just get on, play and get off stage. We do as much as we can, but we can’t pick chicks out of the crowd and have them dance around on stage and go topless, or anything like that! [laughs]”. Which, as you’ll all agree, is a real pity, if only from a strictly egalitarian point of view.

Interview conducted on Thursday 8th December by phone.
Transcription and translation: Saff’, with help from Stan

Mötley Crüe’s website: motley.com

Nevertheless, Gojira manage to make a living from their music, even if it isn’t the most accessible kind. We therefore had to ask him advice on how to make it in this world.

We also took the opportunity to learn more about the musical evolution in the band’s next album, the lyrics, and the Sea Shepherd EP we’re still waiting for.

The following is an extremely rich and thorough interview with a very nice man who managed to remain simple, contrary to what some bitter (or jealous) people may think.

Radio Metal : What happened with the Sea Shepherd EP? How is it coming along?

Joe Duplantier (guitar/vocals) : We’ve had a lot of setbacks and technical problems that got us very late. For instance, a hard drive with a lot of takes we’d made just crashed. It was quite a hard blow a couple of months ago. We were working on the new album, we were almost ready to finish everything… When I arrived in the US, I found somebody who managed to get all the information back, meaning the EP’s audio files. I’ve been able to get my hands on them not so long ago. Now I’ve got everything, I need to sit down and work on it, there’s still a lot to do… I need to finish mixing and add a couple of vocals we’ve been recording. It’s not much, but I basically don’t have a second for myself right now, which means I don’t have the time to work on it. Nobody will do it for me, so I’ll just start working on it when we’re done with the album. We’ll release this fucking EP eventually! It means a lot to us and we’re a bit pissed off we couldn’t release it last September.

So it should be out in 2012…

Yes.

You recently signed a deal with Roadrunner Records, a big label. The way it works is quite unknown and fantasized. Can you describe in practical terms what it’s like to work with Roadrunner?

A lot of these fantasies about big labels are true. People in general dread a lot of things regarding these big labels, and those fears are justified. But Roadrunner’s case is quite unique. In my opinion, it’s just a team of really professional, really enthusiastic people who do their job really well. We don’t receive any directions from the label, artistically speaking. They just pick precisely the bands they’ll sign for some reason or another. We fit in the category of the bands they signed because they already had an identity, a strength, a bit like bands like Opeth or Korn.

When you announced you’d signed with Roadrunner, the feedback was mostly positive, but some purists’ reactions were a bit more negative. These people worry because, “when a band’s situation is too comfortable, they don’t write with their guts anymore”. What do you think about that, and what would you answer to that?

I’d say they might be right. I’m not in the best position to judge. I’m in the thick of the action. As I’m talking to you right now, I’m in front of my computer, I’ve got a mike in front of me, I’m writing lyrics, I’m totally into it. Gojira really is my life, it’s my job. So I’m not really the right person to judge. I think there are people who have been following us since the very beginning and who may be more qualified to talk about what’s happening inside the band just by listening to the music. What’s important to me, at the end of the day, is the music. So maybe they’re right, but in my whole life, in my whole career as a musician, I’ve never had the time to take a rest, I’ve never had the chance to see what it’s like to have some support from a label so far, to have some comfort, to buy a house for instance. I’m so very far from that! So I remain quite far from these considerations or fantasies. I write with my guts, with my companions in adversity, and we’re more like warriors than lucky bastards that get lulled into whatever by some big label. I think those people have too much time on their hands to think about all these things, all these fantasies, but the truth is that you just have to listen to the music. You can’t really plan anything. But maybe they’re right, maybe after a couple of years with Roadrunner our music will sound like shit, I don’t know.

Of course it’s not the same, but it can’t stay the same anyway. I’m 35 now, and if I was living in the same conditions than when I was 16, I would definitely have some serious issues! It would mean that I’d still leave with my mom and dad, in my basement, and that I would we wearing baggy jeans and sneakers, looking like nothing. As you get older, it’s normal to want to work with professionals, to want to be in touch with the world. So of course, there’s gonna be a lot of nostalgic, early fans that will say: “Yeah, on their first album they had so much rage!”. But come on, I’m 35 now! You grow up, you get older and then you do what you can. I try to analyze our music and it’s true that there are things from our first album that you won’t find anymore, because we were maybe 14 or 17 years old at the time. And now, some deeper, richer, more interesting things are popping up, because we’re more experienced. It’s not the same albums, but that’s how life goes, everything changes all the time. When you buy something, at first it’s new, and then it gets old, you can’t help it. With a human life, it’s exactly the same: you change, you evolve and I think it’s interesting to remain flexible when you follow a band, and to accept its evolution.

Even if you’re the most famous French metal band, just a few years ago you could hardly make a living from your music. Can you talk about your current financial situation?

Well, that’s quite simple, my bank account is completely empty! I’m waiting for an advance from the label so I can save some money for the months to come, because basically, if we’re not touring, we don’t get any money. So when you sign a record deal, you get an advance from a label, and you have to pay tons of commissions everywhere: management, lawyers, different charges to produce the record and so on. What’s left in the end is ridiculous, it’s just one month’s pay. OK, we’re a bit famous, but we don’t sell records. Records just don’t sell. The ones we sell basically fund the recording of the album. It’s a reality you have to understand in music business in general, metal isn’t the only one to suffer from that. We didn’t have the chance to live during the great era when people made money from record sales, that doesn’t exist anymore. Now, the way to make money is selling merchandising and touring. It’ll be the next step for us, a step that will allow us to make money, but we don’t make fortunes. We make enough money to live and work full time on Gojira, and that’s huge. Some months are a bit more fruitful and we can afford a new guitar or something, but for instance it’s very difficult to buy a car or an apartment because we don’t have a contract from an employer or an insurance. We’ve got music contracts, but when you have to talk to a banker… A couple of years ago I was like: “Fuck, I’d like to buy a house! What am I supposed to do?” And actually, I still can’t.

Concretely, are you still contract workers?

I’ve moved to New York for a few months, so I guess I won’t be able to keep being one. I plan to stay here for a while because a lot of stuff is happening here for the band, so it’s better if one of us lives here. I just love this city, it does me good to be there. So I don’t know if I will be able to keep this status, but yes, the three other members of the band definitely will.

So what is it like to be a musician in the US?

It’s completely different, it’s the jungle here! Just for social insurance, it’s absolutely crazy! It’s extremely expensive. A lot of people around me who work in the studio just don’t have any. It means that if they break an arm, they’re ruined for the rest of their life. The conditions are really tough, but if you really wanna work, it’s easier to find a job. You can also get fired more easily, but there are a lot more opportunities. When I try to explain what it’s like in France, they can’t believe it, they can’t understand how it works.

You’re one of the few French rock/metal bands that can actually make a living with their music. What kind of advice would you give to our readers who play music and want to be able to live from it? What should they do or not do?

You have to keep all your fears and questions away. I remember when we started, everybody was like: “Guys, what are you thinking? You should concentrate on your studies, what the fuck are you doing?” We didn’t think about it too much and for years we just worked really hard. To those who are just starting, I’d say don’t rush, don’t spend half your time on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on. You have to practice, play, work very hard on your instrument, and not worry about how you’re gonna make it, how you’re gonna become a star. You have to concentrate on the core of the actual material. That’s what we did for around ten years: before we even had a website, we had already recorded five demos. I think that’s what people should do. I grew up in another era, in more “old school” times, and we recorded demos on tapes for thirty francs. My advice would definitely be to give up all the bullshit, to stop thinking about marketing and hairdos and tattoos, and concentrate on your playing instead.

Do you think that too many bands nowadays just go and play in front of an audience even though they barely know how to play their instruments and their own compositions?

Not every band is like that, actually. I think there’s a lot of very talented bands emerging from everywhere, especially in France. I know that sometimes, you’re surprised by a band that’s been around for two years, that can kick everybody’s ass, and they just deserve more attention. My advice would be not to think too much about how to be successful, but to keep on working, to go on stage and then just go for it! You have to believe in your music and to keep in mind that everything is possible. That’s just true, everything is possible! You never know, maybe the next Metallica is currently hiding in the middle of nowhere, like somewhere in the Creuse or something. There’s no rule, no need to care about statistics, about what usually happens. I remember that everybody was telling us to go to Paris if we wanted to make it. Well, no, we stayed in Bayonne, and it didn’t keep us from being successful abroad.

All the more so since your music isn’t exactly very accessible…

It’s because we’ve put our guts and all our heart in it, and because we’ve never lost hope.

Regarding the next album, you’ve been insisting in an interview on the importance of jamming. You were saying that big bands, before actually writing, were spending hours rehearsing and so on. Can you develop that thought?

When you listen to a record, you want to hear people playing together. Whether it be a singer, an artist or a band, whatever, it has to be real. What’s interesting is to feel the vibration that exist between three, four or five musicians, and you can only get this by playing together as a band. We’ve already composer on a computer, but you just can’t skip the rehearsing stage. There’s this trend that gets bigger and bigger, that consists in editing the drums on a computer and drawing up crazy plans, then not being able to play them on stage. So yeah, I do think jamming is important.

It seems that you worked with a producer for the first time for this album.

Yeah. I’ve always been involved in the production, basically I’ve always followed Gojira’s recordings from A to Z. I do the pre-production myself every time. We record ourselves in our rehearsing place, then we go to the studio with a producer, but I follow the whole process, I take care of the artistic management: “Right here it must sound like this, there it must sound like that.” Production is a very precise thing. For this record I needed somebody to bring something new to the band, especially to our sound. And I stumbled upon this guy, Josh Wilbur, who produced Lamb Of God’s records and many others. He’s full of energy, he gets new ideas all the time. We produce the album together.

Did Josh give you any artistic advice or was he just sticking to the sound?

It’s quite hard to give us artistic advice… For him it’s difficult, because he’s working with a band that does exactly what it wants. So yeah, from time to time he’s giving some artistic ideas, but mostly regarding the performance itself, like: “This note vibrates, try and play it more flatly”, and so on. It’s just very technical stuff, he doesn’t really get involved in the melodies, the atmosphere, the tracks’ structure. That being said, for one of the songs he told us he thought some kind of development was missing at the end of the track. We talked about it with Mario, and we thought he’d just pointed at the song’s weakness, and we totally agreed with him. He’s like an hear, an eye from the outside, he points things out at us and then we agree or not. But his input is mostly about the sound. He and I had a couple of meetings in New York to talk about our approach regarding the sound, I explained what I wanted and when we placed the mike, it was just like I wanted it, how I’d explained. He makes my expectations come true from a technical point of view.

Is not listening to the ideas he could have brought up a choice on principle, or is it just that his ideas didn’t seem relevant?

That’s a very interesting question… That’s the problem, actually. It’s a bit of both. It’s on principle because when a band has an album out, if the producer changed the melodies and so on, then it’s no longer the band’s record, with its strengths and its weaknesses. I do want to keep some of our weaknesses, some of our mistakes, because that’s what makes us truly ourselves. So yeah, it’s mostly on principle, but then sometimes he’s suggesting very relevant things so we’re listening to him. We just keep the right to choose if we like it or not at the end of the day.

Yeah, maybe. I don’t know why I said that, it’s ridiculous! Sometimes I’ve got something in mind, I say something, it’s transcribed in some way and then when I read it I’m surprised. What I meant is that I don’t have anything special to say, you know what I mean? It’s Gojira, there’s gonna be double bass pedal, sharp guitars… I hope it’ll be a Gojira album in which people who like us will find what they like about us, except more powerful. Since the beginning, what we do is a kind of a quest for power, depth, beauty, poetry, dream. We keep on aiming high when we’re working on our music. We really have huge expectations, so if we manage to make a hundredth of what we want to do, it’ll be nice! [laughs] So when I say they won’t be surprised, it’s just out of false modesty, because of course I hope that they’ll be surprised and that we’ll fuckin’ kick their asses!

Now you’ve signed with Roadrunner, you will have to control your communication way more carefully, because everything you say will necessarily be said again! [laughs]

Yeah, but it’s funny. I’m not afraid to contradict myself, it’s not important, I’m not at the head of a country! [laughs] Basically, it’ll be okay, it’s gonna be an amazing record, I’m quite happy with it for now. I’m currently recording the vocals so I can’t really have a lot of hindsight, but I still think it will be quite thundering. It’s full of energy, and way more mature than before. I already love this record, even though it’s not finished yet.

You really like to experiment with sounds from objects that have nothing to do with actual instruments. Until now, you’ve used bamboo a lot. What did you use on this record? A door, from what I’ve heard?

Yeah, that’s a transition for the album. Mario wrote the whole thing from A to Z, he created a kind of rhythmic pattern. I insisted on the fact that we had to use some unusual sounds, because being in a band doesn’t mean you have to stick to a bass, a guitar and drums. We’re here to express ourselves, we’re artists, so why not use a door or a tub to make noise? Why should we restrict ourselves to drums? So we wanted to broaden our horizons a bit regarding the sound, by experimenting like we always do on our records. When we walked into the studio, we discovered its metal door sounded awesome. Mario came back with his sticks, tried a few things out, and then we thought: “Wow, we need to experiment with that!” After that, other things will come as well.

Like what?

You wanna know everything? [laughs] I’ve got other slightly exotic instruments in mind, but I need to work on it, I’m not there already.

Then it means you will have to bring a door on stage when you play live!

[Laughs] No, that’s precisely what’s interesting in recording an album. There are three different schools. Some bands only wanna do on the record what they’ll be able to do live. Some think of the album as an unlimited space of artistic freedom, and then change their music so it can be played on stage. We follow the third way, we’re in-between, a bit of both. We’re an old-school rock/metal band, some of our tracks are like “one-two-three-four-bang”, it’s great and we can do it on stage without any problem. We don’t use any specific effects but we allow ourselves some space on our albums to go further, to add absolutely crazy endings, to put some backward guitar effects, metallic plates, wind sounds and so on. Then we go on the road with only two guitars, a bass, drums and still play everything.

On your previous album, Christian [Andreu] and Jean Michel [Labadie] were more or less left out of the writing process and pretty much discovered the tracks just like the other listeners. Was it the same on this record?

[Laughs] It’s a bit exaggerated. No, it’s not the same, the four of us really worked together on this record. Mario and I build the core of all compositions, we work on the production, on all the arrangements, most of the time it’s just the two of us in the studio. But when we’re actually giving birth to a song, when we’re really composing, that’s the four of us. There’s the four of us in there, playing the songs together, we’re very united in that. Even if Mario and I like to meet up to talk, work on the arrangements, it just flows naturally. They’re not excluded from any process. For that matter I think they were happy to spend some more time in France while we were starting the work in the US.

Fuck, this question pisses me off! [laughs] This album will ultimately be about very personal things, just like every Gojira record. But since I’m working on it, it’s a bit hard to talk about it, but there’s something more human on this album than on the previous ones. Before, I tended to write about life and death in a very generic way. I was speaking from a very spatial point of view, talking about humanity as a species, about other dimensions. These are things that fill me, I was very honest when I was writing about that, about the various potentialities that exist in the universe and that inspire me. This time, though, I went back to kind of daily issues that are more connected to our identity within society. I’d say it’s more down-to-earth. I talk about my issues with freedom in this life, in this society, about the identity issue: what am I? I’ve got a name, a status, I sing in a band, I’m French, I’ve got a first name, a social security number, but what I am beyond that? I feel like a wild child who just came out of the woods.

So you’re trying to find your place in the world?

I think I’m quite comfortable with my current place in the world, but I’m thinking about it. I also take into account all the pain around me, everybody’s identity issues, the people who spend their life missing out, missing stuff, which finally kills them. They’re just waiting for one thing: retirement, and when they do retire, they’re seventy and they’re suffering because they just watched their life pass by. I’m thinking about all of this, I’m trying to figure out my issues with freedom in my own life, what is freedom… The closer you get to yourself and to your heart, the closer you get to others.

So do you consider yourself free?

Yeah, but I can’t help but notice that even though I chose to be a musician, and I am, even though I can choose to record an album, and I do, getting up at 8 and taking the subway to go to the studio still gets on my nerve. I’m free to make the decision to do what I wanna do with my life, but I’m not free to do whatever comes to my mind every second. This album is a reflection on what freedom is.

Basically, you’re wondering whether freedom can really be absolute…

Yes, or at least where you can find it. I think you can be handcuffed, behind bars in a cage and still feel free, it’s more like a state of mind. It’s something that’s happening in a spiritual, moral level. I don’t think it’s a physical condition, somebody in jail can be way more free than a billionaire on his yacht. The album isn’t an essay about philosophy, it’s not something that claims to give you the truth, it’s just a reflection.

Would you like to be more free?

Of course, it’s my main concern in life.

Do you already have an idea for the title?

Yeah, but I’m not one hundred percent sure about it, and I don’t wanna disclose it yet. I didn’t even tell my mom!

Nowadays, a lot of newish bands change their line-up quite often, but you never did. What’s your secret?

We’re just lucky we found each other, the four of us. I used to not talk about that too much, because I don’t really believe in luck, but still, we found each other and we get along very well. We went through hard times, ups and downs, but we’ve always overcome them through discussion, by talking to each other. Communication is really important in a band. I’d say that’s the secret.

Can you picture Gojira without one of you guys?

Your questions are definitely pissing me off! [laughs] No! Even if it happens one day, I don’t know how I’d react. Right now, I really have a hard time picturing that. The main part of what makes the band’s strength is the fact that we’re so close. I don’t really like your question, I don’t wanna think about that! [laughs]

Now that you’re an international band, you inevitably don’t play that much in France anymore. What does it feel like to find your audience back? There was a lot of emotion when you played at the Sonisphere last year…

Yeah, that’s true! When we go on tour, we’re really focused on doing everything right. Wherever we are, we try to do our best and give everything we have. To tell you the truth, we’re not even trying: we’re at our best all the time. We’re in a trance, and in the end, we analyze what’s happening and what we’re feeling when the show is over, like: “Wow, it was awesome to play there!” We’re very industrious, very busy, we have to change our guitar strings, get ready, warm up, concentrate, and we tackle every single concert in the same way. It’s true that the Sonisphere gig was something. We’ve played in France a lot and that’s still a big part of things, we do a lot of stuff in France compared to some other countries. It had been a while since we’d been on stage and the crowd was amazing. There were something like 30,000 or 40,000 people!

We’ve heard that your brother Mario was painting. How it is coming along?

Yeah, he’s hopelessly hyperactive!

It looks like all drummers are hyperactive…

Yeah, that’s true. First of all, to be a drummer, you must be a bit crazy. Mario is a very talented, hyperactive guy who’s creating all the time. His creative production is unceasing. He never stops, he takes photos, he paints, he draws, he plays drums, he composes on a synth, he surfs… He’s hyperactive! It doesn’t show immediately because he’s a very quiet, composed guy, but in fact he’s incredibly creative. Everything he tries, he does it amazingly well.

Interview conducted on Friday December 16th, 2011 by phone.

Transcription : Isa
Traduction : Chloé
Gojira’s website : gojira-music.com

Heavy Metal Food celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. One year of interviews, columns, recipes, militant videos and daily posts on Facebook. Thank you for your fidelity. You’ve given the lie to those who didn’t believe in it and, through your comments, you’ve undermined the many prejudices we remain the victims of.

During my interviews, I’m always surprised by what my guests tell me. Their lucid approach to their lifestyle and the honesty of their confidences are a great source of satisfaction to me. Because it’s not always easy for me to convince the youngest among you that eating healthy is highly important, and that being addicted to junk food, drugs and alcohol is a dangerous thing. The fact that all these musicians we admire confirm what Heavy Metal Food is trying to teach is a precious support. “Don’t fall for extremes. Don’t stint yourselves, but with moderation”, as Seth (vocals) from Septic Flesh says in the following interview. “Don’t fall into a kind the inevitable routine and temptations” life on tour is strewn with, as drummer Fotis insists.

I realize that food is a formidable way to get closer, to convey life and love. So I would like to wish you all an happy new year with your family, gathered around a good meal you will have cooked with passion.

Peace.

Stay Hungry. Stay Metal.

Gilles LARTIGOT
The Heavy Metal Cook

Interview conducted at the Hellfest 2011

The members of the band perform on stage drenched in blood. Pig blood, most of the time, but sometimes human. Selim Lemouchi, the band’s guitarist and mastermind, went as far as painting one of the walls of his apartment with his own blood for magic rituals. For this interview, the subject of his fascination with death even led us to talk about his own suicide and the way he would go about it! We’ll let you discover his answer in the interview.

In short, the band represents the very cliché the detractors of metal like to ridicule: “a bunch of blood-covered crazies carrying out morbid rituals”.

However, if the aforementioned people ever happen upon this article, I would only tell them one thing: read the interview. What the extremely humble Selim Lemouchi has to say is essential to destroy this prejudice. These sorts of things are marginal and can be a little scary, but they’re neither futile nor devoid of meaning or interest. And as you will see, Selim is far from crazy. He’s a pleasant, humble sort of fellow (he even envies the listeners who have the opportunity to discover his album for the first time. According to him, his opinion is worth less than that of his audience, since they’re more objective), a smart man with a different vision of life. Different, yes – but still pertinent. To give you an example, we would be hard put trying to contradict him when he wonders whether we really mourn the fate of deceased relatives or friends, or the fact that they abandoned us.

Selim Lemouchi (guitar) : Well, we needed a good record label in the United States, and they wanted to have a good band, so that’s about it [laughs]. We were looking long time for a good partner who could help us out in North America, Canada, and we send them some of the tracks of the record to listen to. They were very excited about it, and wanted to work with us. That’s basically it, and I hope they will do a good job so we will be able to go on tour in America and spread our name even further.

Your music has a very psychedelic rock vibe, like it used to be in the 60s’ and the 70s’, not only in the sound or the influences but in your way of writing music, of starting with a melody or a riff and exploiting all the ways of playing this melody or this riff. Do you think that nowadays bands have lost that?

I don’t know actually. To be honest, I don’t consider ourselves to be specifically a 70s’ or 60s’ oriented rock band. I think that we’re a rock’n'roll band who is not afraid of exploring all the possibilities that is within the music. Me as a person, in writing the music and writing the lyrics, I am very influenced by people like Ennio Morricone and other movie-score writers, songwriters like Tom Waits and also a lot of heavy metal, death metal, black metal stuff… I guess when you put all of those together and you make a cocktail of them, something like the Devil’s Blood will come out. That’s not my place to say what other bands are missing or doing wrong or doing right, because I can only speak for myself. For me, this is the only music that I can make.

It’s commonly said that the best way to find out if a melody or a song is good is to play it acoustically. Is this why you always start to write a song with your acoustic guitar?

I guess that’s because it’s the easiest way. You don’t need to plug in anything, you don’t need to look up any effect, you just have your guitar and your inspiration. You can have a piece of paper and a pen to write down the words as the music and the words come in at the same time. And you know, that’s a very practical instrument. You can take one with you for example, anywhere you want to go, and without a lot of trouble. It’s more practical than a piano or something else.

Perhaps, especially the way it came across to you at least, there’s probably some truth to it. The artwork itself got created in a very spontaneous way. We simply gave our music and leave it to the artist, and he created what you see in the booklet. On a book, in the outside, you only have the title and the composer or the writer, and when you open up the book, this is when the experiences start to flow. So I guess in a way when you open our book also the experience starts to flow as you go along with the music and experience every songs together with the art.

The next question may seem a bit weird to you, but there I go: while preparing this interview I realised that I had actually only a few questions about your music, but a tons of questions about the meaning of it and what’s behind it. Does that often happen to you with the journalists?

Yes, there are a lot of people trying to get me to explain the lyrics or the titles. The only unfortunate thing is that those have to accept that I don’t talk about this too much, because I can’t, because it’s impossible. I cannot explain the lyrics any further. They have already explained themselves. I can imagine that these questions arise when you’re listening to our music and reading our lyrics. A lot of questions appear, but these questions can’t be answered by me or by anyone else, but only by the listener himself. When these questions are not projected so much on the band or in the music but in one’s self, I think the questions become a little bit more interesting, and the answers themselves become more important.

Does that mean that all the lyrics have a meaning but you want to keep it for you?

No, not exactly. What I mean is that there is not one meaning, and my meaning is not the same as yours. To give you my meaning would ruin yours, so it would make no sense. It’s like you’re standing in front of a painting, and me telling you what you should see, instead of you telling me what you see. You’re telling yourself what you see. Music and art are something that should be experienced subjectively. When you try to objectivise these things, they lose their strenght, they lose their appeal. When we explain everything until there’s nothing left to explain, we kill everything that was alive inside. What I’m trying to say is your opinion or the meaning you find within the music and the lyrics of The Devil’s Blood is equally as true, as important and as valid as mine. So that’s all. Find your own meaning.

That’s interesting because since you wrote the songs and you wrote the lyrics you have maybe more legitimity to talk about it.

No, because I don’t see it as I wrote it. I merely… received it. It’s like this reality was already a reality before I wrote the song. The song itself previously existed, probably for thousands years, and the only thing that I did was take it out of the ether and concretize it in this world so everybody can listen to it. That’s the end of my participation. It’s not something that I created. It’s something that I have allowed to be experienced.

Absolutely, and maybe even lower! Because I put so much thoughts, and so much efforts into it that I would never be able to get the same amount of new, spontaneous feelings from the record that can have someone that never heard it before. I envy the person who will be able to listen to the record for the first time. I guess it’s the same if you are the director of a movie. You’ve made this beautiful movie, you go into the theaters and people are watching it: it would never have the same amount of emotions to you as it will for someone who has absolutely no idea on what’s going to happen. That’s the way we experience life: not by what we expect or what we can predict but by everything we can’t predict and can’t expect, everything that surprises us, and everything that turns our mind into a different direction and confuses us. That’s when the interesting stuff happen.

Ok, so that means that artists cannot enjoy a work of art like listeners, or like viewers, like others, because they have no surprise…

They are closer to it, which makes it more difficult to appreciate it in a spontaneous way, obviously.

Do you think that the most important and interesting thing in music isn’t actually the music itself but what is behind the music?

I guess it’s different for everyone. The mystical power of music is that it can make you think about things that you didn’t dreamed possible before, that you can experience emotions at the touch of a button that you might not otherwise be able to experience. So I guess music does have a very powerful, magical quality to it. If this is use in a proper manner then it becomes a very, very powerful tool.

On a documentary about you and the band, you declared that from the age 16 to 26, you’ve been living a life that wasn’t reflecting who you really were. Do you think that this kind of struggle concerns a lot of musicians, and that that’s why they write music?

Perhaps? Perhaps this is a common trait that a lot of people share, this sense of unbelonging, of not being home in this world, perhaps, I don’t know, I can only speak for myself, obviously.

Because that is actually the meaning of a painting you have at home which represents an androgynous person who’s punishing herself, right?

That was a part of it I suppose, yeah. That’s just a painting I made a few years ago… The painting itself does not symbolize me, it’s just something that I wanted to paint. It doesn’t say so much about me as it does about certain principles that I wanted to translate into art.

At your place, there is also a wall painted with your own blood. I suppose, then, since it’s an important ritual for you, that you also go on stage with real and human blood?

Well, human blood is a bit difficult to get in such large quantities, it has happened by the way, but usually we use pig blood.

No, not tempted, but this is a reality of life that one day we shall experience, yeah. It’s the ultimate initiation into one of the largest mystery of the universe, and it’s not something that I need to hurry up at this point [he laughs], because I have enough to do. But it’s not something that scares me. It’s something that beckons me in the distance, like a safe heaven, like a port, you know? My life is on the seas, and one day I will put my ship into the port, and walk the endless hills. It’s a very joyous and merry thing to think about. It will be the defining moment of my life.

Do you think that you won’t wait for death? That maybe some day you’re gonna decide when the time is right for you to leave?

I hope so. I hope so, but it is of course up to destiny, it’s difficult to say. But I hope I’ll be able to make the choice myself.

Ok, and do you know how you’d do it?

To be honest I didn’t give it that much thought. I think I’d probably set for hanging.

Both, because the reason people cry at funerals is not because they pity the dead for being dead, it’s for themselves being left behind. We don’t cry to shed tears over the ended life, but we cry over our own unended lives and over still having to continue walking through this life without that certain someone who was very close to us, which makes our travel that little bit more difficult. At the same time I envy those who have been blessed with what I already called the vision of the mystery, the perfection of the end. So I guess it’s a little bit of both, and there is no shame in any of that. It’s a very human emotion to feel sadness or envy, jealousy, rage, anger… These are what defines us as living beings and we should never be afraid of any of that.

Sex and love are also very present on this record, in the lyrics and in the artwork. How is love related to death for you?

Completely and totally. They are one and the same, in the same way that hate and love are so closely tied together by passion.

Interview conducted on Monday, December, 12th, 2011 by phone
Transcrption : Chloé

The Devil’s Blood’s website : www.thedevilsblood.com