Life can be so simple. Just do what you like and you will do it with joy, energy and passion - if you have to until retirement age. "Sure, I still have a lot of fun, otherwise I wouldn't do what I do," says Mick Box, last remaining founding member of Uriah Heep. eclipsed caught him a few days before his sixty-seventh birthday on June 9. So, is there gonna be a real rock'n'roll party? "Sure," he laughs, "I'll make it pop." But before that there will be some live shows in Scandinavia, among others at the "Sweden Rock Festival".
The eternal rock trot - album tour album tour - has been with Box for forty-five years now - and he still can't get enough of it. "I love what I do and I think you can hear that too - on our shows and on our new record." "Outsider" is the name of the twenty-fourth studio album of the British hard rock institution. Could the guitarist list all the records? "Sure. I carry every single album in my heart." In the meantime, the output is no longer as high as in the early years, when Heep occasionally threw two LPs a year on the market. Box and his men it is still important to write new material. "Outsider", the always cheerful box believes, marks a new milestone in the group's impressive discography.
"It's a very important album for us, a statement of where we stand today." In fact, it once again offers powerful, straight, melodic hard rock with the typical heep trademarks such as Hammond sounds or polyphonic choral singing. The eleven songs, which strongly follow the early band phase with successful albums like "Salisbury", "Look At Yourself" or "Demons And Wizards", still sound surprisingly unused. The recording appears homogeneous, as if from a single mould. "We went into the studio without pressure, without expectations and blinkers. That's why it sounds like it. We just started playing and putting our ideas together and after only ten days we had eleven finished songs." The typical heep sound comes naturally: "We invented this sound in the seventies. It comes all by itself."
