Ken Hensley
Let Me Be Me

30.07.2007

Though Ken Hensley, former keyboardist and songwriter of Uriah Heep, has been in Russia on numerous occasions over the past five years, it never seemed possible to catch him for an interview. His records did come out over here, and he played as many as three solo gigs in Moscow, but most of the time he was doing all kinds of weird things – re-recording old Uriah Heep material with Russian musicians, MCing an a rock festival in St. Petersburg, appearing at a Red Square gig with only playback behind him, and so on. Thus, the only opportunity to talk to the man, whose voice and music still inspires millions of hard rock fans, was by phone, and we eagerly rose to it – Ken is among our favorite musicians as far as the 1970s rock generation is confirmed. Unfortunately, the connection we had was one of the worst we experienced ever – over the 30 minutes we enjoyed all kinds of noises, jams, minor breakdowns, etc. Nevertheless, we did the best we could to cover Ken’s latest effort “Blood On The Highway” and other activities he has been engaged in lately. As you might know, “Blood On The Highway” is not exactly a solo record, as it features such singers as Jorn Lande (ex-Masterplan), John Lawton (ex-Uriah Heep), Glenn Hughes and Eve Gallagher. It’s also an autobiographic story of the musician who climbed to the top of the rock world in the 1970s, the prime time for such music, as Ken believes…

We guess everybody asks you this question today, but still: how did the showcase of “Blood On The Highway” go yesterday? How was it like playing a show in such an extended format with all the singers?

It was fantastic, it was a magical evening, it was wonderful! However it wasn’t easy. The problem is that you have to pull all these people together, try to get them all at one place in one time, and apart from the cost of doing that, it was tremendously difficult logistically. If you try to do a tour like this, it will be much easier, but pulling them all together for one show was quite a problem to do. We all worked hard for two straight days, but the audience loved it, and the show just went incredibly well.  

“Blood On The Highway” was recorded with a band of Spanish musicians, but at yesterday’s show your line-up consisted of the people from Scandinavia. How did it happen that you have separate line-ups for the studio and for live shows?

I live in Spain, and the studio is in Spain, so I chose two musicians – the drummer and the bass player, Juan Carlos Garcia and Antonio Fidel, because they have spent many years playing in a Spanish progressive rock band together, so they are from the right generation. The fact that they have played together for so long means that I have a really solid rhythm section. And then, of course, living in Spain I have to pick up the best players there, that’s why I was able to get Ovidio Lopez, he’s one of the top two or three guitar players in Spain. But bringing these guys with me onstage was physically impossible. So I have a live band from Norway, those are the guys we needed for a live show. The recording and the live performance are very different.

Your live guitar player Erik Hauksson has recently participated in the Eurovision song contest. How do you evaluate his performance there? And what do you think of this show in general?

(laughs) First of all, I think Eric’s song was in Top 5, not the best song, but it certainly deserved to qualify for the finals. I felt sorry for him when he didn’t make it, I voted for him four times, it probably cost me a hundred dollars to do that. But the show is not really about songs, isn’t it? I don’t know why they call it “European song contest”, because it includes countries that are not part of Europe. I don’t feel anything positive about the show, let’s talk about something else.

Let’s talk about “Blood On The Highway” then. You have four different singers on it, and you also sing a couple of tracks. But was there anybody else that you wanted to have on the record, but it turned out impossible?

Yeah, there were. We approached a lot of people about singing on the record, and there were times when we might have had as many as seven or eight people singing, and this wouldn’t have been a problem. But the thing is that I needed to have people from the generation that was around in the 1970s, such as Glenn Hughes, such as John Lawton, and I had to have the people that still have amazing talent, passion and the energy that existed in the old days. After I found that some people from that generation had already retired, or were too expensive, I kind of cut the list down to where I had the four voices that I wanted anyway.
 
A few songs on the new album (“You’ve Got It”, “Think Twice”, “The Last Dance”) are re-recordings of the material from your recent solo records. What made you give these songs another try?

First of all, every one of the songs on the album had to be relevant to the story that we were telling. When I was looking through my songbook to see what was there, looking for the titles I needed, I found that a song like “You’ve Got It”, which is the drug song, was perfect to use in this context, because it speaks very seriously about the problem of drugs. And drugs were a very significant part of rock’n’roll life in the 1970s. The songs had to be relevant to the story, and they were.
 
You recently said there are plans to turn the album into a musical later in the year. How much have you progressed in this direction?

Not far. It’s something we have talked about, it’s possible to do this, I really think it can be done, but obviously it’s a big and extremely expensive project. It has to be taken one step at the time, and we are so busy at the moment with the release of the CD, that we haven’t had the chance to sit down and really talk about anything further. It’s still something that could happen.

There have been a lot of musicals based on rock classics recently, for example, “We Will Rock You” or “Mama Mia”. Have you seen them, and if yes, what do you think of it?

I haven’t seen it live, I’ve seen excerpts from “We Will Rock You” on television, and I don’t think there’s any correlation between “Blood On The Highway”, if it ever appears in a live situation, and “We Will Rock You” at all. If “Blood On The Highway” ever makes it to the musical stage, it will be very different to anything that people have ever seen before,

Now let’s speak about the book that accompanies the album, “When Too Many Dreams Come True”. How much is the second edition different from the first one? And how was it like writing an autobiography as opposed to writing poetry?

Writing the book was extremely difficult, because it’s not something you just do, I mean, it’s something you have to learn how to do. The first edition of the book ended up being more like a long letter really, with a bunch of pictures in it. We developed the idea and drew in Mathias (last name impossible to decipher – ed.), a professional writer, to hopefully improve the book and put more detail into it. Now the book is much bigger, it has a lot more details, a lot more names and facts and situations, a lot of new photos as well. Moreover, now it looks like a real book, whereas before it was just a private attempt to publish notes about me. Now it’s a professional job.  

As far as we understand, the book is written in English. Are there any plans to translate it into other languages, Russian, for instance?

Wait a minute, let me ask somebody. (Talks to somebody in the background). It’s not yet translated, but it will be translated eventually. I can’t get an answer for you in which languages, but I would guess German for sure and maybe Spanish. I really don’t know at this stage.

The album describes the story of a rock musician of the 1970s. In your opinion, do rock musicians of today have a harder time than you had 30 years ago, or has life become easier for artists?

The 1970s was a special time that can never be repeated. The thing I miss most, and which most musicians will never be able to experience, is the spirit of music in the 1970s. It was a pioneering spirit, because we were writing the rules and making things up as we were going along, because no one had ever done what we did before. It was challenging and really frustrating at times, but it was a great time. The music business was just a business, it was very small, and music was the thing that mattered the most. The difference now is, of course, that music matters very little, and money matter everything. I would say it’s much more difficult for musicians nowadays to start a career today than it was in the 1970s. It was difficult then, but it must be much more difficult now, because there are so many people trying to do that. As we didn’t have the Internet, e-mails, mobile phones or anything, we were forced into a situation where we had to be creative, and musicians these days have tools and machines to be creative for them. On MySpace, YouTube and a million of other internet sites you can see musicians creating what they call “records” and either publishing them or selling them on the Internet. So you have a few thousand bands chasing the same dollars, it has to be really difficult.

Do you keep up with present-day music and current bands, or do you prefer the rock classics on top of all?

I do hear the music which I like now and then. Some songs that I hear I do like, the majority are rubbish, but that’s because I’m a musical snob. As a songwriter, I’m always looking for good or great songs, and you can very rarely hear that. I do hear songs which I wish I had written, but the thing is that there’s just so much law-quality music in the marketplace, it drives out anything that’s really good. It’s very hard to find the song that captures the spirit of music as it should be captured.  

The reason we asked the previous question is the new “dance” version of the song “Lady In Black” that you released a few years ago. Are you interested in this type of music?

I’ve heard about a hundred different cover versions of “Lady In Black”, and some of them were actually quite good. I think it’s very flattering when people cover your song, and I wouldn’t mind to hear another one. (As the phone line was very bad, Ken obviously didn’t get our question at all – ed.)

Have you heard the version of “Lady In Black” with Spanish lyrics that the Spanish band Mago De Oz plays?

Yeah, I’ve heard it, and it’s interesting, but there’s also a flamenco version that’s much better.

Are there any differences in working with a musician from Spain and a musician from Norway or Iceland?

Oh yeah, a lot of differences. The differences are cultural differences. If I ask a guitar player from Norway to play me a power chord, he goes over to his amp, turns the guitar up to number 10, and plays me a power chord. If I ask a guitar player in Spain to do the same thing, he goes over to his little box and twists a few knobs until he finds the power chord setting. If I could put two drummers on the same stage, and have them play the same thing, it would sound different. The Spanish drummer plays with a lot more swing rhythm, whereas the Norwegian drummer plays with a lot more straight hard rhythm. There are many differences, but I’m sure they are cultural differences more than anything else, the desire is probably exactly the same.

You also worked with a band from Russia on the album “The Wizard’s Diary” (2004). How do you evaluate the skills of Russian musicians as compared to musicians from the rest of the world? Did you enjoy these recording sessions? How much do you remember about them?

I did enjoy playing with Russian musicians, even symphony musicians, because they’re so well trained. But the problem is that they haven’t learned to work outside the limits, and rock’n’roll is all about breaking rules. They have to take what they’ve learned and then learn again how to find other ways of doing things which may not be in accordance with the rules they’ve grown up with. If you’re gonna do rock’n’roll, you have to learn to break the rules, you have to be prepared to take risks, and that includes music. I think that’s where I felt a little frustrated in the studio in Moscow – trying to get these guys to understand, “No, I don’t you just to reproduce what’s been done before, I want you to bring your own ideas to this project.” And that was hard work to get them to do that, because they always stayed in the same area between these lines where they had been trained. I fully respect their ability to play in a trained way, but the best rock players are the ones who break the rules.

Speaking about Russia – you have visited the country many times, but over the past few years your performances were rather strange. Either you had a Russian backing band, or you used playback, like it happened last summer on the Red Square. What is the reason for giving your consent to such concerts? Some of the fans were quite disappointed with this…

I can’t blame the fans for not being happy, because I wasn’t happy either. Usually what happened was everything was planned one way, and when it came to actually doing things, it was being done in another way. The band I was supposed to play with at Red Square – I met the band backstage, but they never came up to the stage, I don’t know why. In St. Petersburg (in February 2007 – ed.) I was supposed to play, for example, five songs, and there was a backing band consisting of the guys I like playing with, but by the time it came to the show, the show was running so late, that five songs turned into two songs. In the future, when I come to Russia to play, I will bring my own band, and I will not come to Russia to play without my own band. That’s not a very simple matter for the promoters to understand, but I’m not gonna do playback, and I’m not gonna play with anybody else, I wanna bring my own band and give the fans what they want.

And when can we expect you back in Russia with a regular show?

I would like to think that we can do it some time later this year, because we are now planning everything for late September to early October, and it would make perfect sense to do a couple of shows with the original cast some time around this period before it gets too cold.

Speaking about live shows – you have a new DVD called “Live Fire”. Can you tell us a few words about it?

The only thing I can tell you about it is that it contains footage from two live concerts in Norway, some documentary stuff, and some absolutely beautiful photography that was shot by a cameraman from Norwegian broadcasting, that happens to be extremely good. It’s a very nice piece of work, and the first release of this piece of work will be included in the limited edition set for “Blood On The Highway”, which will include the CD, the book, and the “Live Fire” DVD. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. We shot a DVD at the show last night, and whether “Live Fire” will be available separately, I’m not sure at the moment.

The DVD contains a very interesting bonus track, which is credited as “Uriah Heep and Ken Hensley in St. Louis 1990”. What kind of recording is this?

Uriah Heep came to play in St. Louis when I was living there, and some people from a local radio station came down and brought a camera crew with them to film me playing with the band at this particular gig. I played my part in one song and then I left, and that was it. It’s not really anything terribly exciting.

You have played a huge number of concerts, and there are some songs, such as “The Wizard” or “Lady In Black”, which the audience wants to hear at every show. Do you ever get tired of performing those songs? What do you do to keep live shows fresh and exciting for yourself?

I love to play live, and I will always play live when I have a real opportunity to do this. We always include at least five or six songs that I wrote for Uriah Heep, so that everybody will hear their favorites, and as far as it goes, I will keep doing that for as long as people want me to.

There was a long period in your life, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when you weren’t very active musically. But you still wrote songs, and you later recorded many of them on your solo albums. What was the reason for taking such a long vacation? Did you miss the show business, or were you happy to have a normal life?

You have to understand two things about this. One is that I had to get rid of my cocaine addiction, which took me more than 16 years. And the other one is that I had to rediscover who I was, because my identity was completely lost in Uriah Heep. I had to find who I was again, and it took a really long time. It took me 12 years just to get my feet on the ground, it was a challenging time.

Over the past few years you appeared as a guest on two very interesting albums, one by Ayreon (“The Human Equation”, 2004) and the other by Therion (“Gothic Kabbalah”, 2007). We guess you get a lot of proposals of that kind, so why did you agree to play on these particular albums?

I played on the Ayreon album, because I liked the music, and I thought it would be challenging, and so it did, I learned a lot when I did that. The Therion project was something I did because a friend asked me to, and I wish I had not done it, because the music is so completely different from my style that it was practically impossible for me to play anything of any real value. I guess they were happy with it, but I wasn’t, it’s something I feel dreadful about now. I get asked to do that a lot, and if I really love what I hear and I feel I can contribute something to it, I’ll do it, but I have to be very careful with that.

Right now Uriah Heep are working in the studio. Were there any talks about your involvement, as a guest maybe? Would you agree to such a proposal, if it was made?

I have not spoken to the Uriah Heep organization for a long time, so there would be no reason for me to get invited, because they have a really good keyboard player.

Some people believe that your song “The Return” from “A Glimpse Of Glory” (1999) tells about David Byron and Gary Thain (deceased members of Uriah Heep – ed.). Is that indeed the case?

No, no, no, it’s about Jesus coming back!

OK, and how do you react when some of the songs you write get interpreted by fans in a completely different ways, like this one?

I expect that. We all see and hear things in a different way, and I fully expect that to happen. Sometimes they are very far wrong, but you only get to learn the truth by listening to interviews like this one, because I can tell you exactly what the song is all about, because I wrote it. (laughs)

Ken Hensley on the Internet: http://www.ken-hensley.com

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview.

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart” Khorina
May 23, 2007
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