eclipsed author Michael Lorant has interviewed Alice Cooper nine times over the last three decades. These included telephone calls, but also conversations in which people sat opposite each other. In addition, there are several so-called Meet and Greet meetings on the fringes of concerts. The last time he met the veteran shock rocker was in Essen in April during the "Rock meets Classic" concert series.
London, early May. IQ have just returned from some highly acclaimed concert visits to mainland Europe (see box). Shortly before the show for the release of "The Road Of Bones" at Islington Assembly Hall, eclipsed spoke with guitarist Mike Holmes about self-criticism, perfection and serial killers.
eclipsed: It took between four and five years for each of your last albums. Are patience and slowness the most important components of the IQ formula?
The first impression is deceptive: At first, an anathema's current release "Distant Satellites" seems like a continuation of the celebrated, commercially successful predecessor "Weather Systems". After all, the band also recorded the record with Norwegian producer Christer-André Cederberg in his Oslo studio, Steven Wilson mixed two songs again, and Dave Stewart is again responsible for the wonderful orchestral arrangements. Everything's the same, so it seems. And yet, the more often you hear "Distant Satellites", the more new musical territory opens up.
Pink Floyd and Mongolia - this word combination has something similar to, say, Prog and Genghis Khan. In the seventies and eighties, the discos of the same name ("Hey Leute, ho Leute") delivered the opposite of filigree or even psychedelic music. Which is fitting in so far as the Mongolians themselves present their legendary world ruler eight hundred years after his work as an unfiligree appearance. At least in the central square of his homeland. The colossal monument to Genghis Khan on Sukhbaatar Square in the capital, Ulan-Bator, is a massive one.
Mark Oliver Everett alias E is and remains a strange oddball. In his songs he finds the most poetic pictures for every situation in life, on stage he gives the babbling ramp sow. If you sit face to face with him, however, he pushes around as if he were ashamed of everything he does. He enjoys small compliments, sounds excited about what others say about his music, and rarely finds the right words to comment on his songs. Maybe he doesn't even need that on the new record.
Swans were always gloomy and heavy, ignoring all mainstream and alternative trends. Their last album "The Seer" might have been hard to digest in its power, the new recording "To Be Kind" follows again the more transparent sound aesthetics of albums of the early nineties like "Love Of Life". Michael Gira, who has led the swans from the very beginning, is not a man of friendliness, although everything is going well privately at the moment and the sixty-year-old is getting married this year. In return, you can always rely on his depth and sustainability.
The Aschaffenburg photographer Jürgen Spachmann uses his camera to get musicians like Steve Hackett, Mike Portnoy, Fish or Beth Hart extremely close to the skin. It's the only way he can get behind her mask, he says.
eclipsed: How did you come to rock photography and especially to the project "bigface", where you get extremely close to musicians with your camera?
51°28'31N 0°14'27"W/51.4752°N 0.2407°W - Coordinates that make the heart of every rock fan beat faster. Behind it is 117 Church Road in London's Barnes district, the address of a legendary studio that has been writing rock history for forty years and was named in the same breath as Abbey Road until it closed in 2009. The biggest names in pop and rock have worked in the Olympic Studios: Beatles, Stones, Who, Eagles, Clapton, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, King Crimson or Led Zeppelin. They took or mixed a lot of songs from their first four albums.
Their career began at the end of 1969 in the cellar of the trendy Dortmund music club "Fantasio", where they had their rehearsal room. While they were preparing for future tasks there, upstairs in the club there were star troops like Yes, Black Sabbath or Colosseum. The star of Epitaph should not shine as brightly as that of its English colleagues. Nevertheless, what the German formation delivered in the seventies in the areas of prog, hard rock and jazz was absolutely competitive. But in the middle of the eighties Epitaph went out of breath; the band broke up. 2001 then the comeback.
There have been many attempts to describe the music of the London band archives. But with every record the band around Darius Keeler and Danny Griffiths punished all their genre archivists with lies. They never wanted to commit. However, the new album "Axiom" now has a completely new quality. The CD consists of a single long piece that leaves behind all the coordinates of pop or rock. "The last album wasn't a difficult one, but we still had all the time in the world to think about it," says Keeler. "With the new record, it was completely different. We only had a few days to record them.
