Rockezine.com interview with Edguy on Feb 01, 2003

with Tobias Sammet on Feb 01, 2003

After five studio albums people started asking for a live album. And as Edguy are always willing to please their fans, that’s what they recorded. These young guys are conquering more and more of the metal world, with an attitude that, according to Roland Grapow, made him very jealous when he still was in Helloween. Who are these Edguys and what is their new album about? Rockezine sat down with the sympathetic singer Tobias Sammet and tried to pry some serious information out of this notorious joker...
		The first time I ever saw you guys was at Summer Breeze last year. When we saw the stage, and all the stuff you had put on it, my colleague and I said to each other: reminds of Maiden.
		And then you came and played, and we thought: well, this is the German Iron Maiden. How do you feel about this? We don’t necessarily want to sound like Iron Maiden; it’s a great band, but so are the Beatles. I really like Bruce Dickinson as a front man. People always compare me to him; but if I would have a guitar, they would probably compare me to Paul Stanley or Angus Young or whatever. I just want to move on stage, have the energy transported to the audience. Some people do fighting sports or martial arts to unleash energy, and we go on stage. It’s not a negative aggression; just unleashing energy. And that’s what Bruce Dickinson does as well. He’s a real energetic person, very restless. And that’s what I am when I’m on stage as well. ‘Cause when people just see a band standing around playing their songs it looks boring. When we play it’s like, no matter how many bands have played at this festival today, we just want to go out and do the best show that has been done. Move as much as possible and force the crowd to have fun. That’s why I am screaming and doing the weird things on stage, to have fun.
		So that’s why you have all the pyrotechnics and the big show and everything, to add to the impression you make? Well, we can go back to Maiden and Kiss again, those bands are visual. I think that’s what people pay for. They pay a lot of money to see a band and if they just go on stage and play their stuff, it’s like a public rehearsal. There are many different ways to come across, one is to go around screaming and jumping and making contact with the audience, another is to make a special show. Have pyros and statues and walkways between different levels.
		So is that why your tour poster raves about the special effects, pyrotechnics and bad jokes people get when they visit Edguy, and says nothing about the music at all? Well, the tour poster is for the fans, so they know what the show might look like. I mean, what kind of people would feel attracted to a poster like that in the streets? Not your grandmother, who doesn’t know the music anyway and thinks the creature looks disgusting. We just try to let our fans know what to expect; and they know what the music is about already. I don`t expect people to come to the tour that don’t know about the music. Of course the music is the first thing; if the music is bad, fireworks won’t do the job.
Wherever you have access to the internet there are metal fans		Your last tour was your first headlining tour? Well, the first one worldwide. We had already done some headlining shows in Germany and France and Sweden. But this was the first real long tour, a couple of festival gigs and the rest of them was headlining. This was the first tour where we did all the continents. No wait, I’m lying. I’ve never been to Africa. But I think there are some heavy metal fans over there… Many bands just concentrate on the finance-wise “important” countries, but there’s a lot of fans everywhere. So we said like: ok, what’s better than a vacation with your best friends in Australia? So let’s go there. Worst case it’s gonna be a vacation, best case we’ll play some great shows. It was a risk. We went there and everybody said: nobody ‘s gonna show up at the shows. There’s no metal scene in Australia, nobody knows you. But there was! And even in Africa; I have talked to this band who played maybe four shows in Africa. There are metal fans! Wherever you have access to the Internet there are metal fans. You just have to build it up. If you want your music to reach many people, you have to go to those people and show you exist. You have to show them why they should go out and buy your record.
		So is touring for you a way to promote your record, or is it more? What do you prefer, touring or recording songs? It’s hard to say. It’s kind of like the seasons. In summer you are longing for the winter, ‘cause it’s hot and you wanna have snow and go skiing, and when you have had a couple of weeks of skiing and cold weather, you long for spring, with the flowers coming out, and when it’s spring you long for nice summer evenings with barbecues. So you always are longing for the next season. Is a good comparison to the seasons of a band’s year. Recording an album is nice. It’s cool to write something, to see how it is built, and the thrill when something comes out better than you expected it to be. And on tour you get the reward. You go out and see the people and there’s the living proof that people liked the album, that it worked. When you go on stage and play a good show, and have the interaction between you and the audience, that’s something special I think. People have come to see you and you want to give them something back, you want them to have fun. That’s a great game, the interaction, not just stand there and say: ok, here I am, pay attention. It’s not just something that happens to the audience, it goes two ways. It’s nice to see on paper that you’ve sold so many records, but when you are there with so many people with real faces, it’s real.
		Your live album coming out in May is the first album you didn’t produce yourselves… We produced it ourselves! We wrote and played the stuff! But no, we were not there when the mix was done. And that was the first time. But we were supervising it, to see that things wouldn’t go out of hand. The guy who was doing it sent us CDRs and we would listen to it and say: ok, we need some more bass here, have you got another version of this song. So we kinda did keep it in our own hands.
		What do you think makes a live album special, as compared to a studio album? It’s a different thing; it shows the band very naked, very bare. This is what the band sounds like. In a studio, with today’s production options, any band can sound tight and well. But with a live-album, when for example you have a fucked-up drum sound, you cannot repair it. So it’s more honest, and it transports energy. Some live albums are just studio songs with a little audience in the background. I wanted a live album that sounded like Twisted Sister live at the Hammersmith Odeon. You can feel the band standing on stage, hear them breathe. That’s what makes the difference I think. A good live album is convincing, less anonymous.
		You are still very young, yet your band has been around for some time, you started in school.
		Nowadays there are lots of bands playing it, but back when you started heavy metal was mostly considered outdated. Did you get many negative reactions in the beginning? Only bad reactions. Everybody told us to stop. People were laughing at us. And asking if we had never heard about Pearl Jam or Nirvana, and telling us we made “ old-fashioned squealer metal”. I’m not talking about the band, but about squealing, like iiihiiiiiiiiihhhhh! They called it old-fashioned eighties stuff, but that was the music we just wanted to play. We thought it was best not to give a shit about what people said or did, like Blackie Lawless, just saying: I don’t give a shit, this is my kind of music, and if you don’t like it, fuck off. That was the attitude we had; and that gave us strength. But there were always people who laughed at us, and said: But you could be much more famous and make a lot of money playing a different kind of music. And I was like: So? If I want to make money I should go study and get a normal job. That’s not the reason I am doing it. We just make the music we like to make, and that’s the best thing that can happen to you. So we didn’t give a shot about those people. As long as you have your pride, and some food in the fridge… today we get a lot of food in the fridge, haha. But all we want to do is make our music. I think in the music anybody who thinks about which way to go, should act like that, say: I don’t give a shit; I accept that there are many people who think that the band is shit and the music sucks, and I can live with it. I think that’s the kind of rock and roll attitude people like Blackie Lawless have, and that really impressed me. They were true to themselves.
		How do you feel about the qualification “power metal”? Whatever people call our music. It doesn’t change the music itself. I say we play heavy metal but when someone says rock and roll, I say fine, when someone says you play speed metal, I say yeah, we do. I mean, there are many expressions for the same thing. It still is what it is. It’s a heavy kind of rock and roll music, and we all make it, even bands like Cradle of Filth basically make a heavy kind of rock and roll music. But I can handle power metal, bombastic metal, whatever. Even happy metal. There’s a lot of positive energy in our music. Sometimes people say heavy metal cannot be happy. Then I say ok, so we are not a metal band, whatever! We play our music, I call it heavy metal, but if someone else calls it something else, it doesn’t change the music.
		You did a video for “All The Clowns”. Why did you decide to make a video? Well, it was no a very conscious decision. It was in our contract, so we were allowed to do it. So I said ok, let’s do one. We had of course the single “Painting On The Wall”, but that’s a rather serious song, so we should have done a serious video and we didn’t feel like that. So we decided to do “All The Clowns”, as, if we had to waste a day in a video studio, we wanted to do it with the funniest song we had. We had great ideas, which were too expensive, so I just went and stood in the water for a day. Which was not really that funny, well everyone thought it was funny, me standing in the water, but I didn’t. And we even got airplay, well not in Germany, but in France and Spain; and a crewmember of ours was in a hotel in Italy four weeks ago and he saw the video. And he asked me; hey man, what are you doing on my TV here? But maybe the video helped us reach more people, you can never know.
		Your other project Avantasia is totally finished? No part III? No, it’s totally finished. Of course I don’t know what I’m gonna do in fifteen years. But at this moment I’m just so happy with the Edguys, this tour was really getting us together. It was the longest we have ever been on, and of course you get on each other’s nerves once in a while, but that happens in every family. And it really is like a family. I think that is very special about this band; we have a very good relationship. In fact we are now all waiting for the next tour to happen. After the last tour we were exhausted for maybe a week, and then everybody was like calling each other, asking: so, what’s new, just to get in touch with each other again. We wanted to do a support tour with Stratovarius in Finland, just because we wanted to play. We have known them for some years, we’re friends, and we just said: let’s do something together; we’ll support you! And they were like: are you serious? And we said, sure, why not. And they said: but you’re a headlining band, why do you want to support us? And we said, well, its not that expensive and it will be fun. In the end we couldn’t make it and that’s too bad; but you see, we are just thinking of any reason we can just to be together and make music. You know, we are already preparing the new show. We’re in touch with an engineer who is building moving things for our stage. No, it’s not gonna be Eddie! And no, Ed-guy has nothing to do with Eddie either; it comes from Edgar, one of our teachers. The tour is going to be the first part of 2004, and it’s going to be, like the last one, basically everywhere. Well, except Africa. I would like to do some shows there though.
		Is Eggi (Tobias Exxel, bass player) still in Taraxacum? It’s his band! He has some other musical desires than we do, and if he wants to do that, it’s his decision. I think we have the priority, as Taraxacum have not yet sold that many records. He never lets it interfere with Edguy, and it’s not my job to tell him what to do in his free time. If that makes him happy, it’s in everyone’s best interest.
		You write most of the songs, and you write the lyrics. Where do you get your ideas? Basically from many different things, whatever comes to mind when I am writing. Sometimes it’s philosophy, religious ideas, fears, sometimes it’s like stories I tell, sometimes autobiographical stuff, things that I need to work out for myself. My thoughts, my concerns, my fears. Anything that comes to mind when I start to write.
		(Tressy Arts)