Sadist
Ongoing Evolution

05.05.2016

Italian progressive death metallers Sadist are in the midst of preparations for a huge tour across former Soviet republics that starts May 13 and is set to cover, in addition to Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, such exotic countries as Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova, which are not commonly visited by Western metal bands. While you are waiting for Sadist to come and play in your city, you can entertain yourself with our interview with the Sadist mastermind, the virtuoso of simultaneous guitar and keyboard player, and the founder of Nadir Studios, Tommy Talamanca. Despite his busy schedule, Tommy has found a spare hour to call me from Geona and share his thoughts about the new phenomenal Sadist album, “Hyaena”, as well as about the creative process in the band and life in general. Prepare yourself to read through some twenty pages that documented the train of thought of the great Italian composer, musician and metalhead.

Buon giorno, Tommy! How are you?

Zdravstvuite (“Hello!” in Russian – ed.). I’m fine, thanks.

That’s cool. What’s the weather like in Genoa today?

It’s raining, but not too cold, around 12, I guess. Are you in Moscow?

No, I’m in Nizhny Novgorod, you played here in 2010.

Yes, I remember, it was a very nice show. And we are playing in Nizhny Novgorod again in club Crazy Train on May 19, I think.

That’s cool. I’m really looking forward to visiting your gig. Anyway, the new Sadist album “Hyaena” has been out for exactly 5 months now. What are your feelings about the reception of it?

It seems like the album is doing very well. We had very good reviews around the world, and we have just started a tour, we were in Rome last week, and then we were in Florence, and next week we are going to play in the south of Italy. Right now I would say that the general reaction is very positive, and I’m happy about it. Let’s see what’s going on in Russia and how the Russian fans are going to react to the new stuff played live. I hope they’ll like the new album.

Do you know how this new album is selling?

Well, this is the time when you start to count the copies and to see how the sales are going. We were just talking to the record company last week and they were pretty happy. They have to send us the detailed sales account within a couple of weeks, so we are still waiting and we don’t know the exact number of copies sold yet, but as the guys from the record company are happy, we must be happy too.

Are you satisfied with the work of Scarlet Records?

Yes, of course. They are not a very big label, but they are very good guys and, what’s very important for us, we know them and we’ve known each other for many years. They aren’t the biggest label in the world, but we are not the biggest band in the world either, so the partnership is quite balanced. This means that we know exactly what they can do for Sadist and it seems like they are doing their job well. But at the same time since we have a company involved in music, that’s Nadir Music, and we do most of the jobs for other bands like promotion and whatever, so we can manage to do something for Sadist as well. We split the promotion job, so that part of the job is up to Scarlet Records and part of the job is up to Nadir Music. By now we can say that everybody is doing a good job. Of course we need some time, most importantly to do some touring and make albums, sell more copies and see what can be done about promotion and in which countries we are stronger and in which countries we have to work more. That’s why we go touring, not just because we love it, but also because we have to improve promotion and to see where the best market is to invest and to put energy into and to push the album in those countries.

So you are going on tour now. Are there any new countries for you to explore on this tour?

Yes, we’ll be in Georgia for the first time, we’ve never been there. We are also going to Siberia, of course that’s Russia, but we’ve never been there and we know that there are a lot of people waiting for us. We’ll be touring in England by ourselves, that’s the first time we’ll be in England as a headlining band, because usually we went there as a support act, like for Suffocation. This time we’ll start with small clubs, but we’ll see what it’s like to be headlining in England. We also have some big festivals like Hellfest in France. That’s the first part of the tour. At the end of summer we are going on the second part of the tour and we hope to go to other countries that we are not playing in the first part. We’ll see.

Are you satisfied with the record? Is there anything you would like to change now that you are somewhat distanced from the album?

This time I guess we are completely satisfied with the album. We spent a lot of time songwriting and we were working on the album for about two years. I mean, after the release of the previous one, “Season In Silence” in 2010 we spent almost three years touring all around Europe, then we stopped and started working on the new album, and in two years we wrote the best music possible. The album sounds very well, we spent a lot of time working on the production and on mixing. We did our best. I don’t know about the future, how the next album is going to be, and when we will be able to make a new album, but as usual we’ll start working on the new album when we have time to write good stuff and when we are ready to make a good album, not just another one, because we just have to make another album, you know, that’s not the way we normally work. We just want to release very good stuff and see what happens.

Do you write new material on tour, in the studio or at home?

I personally mostly write music in the studio as I work in the studio and I spend almost ten hours a day in a recording studio. When I have some spare time from one job or another, like one free hour, I spend it on the guitar trying to play something interesting that could be used for Sadist. I save it in a special folder, and then maybe once in a while I call for other guys and say, “Hey, I have a new song, let’s try to arrange it together with drums and bass and vocals and keyboards”. So I mostly work in the studio. Andy (Marchini), the bass player – he is the other guy who mostly works on songwriting – he has a different job, and when he has some spare time he comes to the studio to work with me on new riffs and new bass lines and we try to write some stuff. When we have something that can sound more or less like a song we get in touch with the rest of the guys – Alessio (Spallarossa, drums) and Trevor (Nadir, vocals) and we start jamming on those ideas as long as we need to have something like a good Sadist song. It’s a quite old way of working. We are not into computer songwriting, you know. I don’t like Guitar Pro, I don’t like those bands who write music just on the computer, because we have a live attitude and we want it to be clear in songwriting, so that when you are listening to the song you listen to somebody who wrote it with real instruments and not with a computer. That’s our attitude.

So you are saying it’s you and Andy who write the music, right?

Yes, mostly. I think it’s what happened with “Hyaena”. In the past sometimes it was me working on the keyboards and guitar lines, but most of the time I work in partnership with Andy.

Was the recording process hard for the “Hyaena” album?

Not so much. I mean, we’ve been working together for almost 20 years and that’s quite a long time so we know each other very well, we know the way everybody likes to work during recording. I know the way Alessio plays, I know it not only as a musician but also as the producer and sound engineer, and that’s very good, because I know exactly what drums are going to sound like, and since we don’t want to have too much samples on drums, we don’t want to have average sound like most of the metal bands, we always go for a very good acoustic sound. And that’s the same with the bass, for instance, we spend a lot of time trying to find the best way to make the bass amplifier and we sometimes try to change the bass. This time Andy mostly used a fretless bass, and that’s something new for Sadist, because of course we had fretless bass on the previous albums, but not for almost all songs. This time we recorded almost all the time with the fretless bass, and that’s very good, because it gave the album a fresh sound and it was something different from the previous ones. I mean, we take our time, and of course we are slow in the process, because we don’t want to rush, we want to make a good album, but most importantly we want to find a personal sound, as I’ve just said, we don’t go for average sound, samples or stuff like that. This time we spent a lot of time looking for acoustic instruments. Since the album is about an African animal, we wanted some African or Mid-Eastern instruments, and we spent a lot of time looking for them and learning to play them. I played a Turkish lute, it’s not simple to play, so I had to learn, and that’s why it took a lot of time to prepare a good recording.

So during the recording you played this interesting authentic instrument, oud…

Yes, oud, it’s a lute, a Turkish one, I recorded it, and we also used a santur, it’s another instrument from this area, and of course we added a lot of percussion. We called an African percussionist, he was a very cool guest, you know, a native African percussionist. In the past we worked with percussionists, but they always were Italian, very talented and good musicians, but this time we wanted to work with an authentic musician, because we needed not just the sound, but also the feeling from Africa, and since we are not African - though of course everyone comes from Africa in a way - we needed help from a real African musician to help us get into the mood. Of course we are doing something strange mixing heavy metal, which is a typical Western kind of music, with African tribal sounds, percussion and rhythms, and that was a big challenge for us. Of course the most important part of the sound is the metal part, because we are a metal band, but since we are looking for something new and every album has to sound different from the previous one, this time we wanted to do something different, that’s why we went for an African guest.

But you played this santur thing yourself?

Yes, of course, I spent a lot of time learning and practicing. I didn’t play anything difficult, but we just needed a sound, something for the right mood. I did a similar thing in the past with a sitar on the “Sadist” album in 2007, and we recorded a Greek bouzouki, and the process was more or less the same – I spent some time practicing by myself, and then when I was ready we went to the studio to do recording. This time we wanted to bring a change and to go for some different instruments.

Who is this guy riding the Hyaena on the album cover? What’s the idea behind the cover?

This is done by a painter from our neighborhood, a very talented guy (his name is Luca Orecchia – ed.), and the idea was to have something tribal. It’s more or less the same with the sound and the mix - we were looking for something different from an average metal production, and the same goes for the cover art. We didn’t want to go for some Photoshop stuff, it can be very good, but it mostly looks the same. If you look at an average metal cover artwork, they look more or less the same nowadays. We were looking for something different, because since the music is different from the average, and the cover is the first thing you see when you buy an album, it has to get you into the mood, some very tribal mood that reminds you of something wild. That’s why we have this evil Hyaena with the devil riding her, and that’s more or less the mix: the devilness stands for the metal music, the Hyaena is the African mood, and we are trying to mix it together. What we did in the music we tried to do in the artwork.

So it’s the devil riding the Hyaena?

Yes, it’s a legend of some African tribe that tells about the devil in the night riding the steed of the Hyaena going for souls of the people from the village. That’s a very nice legend, a little weird, but Trevor wrote a song, some lyrics, that’s the song “The Devil Riding The Evil Steed”. That’s more or less the mood of the album. We are mixing something that sounds a little “sadistic” in a way, because a Hyaena is in a way a sadistic animal, it hunts other animals and kills them, so the attitude of a Hyaena is somewhat sadistic, it’s a Sadist attitude, and we like this in this animal.

Was the idea behind the cover yours?

No, it’s the painter. We explained to him the topic, the concept of the album, we made him listen to some stuff. He wasn’t into metal, but he is a very artistic guy and he understood the feeling of the album, and he got exactly what the concept was about. He showed us some stuff and we chose from some different paintings, and the one on the cover is the one we loved the most.

So he made several paintings for the cover, didn't he?

Yes, you can see some of them inside of the booklet, we put some of them there because they remind you of the songs. For instance, there is a song called “Lonely Mountain”, and he made a painting that reminds you of the idea of an African mountain where you can see those animals going hunting. Every song has a different mood, a different topic, so we needed several paintings representing the mood of each song.

You have a great video for the “Lonely Mountain” song out there and I heard it was done by some Russian girl. Who was she and how did you find her?

We asked a very talented girl called Darya Korneeva from St. Petersburg, who worked for a very talented Russian band, Psilocybe Larvae, that worked with our company in the past. She made a video for these guys and we saw that video. I don’t remember what song it was (“Trial by Fire” – ed.), but when we saw the video we loved it, and we loved the idea to make something different, because it was somewhat boring for us to make a usual metal video with the guys playing in the background or live or whatever – some really average stuff - we were looking for something different. We explained to her the feeling behind the album, we explained exactly what we wanted, and she really did a really good job. We are really happy with the video.

Obviously you are the engineering and production guy, as you are the owner and the mastermind of Nadir Studios. What do you like more – doing engineering work or playing the instruments?

Well, I like both sides of it. I love to be a musician, because I started as a musician, and with time I became a sound engineer and a producer while working on our music, and when I was in the studio with Sadist I found out that this kind of work – I mean recording and producing music – was as interesting as playing and writing music. It was a different way to work with music, and I always knew that I wanted to work with music in my life. I was a little kid when I started playing guitar. It was quite a natural evolution and natural path of life, because as you can understand it’s very difficult to make a living just playing metal music in a band and of course you have to find some sort of a normal job, but I always wanted to work with music, no matter what kind of music. Of course I love rock and metal music and as a musician I try to work mostly with rock and metal music, even if sometimes I play different types of music in the studio or as a session player. You know, work is work, and you have to work to make a living. And producing music is interesting, because you are in touch with something coming not from you, something different. You can approach a different point of view, different musicians and composers, and it helps you to grow. For instance if you work with pop music or hip hop you have a completely different point of view. The most important thing in this music is not the guitar or the rhythm or aggressiveness, but the melody in the vocals or, if it’s hip hop, the groove from the drum machine or whatever, and in every kind of music you can find something interesting. Even though there is a kind of music you like the most, for me it’s rock or metal music, but every kind of music is interesting, and if you are a musician it’s very good to get to every kind of music.

Do you do a lot of management work being the director of the studio?

Nadir Music is a company, and we have different partners in the company. I am the sound engineer and the artistic producer. I have partners, one of them is Federico, who is the manager of Sadist and of Nadir Music, he manages the work with bands, events like festivals and shows, he does booking for some other of our clients. Another partner is Trevor, the singer of Sadist, he works as a press officer, he manages promotion, press relations and some bands we produce in the studio. It’s not a very big company, but we are growing, it’s already like 20 years old. It started as a very small recording studio run just by me. By now it has grown and is quite well known everywhere, it is involved not only in metal music, but we also work a lot with jazz, pop… Now we are producing a very big pop band from Italy with a very important Italian producer; in this project I work just as a sound engineer, that’s a very big production and we are very happy about it, because it’s a very important job that makes the company grow more. So we are growing, business is growing, and we try to do different things. We have a very talented girl, also Russian, she is in Genoa and she is our photographer. She made the photos for “Hyaena” and she works for Nadir, she is a very good designer. Little by little we are involving more people in the company and we try to get bigger and to provide better services to our clients, to the bands that decide to work with us.

That girl you mentioned is Svetlana Fomina, right?

Yes, that’s her.

Is it busy now in the studio?

Yes, we are quite busy. Next week we are starting production of a power metal band from La Spezia which is close to Tuscany. They already made an album with Nadir a couple of years ago, they are called Septem, they are very talented, not very famous, of course, but it’s going to be quite an important production job, something like three weeks, which is not so bad, actually. Of course the budgets are getting smaller and bands now have to make a good album in 20 days, three weeks, four weeks at most, but you can manage, it’s possible to make a good production even in three weeks.

Do you like power metal?

As I have told you, I like every kind of music, but, I must be honest, my favourite kind of music is the kind of music we play with Sadist, that is very aggressive music with some different elements. I love bands like Meshuggah, for instance, Cynic, that kind of stuff. I love everything that is different from average. I don’t like those kinds of bands that don’t go for something personal. What I’m looking for in a band as a listener is something different. I don’t need 100 copies of Pantera or Slayer, nobody needs it. I need to listen to something interesting and fresh. That’s what I’m looking for when I listen to metal music.

I wanted to ask if you prefer metal over jazz or jazz over metal, but obviously metal is the answer…

Yes. I like jazz, but I must be honest: it’s a bit boring. (both laugh) I love jazz, I work with it, we have a lot of customers in the studio – jazz musicians, some of them are very famous, we often work with a very famous Italian jazz guitar player Alessio Menconi, I think he toured Russia last February. He is a very talented musician, an incredible guitar player, I worked with him as a sound engineer in the studio and sometimes during live shows, and of course, I love this work. When I work, it’s different. I am focused on my job, I am not there to have fun, I’m there to do a good job and I always enjoy it because I love my job. But when I listen to music… Sometimes I like to listen to jazz music, but if I want to listen to something quiet, I listen to classical music. That’s really my passion. What I listen most to when I don’t work and listen to music just for pleasure is classical music. Most of the time I listen to Bach, Mendelson, this kind of stuff. I don’t listen to metal music too much, but of course when I listen to it I enjoy it.

Do you like opera?

I like opera, but I prefer older stuff like Vivaldi, Bach… I listen to some opera, I love Verdi, for instance, Puccini, of course. I like every kind of music, but when I go to concerts I don’t go to opera. I prefer normal classical music, without lyrics, some music from the 17th century.

What is it that keeps you interested in metal?

Well, it's a tricky question, because metal music actually has a big problem – a lack of creativity. The quality of recordings and bands in general is very high, but a very big problem with metal music is that most bands sound the same. And it’s not only about the riffs – of course after Pantera and Slayer it’s very difficult to write original and good guitar riffs, but it’s also a matter of sound. I mean, sometimes you listen to a band, then to another band, but you hear exactly the same snare drum sound, the same kick drum sound, the same guitar sound, and it’s weird. I like to listen to bands with a personal sound. I hear this sound when I listen to Pantera or Slayer. Big bands go to the studio and the first thing they do is trying to find their own sound. New bands don’t do that. It’s really sad, because music isn’t of course just a matter of sound and production, but personality often goes along with the sound you are looking for in the studio. For instance, when you listen to bands like Opeth, you can see, that they were looking for a very personal sound during recording and mastering, they were looking for something different. I don’t understand why new young bands don’t care about it. It seems like they don’t want to have a personal sound, they just want to sound like somebody else, and it’s weird. It’s like you were trying to speak with somebody else’s voice when you are talking. I think that’s a big problem with metal music nowadays.

Right. So just that I don’t forget – you said you didn’t use any samples for the drums for the “Hyaena” record?

Yes, we tried to avoid it. We spent a lot of time on compression, because it’s a metal album, so you have to compress the kick, the snare, toms, and you have to compress a lot, because you need the punch from the very beginning. But anyway we tried to go for an acoustic sound. In the past we sometimes mixed samples with acoustic drums, but we never used just samples. I mean, we probably used just samples for the kick on the third album “Crust”. I remember, we had some problems in the studio with the miking, it was not in Nadir Studio, it was in a Dutch studio, and we had some problems miking the drums, so in the end we went for samples on the kick drum, but it was the first and the last time we used just samples on drums. On the rest of the records we always went for the acoustic sound, because in the end we don’t have to sound perfect, we have to sound personal. I mean, we are so used to listening to perfect music that’s not natural, not human, it’s robotic music and I don’t like it really.

How did you discover your interest in metal music? How old were you?

I discovered it when I was very young. I started to play guitar when I was around nine or ten years old, and when I was twelve, I discovered an Iron Maiden album. I guess it was “Somewhere In Time” or something like it, I don’t remember exactly. I fell in love with the cover, with Eddie. It was very fascinating to me. I was just 12 or 13, very young, and you know, this is the age when you are looking for something very wild, it’s a matter of age - when you are in your teens you are always looking for something aggressive. In my time when I was a kid guys were going for metal music because that was the way to go for something wild. Nowadays metal music is not dangerous anymore. That’s sad, I have to say, but most of the guys of this age go for hip hop music, it’s more aggressive than metal music. It’s a little strange, but that’s what I see when I look at kids of 13 or 14, they mostly go for hip hop, not metal. This really scares me. But at that time when I saw that Iron Maiden cover I listened to the music and it was really shocking for me. It was exactly the kind of music I wanted to listen to. And then little by little I discovered Metallica, Slayer and others.

When did you learn the trick of playing the guitars and keyboards simultaneously?

I started doing it from the very beginning with Sadist. Once I saw a jazz guitar player who was very famous some years ago, it was Stanley Jordan, a very talented guy, and I remember, he was playing guitar with both hands doing some sort of tapping. You know, nowadays people are going crazy about Tosin Abasi, who’s a very talented guitar player, but he is not doing anything new, because I remember Stanley Jordan, he was doing this stuff 30 years ago, probably. I remember, I thought it was really interesting, it was a different way to play guitar. But I was studying piano at that age, I started learning to play the piano at 15, because I wanted to improve as a musician, I started to study harmony and I wanted to grow, to increase my knowledge, not just to play guitar. Once I saw Van Halen in a show and he was playing keyboards and guitar, but of course not at the same time – sometimes he played just the keyboards, sometimes just the guitar, and I tried to do the same. Little by little I found out that sometimes keyboards and guitars were playing together on the album, because we were recording keyboards when the guitars were playing, so I decided that I had to practice playing those two instruments together. In the beginning it was a little tricky, but little by little I understood it. It was not so difficult for me, I don’t know why. I find it quite natural, because it’s like playing the piano: you put both hands on the piano, but sometimes the left hand takes care of the harmony and the rhythm, and the right hand takes care of the melody, so I could do the same using the left hand in a sort of hammer-on technique for some chords or riffs and the right hand on the keyboards for some melody, and little by little I improved this technique. Nowadays when I have to play just the guitar, not in Sadist but as a session player, or when I play just the keyboards, it seems strange for me. I feel like I’m naked. If I don’t play both instruments, it feels strange. It has become so natural for me that I always try to go for it.

Oh, that’s funny all right. Which of the seven Sadist albums do you like most?

I have to say that there are two albums that I really love. They are really important not just because of the music, but also because we recorded them in a particular moment for the band. One is the “Crust” album, which is the first album with Trevor, and on this album Andy came back in the band. He had left the band for a couple of years when we recorded “Tribe”, the second album, and we had a different bass player, and then for the third album “Crust” Andy came back, and since Andy is one of my best friends it was very important for me and I was very happy. That’s why “Crust” is such an important album for Sadist and for me personally. And the second one which I really love is the “Sadist” album of 2007, the fifth album, because it was recorded after a long stop. We stopped playing for something like five years, because after the fourth album “Lego”, which was a very bad one, we had a very bad time in the band, and we wanted to stop completely. But after some time we found out that we still have something to say as a band, and we started writing music together. We met in 2005 and started working on new songs, and the final result was “Sadist”, and I still really like this album, I think it’s very good. It has the perfect balance of the first three albums - we had our main influences from the prog music that came to be seen on our first album “Above The Light”, we had some tribal stuff and ethnical influences on the second album, and we had the aggressiveness from our third album “Crust”. That’s why I really like this album.

You mentioned those experimental albums “Crust” and “Lego”. A lot of fans couldn’t understand those, as they are really unusual for the band, I’d say.

Yes. The trademark of Sadist is constant change. We always go for something different. We are not the kind of band like AC/DC, I mean, I love AC/DC and I’m a huge fan, but you know, they are trying to make the same album every time. Because that’s what you want to hear from AC/DC. But Sadist has always been changing since the very beginning. If you compare “Above The Light” and “Tribe” you’ll see that they are very different. On “Above The Light” we had very big influences from prog and classical music, on “Tribe” it was more about tribal stuff, and we started mixing metal with some ethnical and tribal influences. The same goes for “Crust” – we wanted to change something and we put in some more aggressiveness. I mean, people consider Sadist to be a death metal band, but if you listen to “Above The Light” and “Tribe” you’ll hear that despite the vocals the music isn’t that heavy. I can’t say it’s really death metal. It’s not the kind of music that I consider to be death metal, which is Morbid Angel or Deicide or Cannibal Corpse – that’s death metal for me. On “Crust” we started to be more aggressive, because Trevor joined the band, and he was a very aggressive singer. It was another step in the evolution of the band, but that was not the end of our evolution. Every time we tried to do something different. “Lego” is not the best album we made, I guess, there is something wrong with the album, I mean, the production and the songwriting are not very good, but there are some good songs on “Lego”, and we just tried to arrange it in a different way. This is something that goes with the band, I mean, people, who follow the band since the very beginning, are always waiting for something new and different. And it’s a big challenge, because I know that sometimes you can disappoint your fans. This happens, but this is our trademark, and if we tried to copy ourselves… I mean, it could be very easy for us to make “Above The Light” part II,  because, if you remember, in the 90s we started playing this kind of death / thrash metal mix with some classical and symphonic music before Cradle Of Filth or Dimmu Borgir and all this kind of black metal bands. And those bands got very big on the market. If we wanted we could start to do face-painting and play the same stuff from “Above The Light” in a more aggressive way and maybe we could have sold more copies and be more fashionable, but we didn’t like it – we just wanted to make something different. When something starts to be trendy it’s not interesting anymore.

Right. So you never painted your face in Sadist, did you?

No. (both laugh) Now I’m too old, I would not do it. I’m married and it could be a little strange for me. I’ve always been focused on the music, not on the show. Of course we try to make good shows, but we are this kind of band where the show is the way we play. Of course we have a very aggressive attitude. We don’t have the jazzy attitude like bands like Dream Theater, for instance, they are of course very good, and when you go to see Dream Theater you want to see very good musicians playing at their best. But we try to be more in the vein of bands like Pantera, for instance. We have an aggressive attitude, and despite the fact that we play some tricky music and sometimes really difficult stuff we try to do it with an aggressive attitude. So I guess we don’t need to paint our faces. If we started to do it now it would be strange and a little funny.

Right. Do you do any sports?

I ride a bicycle. I don’t have much time to do it. In summer I practice a lot. Sometimes I make like 100 kilometers a day. That’s not so much, I know, but I’m not a professional and this is something I do just for pleasure. That’s my only passion, I’s say. Of course I like swimming, but I just do it in the summer when I go to the beach, I don’t go to a swimming pool. That’s all.

Right. What is your favourite city in Italy?

I love Genoa, I really like my own city. I know, it sounds a little stupid, but I love my city, I think it’s very beautiful, despite the fact that it’s not so… You know, when people think about Italy, they usually think about Rome, Florence, Venice… Russian people think about Milan because of the shopping. But Genoa is so interesting because there is so much history in this city. I mean, for one year Napoleon could be a Genoa citizen, Genoa conquered the Crimea, Genoa invented banking, we invented jeans. We have so much history. We had Christopher Columbus, we discovered America, that was a mistake, I guess, but there is so much history in this town, and when you are in Genoa, you really feel this history, and that’s something I really like. I love very old cities in general, and cities with very important history. I remember, when I was in St. Petersburg the feeling was very important for me, because I could feel the history of the city, from Peter I, and that’s something I’m really looking for when I go to important cities. The history of the place, of the people who live there – that’s something I really love.

Speaking of St. Petersburg – I heard, there are entire streets copied from Genoa in St. Petersburg…

Yeah, I know, so many Italian architects worked in St. Petersburg and you can really feel the Italian influence when you are there, that’s something I really loved as a tourist. I was there as a musician, and I didn’t have the time to see the city, but then I came back there with my wife. She is Russian, but she had never been to St. Petersburg, so she was there for the first time and she loved the city too. We really felt that there was so much history around us and it was very fascinating.

So you have a Russian wife…

Yes.

Cool. Do you have children?

Not yet. We are working on it, but I’m so busy with my job, and we are waiting for the time when I’m not so busy.

Do you have time for any other hobbies beside music?

I love reading, but unfortunately I don’t have much time to do it. I spend most of my free time studying Russian, because my Russian is very bad, and since I don’t live there it’s very difficult for me to improve. I talk to my wife sometimes, but she is very cruel, because she talks very fast, and sometimes it’s very difficult for me to understand and to reply, but if I talk slowly and people talk slowly, then “ya ponimaju” (“I understand” in Russian – ed.). It’s a matter of time. I hope that in a couple of years my Russian will improve.

That’s really cool. What is your favourite food and drink?

Ah, I’m Italian, so I love every kind of food. I like when I’m somewhere… Of course since I’m Italian, I’m sorry, but I think that Italian food is the best in the world, much better than French food. But I love when I’m somewhere else, for instance, in Russia or Armenia, I always try something typical for the place and that’s very interesting, because it has something to do with the culture. It’s not just food, you don’t eat just because you have to eat. When you eat, you meet some different culture and history, because specific kinds of food developed through years of history. That’s something I like – to meet new cultures when I eat something different. Of course when I’m in Italy I like to eat Italian food, I love lasagna or in Genoa we have pesto – a typical green sauce and I really love it. When people try it for the first time they love it. I love pizza, of course, because everybody loves pizza, but… I like to try something different every time.

Right. Do you cook yourself?

Yes, I cook, unfortunately, my wife doesn’t, I don’t know why. (laughs) Women, even Italian women, stopped cooking nowadays. It seems like nowadays men have to cook and women… They just don’t like it, or I don’t know why… It’s not like my hobby, I just have to do it, so I do it.

Thank you, Tommy, for this great interview! Your final words and anything you want to tell your fans in Russia?

I say “Hi” and I want to meet everybody there, I hope to have time to meet all the people we met last time we were there, it’s already five years ago. Do vstrechi! (“See you” in Russian – ed.)

Sadist on the Internet: http://www.sadist.it

Richter
March 16, 2016
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