In couple of months, Blind Guardian, return to Greece for three concerts. Rockoverdose.gr and Apostolos Pantazoglou, took the chance to speak with the band’s guitarist, Marcus Siepen. You can read the interview below.
Rockoverdose.gr: Hello Marcus and welcome to Rockoverdose.gr. What are you up at the moment?
In the moment we are preparing for the upcoming shows, festival season will start for us in about 2 weeks and we are still talking about setlists and possible songs, equipment things and everything related to the gigs.
Rockoverdose.gr: A couple weeks ago you released the album "Memories Of A Time To Come". What was the reception of the album by the fans?
All the feedback that I got so far was awesome. Of course there are some people that missed their personal fave songs, but I guess it is impossible to please everybody when it comes to a best of album, the only solution would be to put all our songs on that album, and that would be a bit too much 😉 But as I said, the general response it great, people love the new versions of the songs and also really appreciate the cover artwork and booklet, so we are very happy with the feedback.
Rockoverdose.gr: This is your first best-of album (if we exclude "The Forgotten Tales") but you didn't do what most bands do - take some songs from your catalogue and just release a compilation album. You worked on every song again. Why did you do it?
Because we don't like this other version of a Best Of album that you just mentioned. If you just put together a couple of songs that have already been released in the very same versions I don't really see any reason why somebody should be interested in this record. We wanted to add value to the whole album, that’s why we decided to remix everything and even re-record 4 songs. Like this our fans of course know the songs on this album, but they don't know those versions. The Cover and booklet are as important for us, so we put the same amount of work in those ones, going through so many old pics and writing liner notes for all the songs. We want the whole package to be great and interesting for our fans.
Rockoverdose.gr: How hard was to choose songs from a 24 year career?
Pretty hard! We wanted to cover our whole career, so we wanted at least one song from every album to be on “Memories”, but we also wanted to reach a certain flow when you listen to the album, that's the reason why there is no chronological running order for example. We also wanted to avoid having too many songs representing one aspect of our music, so we for example skipped “Wheel of Time”. We definitely thought that this song would deserve a spot on this Best Of, but we already had “Sacred worlds” and “And then there was silence” on the list, and a third very long, epic and orchestral song would have been a bit too much.
Rockoverdose.gr: It must have been quite interesting to work again in songs that you haven't played live for quite some time.
Definitely! While doing this we rediscovered some old classics ourselves, “Somewhere far beyond” for example. I have always been aware of the fact that I really liked that song, but only now, when we were listening to our own albums, I realized that this is one of the best tracks that we have ever recorded. “Follow the blind” is another example, we only played this one live a single time, back in 1989, after that we never played it anymore, never rehearsed it, it was pretty much forgotten and rediscovered only now. Maybe we should listen to our old albums more often 😉
Rockoverdose.gr: You also had for us a big surprise, releasing some of you old-school material when the band's name was still Lucifer's Heritage. Whose idea was this?
It was our idea, there is still a lot of people asking about those demos, and of course the original demos are not available anymore. So putting all those old recordings (together with all the other demos we made over the years) on a third CD was the perfect opportunity to make this still available for everybody who is interested. Like this people get an idea how our songs change from demo to the final version, and they also get an idea how we sounded like back in the very early days of the band. I think it is a cool thing to be able to check out such recordings.
Rockoverdose.gr: Is there any more material from those days?
No, at least nothing that is “presentable”. There are a lot of live tapes or rehearsal tapes from that time, but no proper recordings, nothing that we would release. They were only done with tape recorders, so most of them sound horrible. While it is fun for us to listen to them from time to time I doubt that anybody else would really be enjoying those tapes.
Rockoverdose.gr: Let's go to the next steps. You are working on two new releases right? The new studio album and the orchestral project. Could you tell us a couple of things about them?
We are working on both albums in parallel, we already recorded 6 songs for the orchestral project, and we started to work on new songs for the next regular Blind Guardian album. In the moment I can't really tell you which one will come first, that depends on our progress in song writing, if we should finish 10 or 12 “regular” songs first then the next album will be the regular BG album, otherwise we would go for the orchestral project first. But as I said, we only just started to write new songs, so it is way too early in the moment to say anything about those songs, or to think about when we might be done with writing.
Rockoverdose.gr: If I am correct you have been working on the orchestral album since the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy days. What happened and you let it aside?
It is correct that we are working on this project since ages already; I think we started in the middle of the 90's, but we never let it aside. What held us back for a very long time was the fact that we didn't know how to record this music, we didn't have an orchestra available, we could only work on our ideas, using programmed keyboards, and we didn't want the album to be programmed keyboards for sure. This situation only changed after we finally had the chance to record with a real orchestra when we did “At the edge of time”, since then things speeded up big time. But of course it is still a lot of work, we still have to write more songs, and even when a song is finished we need to transform everything into written music, since we can't give a tape to the orchestra, asking them to play something like that.
Rockoverdose.gr: You all are great Tolkien fans. How do you feel that you are responsible for connecting metal with Tolkien for a lot of people?
We didn't do this on purpose, it was never our intention to introduce Tolkien or any other writer that we love to our fans, but of course it is a cool thing of there are some people who discovered great books through our music. We just love basing our lyrics on the stories that we love ourselves and obviously a lot of our fans have the same taste in books 😉
Rockoverdose.gr: Last year you co-operated with Van Canto. How was it?
It was a very cool experience for me; especially I never did anything like this before. Stef contacted me and asked, if I would be interested in recording some “real” guitars for their album, and since we are good friends I immediately agreed to do it. So he sent me a demo of the song with vocals and piano, from there I composed the guitar lines, replacing the piano in the end. Originally we wanted to record my takes in our Twilight Hall studios, where Van Canto recorded most of the album, but whenever the band was here, we have been on the road ourselves, so in the end I went to Stef’s studio and recorded my takes there. I love the result and even more the experience I gained from that, Stef has a completely different way of working and composing, so I was forced to adapt to that, I guess I learned a lot from this.
Rockoverdose.gr: You’ve announced that you are coming again in Greece next June. You are pretty frequent visitors here - something which we really like of course. You have a quite devoted fan base here. Why do you think Greeks love you so much?
You should ask the Greek fans, not me 😉 But I think they respect and honor the fact that we always try to give them the best that we can give at that point in time, no matter if it comes to songwriting, productions or live shows. Whenever we do something, we give 100%, and people can see this.
Rockoverdose.gr: As far as I know in your Official Facebook page, the only fan club you linked is the Greek one. How come?
They deserve it! Greek fans are among the best, very loyal, very crazy and very devoted!
Rockoverdose.gr: Shall we expect any surprise in your upcoming shows here?
As mentioned before we are just preparing the upcoming shows, and there will for sure be a couple of surprises. There will be some songs in the set that we didn't play in ages, but I won't give you any names now, it would only spoil the surprise 😉 But I can tell you that 2 days ago we were talking about some VERY special and extremely rare songs for Greece, so be prepared for some surprises.
Rockoverdose.gr: Anything else you would like to say to the Greek fans?
We'll be back to Greece very soon, and I hope to see all of you at the shows again, let’s have some great parties together!
For Rockoverdose.gr
Apostolos Pantazoglou
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