Stormwarrior
Worth Fighting For

13.03.2008

As a rule, interviews done by e-mail are laconic and shallow. But there are always exceptions to the rule, and Stormwarrior singer and guitarist Lars Ramcke turned out one of them. In his interview, he provided an in-depth coverage of all aspects of life in Stormwarrior – of the recording of the band’s three studio albums, upcoming DVD, positive and negative developments in the band’s history, the dreams that have come and never come true, meeting with Kai Hansen and Piet Sielck, and entering a new global level…

The release party for your new, third studio album “Heading Northe” will take place in Hamburg in a couple of weeks. What will this event be memorable for? Do you plan any surprises?

Yeah, we actually do have plans to make it some kind of a special and memorable release party. Of course we will play some tunes of our new album “Heading Northe”, but we are also planning to invite some ex-members of Stormwarrior to join us on stage again when we will play the older songs from our first two albums! So I guess this party will become really interesting but also really special at the same time.

Four years have passed since the release of your previous album “Northern Rage”. What was happening in Stormwarrior’s life during this time period?
 
Well, of course we didn’t plan to let four years pass until the release of the next studio album. But we really had some hard problems during the last four years, which were not caused by the band itself. But the fact that the band is still alive and in the meantime even stronger than ever before, we feel some kind of confirmed that it was worth fighting for the continuation of the band through these years…

To give some facts and information about this right now… When we had finished the recordings of the last album “Northern Rage”, we began raising our first own studio (Thunderhall) in the same bunker where Gamma Ray had their studio at that time. But about three or four months after we had completely finished building up our studio, the whole bunker had been sold to another owner who didn’t want to use the bunker for musical rehearsal rooms again. So we were forced to search for some new rooms to rehearse but also for some other rooms to store all the wood material and all the other equipment of the whole studio. So summed up, the whole thing concerning this studio-building time and the searching for new rooms and raising the studio again took about more than two years!!! Of course this time period really threw us back for about some years (not only concerning time but also concerning the financial aspects).

Actually the band was close to “split up” at that time because we didn’t see any chance to recover from that in the nearer future. But since the whole Stormwarrior thing is some kind of “my baby” for me, I never really accepted a situation like this to be the end of Stormwarrior, so I / we just continued to fight for the survival of the band.

Of course, a period like this is really hard for a band and it is even harder to keep everyone else in the band investing the same amount of energy and time into the band since then band just wasn’t big enough at that time to let enough money come in to pay the bills of everyone in the band. So logically, we also had some line-up problems in that period and again, changing the line-up, took some more time to recover from that and to rebuild the band again.

I think now you can imagine that these four years haven’t been a break or some kind of pause for the band. Actually we were working all the time, but one problem followed the other so we have always been thrown back again during the last years. But somehow we always had some gigs (also some real big ones on great festivals during the summers) so the band has never been really dead! And the fact that, after all these complications during the last years, the band still exists and, as I said before, has definitely the strongest line-up ever, it all confirms me once again that all the hard work and all the struggle has been worth it.

Concerning the situation of the band right now, it seems that we are not affected by any kind of problems or barriers at the moment anymore, so everything just really feels as a new starting point for Stormwarrior! We finally have a line-up consisting of people who all want the same and who are ready to invest the same amount of time, energy, feelings, money etc. into the band to lift the band to its next higher level. Besides, we have a new label that really believes in us and that tries to push us in every way they can to make us reaching a higher level throughout the whole world. According to that the band as a whole seems to really burn to play live shows everywhere in the whole world, so right now Stormwarrior is definitely hungry for conquering the world of Heavy Metal!!!

Are there any guest musicians on the new album? Is Kai Hansen involved once again?
 
No, this time there are no guest musicians on the album and even Kai Hansen didn’t take part in any production part of the whole album production. This is from the first to the last note pure Stormwarrior even produced by ourselves!

You recorded the album in you own studio Thunderhall. What are the main differences between working in your own studio and a rented one? Does it mean you created new songs right in the studio? What is the usual process of creating songs?
 
Of course, working in our own studio saves a lot of money on one hand, but on the other hand it also saves a lot of stressful situations or time-pressure scenarios in a hired / rented studio. The advantage in working in your own studio is that you have endless possibilities in trying out different versions of single parts and arrangements and that you have everything under your own control.

At the beginning of Stormwarrior it was very helpful to let the whole production be done by Kai Hansen. We could learn really a lot from him and also from Dirk Schlächter as the co-producer and sound engineer of the first album and it seems that it was enough to now record on our own. And since we spent all the money that was coming in during the last years, from gigs or from advance payments from our previous label, into studio equipment, we have some real good and professional equipment in the meantime to call our own to record on and to give a good sound to all the single signal sources.

Yeah, we were even writing the songs in our studio. We were writing them and at the same time recording them as the pre-production to also try out every possible version of every single part and every possible arrangement. So if you have a pre-production in the end that is really good concerning the performances but not concerning the sound, you have to re-record everything for another time which also takes some more time.

Concerning the creation of the songs… It was really different from song to song! Sometimes I had a single vocal line for a chorus and I continued with arranging a whole song around this vocal line, sometimes I just had one great guitar riff to be worth working on and trying out what kind of part would fit after that guitar riff. So there are a lot of different ways to get a song foundation consisting of the verses, bridges, refrains and some kind of main riff or main theme which should be good enough to give a special character to the single song.

But as soon as you have a basic song foundation, things become really interesting when it comes to writing the mid-parts like solos, melodic harmony parts or just some epic and mystical parts. The arrangement of these parts of the songs very often is responsible for whether the song becomes a real killer one or just a “normal” usual Heavy Metal song. So of course we tried to make every song sound special and different in the end to make the whole album having enough energy to become a real masterpiece (which we achieved, at least in my opinion).

What inspires you to create new songs? Do you read any specific literature on Northern mythology and history to find topics for your songs?
 
Normally the musical side of creating songs is parted from the lyrical one. Of course, both sides complete each other somehow during the songwriting. So sometimes if I have everything musically written for a song, except for the refrain, I am waiting for getting a great idea for a vocal line to get an idea about how the refrain could be in the end. And since the refrain is also one of the most important parts of a song, it is really necessary to have a great vocal line in the refrain. So sometimes I even re-arrange a whole song if I have the feeling that the refrain would have to be a little different in the end to fit to the whole feeling of the song I wanted to have.

Concerning the lyrical aspects… Of course I am reading the old books and I am searching for ideas the old sagas, but I had also studied northern archaeology and Scandinavian culture and languages for about two years before I continued studying audio-engineering. So at that time I was actually reading nearly every available book concerning this topic at the university and I also had very soon enough material together for the whole “Northern Rage” concept back then, but also for some parts of this new album.

How did bass player Yenz Leonhardt end up in Stormwarrrior? Is he a permanent band member? What about his contribution to Stormwarrior’s music?
 
When Jussi left the band last year we had two big festivals to play that summer (that were Manowar’s Magic Circle Festival and the Wacken show), so we asked Yenz to help us out and he just said ok. After these two festivals we asked him to become a full member because everyone in the band loved him from the very first moment and it was clear very soon that he would be the perfect guy to complete the band and take part in putting the band to a higher level. So now, in the meantime he became a full member in Stormwarrior and concerning the album production he also had a great influence. Since we knew before that he is a great bass player we left him “free-hand” in writing the complete bass-lines for every song on this album. Besides, since Yenz is also a great singer, me and Yenz were doing the whole backing vocals and choirs together, so he even had a great influence on how the vocals had been arranged in the end (at least concerning the backing vocals).

“Heading Northe” is your first work for the label Dockyard 1. How does it like working with a new label? How many albums do you have to do for them? And why did you leave Remedy Records?
 
Of course we’re very thankful to Remedy Records for the work they did for Stormwarrior, but as we’re still nearly completely unknown in the outside of Germany we had to search for something new to push the band to the next level. Remedy just didn't have enough power to fulfill what we expected with this new release. So we talked with them and gladly got an agreement that was good for both of us. That means that this year the “Live at Wacken” DVD will be released through Remedy Records including the show with Kai Hansen in 2007, and at the same time we are free to sign to another label.

Since the guys of Dockyard 1 worked for well known labels like Noise or Sanctuary before, they have enough connections worldwide to really take the band to the next level. And so far they really do a great job. We have about four times more distribution countries worldwide and in the last four weeks already more interview requests as we had before with both of our first two albums. Dockyard 1 has developed a plan for us that goes about three studio albums to bring us to where they see us and then we all should see what really has happened until then...

The artwork for “Heading Northe” is not as brutal as the covers of your previous albums. What are the reasons for such changes? Did you use a different cover artist this time?

No, the new cover artwork was done by Uwe Karczewski (early Helloween and Iron Angel artworks) again. Yeah, the first two artworks were more brutal, but since we knew already from beginning on, as soon as the title track had been written, that “Heading Northe” would be the opener on this new album and that it would be also a great name for the album title. So we were just thinking about what kind of artwork would express the spirit of this song and what you see has been the result. And in my opinion it is by far the best cover artwork Uwe ever has done (not only for us)!

Your DVD will finally see the light of day this year. As it’s known, it will contain your gig at the Wacken Open Air festival. How long did the set continue? Why did you choose this particular performance to be released? And will there be any other material on the DVD?

I don't know yet if there will be any other material on that DVD and I still don't know exactly when it will be released. I first have to listen to the tapes and watch the film material, and since we never have done a DVD until now I cannot say how long this all will take to complete the DVD production. What will be definitely included is the full set of the Stormwarrior songs at that show but also the whole second part of the set we did with Kai playing the old “Walls of Jericho” tunes.

We planned to make a DVD out of that gig from the very beginning on when our booking agency made the final agreement with the Wacken guys. So we also invested a lot of money into the pyro stuff to have the maximum of power and fire on the stage then. So I guess this DVD will be a really great thing for all Stormwarrior fans as well as for every old-school Metalhead who once lost his heart to the true Helloween during the “Walls...”-period!

You did a live album called “At Foreign Shores - Live in Japan” in 2006.  Why did you choose Japan as the recording site? Is the Japanese public crazier than in the rest of the world?

Yeah, they definitely are, I think. They were all welcoming us really great and very friendly at that time and made this tour really overwhelming for us. And that was also the reason for doing a live album out of the recordings that were made during that tour anyway. We didn't actually plan before to make a live album when we went on that tour, but because the whole tour went so unbelievably great and the reactions of the fans were so unimaginable, especially for a support act (as you may hear on the live album), we were very glad afterwards that the whole tour had been recorded anyway, so that we had the possibility to make a live album out of these shows. Normally I would be one of the first ones to say, after having only two studio albums out it would be way too early to release a live album, but we did it mainly for ourselves to always have something in our hands to remind us on the first Stormwarrior tour of all times, which went so unexpected great for us!

The year 2008 is the band’s 10-year anniversary. How would like you to celebrate such a date? Are there any special live or other activities planned?

I think since the album is really greatly accepted everywhere we will have a lot of gigs this year and we will celebrate our anniversary on every show then. Maybe we will also have the chance to jump on a bigger tour that would bring us also to Russia or we will have some offers for single shows then. Else for the fans, this year will be special because there will be two releases of Stormwarrior, the new album “Heading Northe” and the “Live at Wacken” DVD with the special Kai Hansen set!

Can you look back and say what you like/dislike and what you want to change in the history of the band? Can you say you have achieved what you wanted in the beginning?

I already achieved with the first album what I wanted to achieve when I started the band. I wanted to produce the first album together with Kai Hansen and make a great album! Another dream had been to meet Rock n' Rolf and to play together with Running Wild some time (we did that in 2005) (smiles) so the only things that are left to achieve are meeting Rob Halford and K.K. Downing and Blackie Lawless of WASP someday. Everything else that is coming from now on is just above what I wanted to achieve in the beginning and I would like to try out what the gods have planned with Stormwarrior. (smiles)

Of course, every line-up change in the band was hard for the band and maybe it would have been better if I had found the line-up we have right now at the very beginning. But on the other hand, all of these experiences and problems made the band stronger and led to that status that Stormwarrior has gained so far. So of course there have been some things that threw the band back, but there is nothing that I really regret and since I am still young there is still everything possible to be achieved by Stormwarrior and the fact that the band now is stronger than ever before makes me proud of course but also proves me that I was right with continuing the band, doesn't matter what kind of problems there had been in the past ten years!

Stormwarrior is a very powerful bandname, but at the same time, so many bands are using the word “storm” in their titles. Have you ever been confused with such bands as Stormwind or Stormwitch? And why did you pick up this particular name?

Of course I knew Stormwitch at the time back then, but they weren't around anymore. Stormwind I have never heard of, so I have never been confused or something like that about it. When I started the band I wanted to have the pure power of Heavy Metal in the bandname to let everyone reading the bandname know from beginning on what the band will be standing for. And in my opinion “Stormwarrior” is still the best expression “available” for this band! We will always be fighting for our lifestyle and defending it, doesn't matter how stormy the attacks of the non-believers would ever turn out to be.

Could you briefly describe every musician in the band? What do you do in life apart from playing music? And why did you abandon the stage names that you used a while ago?

Well, when we started the band and did the first demotape we were thinking about these names to make everything as cliche-like as possible. But with all these line-up changes and the more-gained professionalism our interest in these names faded a bit somehow, so we decided to leave these names behind us, since our own normal names aren't that bad either. (smiles) Maybe other bands would have split up and start with a new bandname, but for us this is also part of the development of the band. And, as in every interview our real names were written anyway, it didn't make so much sense at all to keep these stage-names as well...

Concerning what every bandmember does besides of Stormwarrior, Falko (drums) is giving some drum and piano lessons as a music teacher in some music schools in Hamburg, Yenz is also playing bass in Iron Savior and Savage Circus and he is sometimes working as a producer for some other bands in the studio, Alex (guitar) is still fulltime working during the week as a writer in a media agency and I myself at the moment am only doing the promotional work for the new album. (laughs) Else Falko and me have our own studio where we, if we have enough time, produce some smaller bands from Hamburg. But mainly this studio is used only for Stormwarrior.

What can you say when Stormwarrior’s music is defined as “unique style combining True Heavy Metal anthems with the concept of Nordic mythology”? Is this a correct definition?

I would say that it is true somehow. But of course, concerning the lyrical side of Stormwarrior, there are some more aspects. It is not only about the northern mythology. It is also about the ancient northern culture and the pre-Christian pagan times in general, based on what can be proved to be true by the archaeological finds and the historical facts. And of course, the whole Heavy Metal lifestyle has been part of Stormwarrior from the beginning on and always will be! Maybe one can compare it with Running Wild somehow. They always also had the Heavy Metal lifestyle in their lyrics on one hand, but on the other hand they added the whole pirate topic to their concept...

Your bio says in the beginning you were greatly inspired by such bands from the 1980s as Helloween and Running Wild. Who else influenced your playing and songwriting? What music did you grow up on?

Generally speaking, I grew up with the classical or traditional Heavy Metal bands of the eighties, even if I was born in the beginning of the eighties and I sadly didn’t have the chance to follow the Heavy Metal scene during the eighties. But when I came in contact with Heavy Metal I found out very soon that the best albums had been done in the eighties so I was searching and actually hunting for every cool LP of such great bands like Helloween, Running Wild, Judas Priest, Manowar, Maiden, WASP, Motörhead, Exciter, Agent Steel, Anvil, Iron Angel, Holocaust, Witchkiller, Saxon, OZ etc.... but also later on elder bands like Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Dio, Nazareth, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple or even Sweet... and so on. So of course all these LPs have been influenced my musical taste, but concerning Stormwarrior I would name  early Helloween, Running Wild, Judas Priest, WASP to be maybe the most important ones.

There is a strong true heavy metal stage in Germany with such bands as Wizard and Majesty widely known all over Europe . Do you think Stormwarrior are part of this scene? Do you like what the above-mentioned bands are doing?

Yeah, I definitely think we are part of that scene and we have known the guys of Majesty, Metal Inquisitor, Desaster, Sacred Steel or Wizard for quite some years right now, and it's always a lot of fun meeting them at the festivals again to have a beer together or playing together on one of the shows. I also have great respect for Tarek of Majesty for having the balls to build up a festival like he had done with “Keep It True” for the remembrance of the Heavy Metal cult. And of course I also love the albums of Majesty or Metal Inquisitor for example!

How did you get to know Kai Hansen and Piet Sielck? What are your current relationships – is it possible to say that you are friends?

Yeah, I think you can say that we became good friends during the last years. When we had done our first demo tape I met Kai in a Metal pub in Hamburg and just went to him and talked with him about Stormwarrior and I gave him our first demotape. The next day Gamma Ray had their fanclub party at the Hansen studio and me and the bassist of that time had also been invited (I also met Piet Sielck there for the first time). Kai had already listened to the tape and he said it reminds him of his early years when he started with Helloween. Of course the material and the performance on that tape weren't good enough to start directly producing the first album, but he said he saw some kind of “fire” that he was missing in so many bands in these days, and if we would work hard on the band we could make an album together when the time would be right in the future. Yeah, and when we had our first record-deal with Remedy Records it was quite clear that we would produce the first album together with Kai. During that production we really learned a lot concerning producing and mixing in general but also concerning the whole arrangement of guitars and vocal lines etc. And of course we still profit from that today.

During the “Northern Rage“ times, we also had our rehearsal room and our own studio in the same bunker as Gammy Ray had their studio in. So we were really hanging out together a lot of times back then, because they also had a bar in their studio were there had always been some cold beers waiting to be killed. (laughs) So since we know each other for really some years now, we definitely became some kind of friends and it is always great to meet them again...

You recorded the song "Warchild" for "Tribute to Running Wild", and you did a cover of Helloween’s “Heavy Metal (Is the Law)” on your first album. Do you plan to record and release the set of Helloween covers that you used to perform live with Kai Hansen? Or are there plans for any other cover versions?

No, there are no plans like this so far. Of course there are some songs that some of us would like to cover sometime, and maybe we'll do some of them in the future to release them as bonus-material for anything, but at the moment there are no real plans for doing any covers. And I don't think it would be a good idea to release all the live material we did together with Kai also as studio versions. It will be released as the Wacken set on the Live DVD as live versions with a special feeling and I think that should be enough.

Lars, you are the only original member of the band by now. What do the ex-Stormwarrior’s members do now?

I think the ex-members are studying, working and/or playing in some other bands. (laughs)
I am, for sure, not that kind of person who is dwelling on something like an ego trip (smiles), so the band never parted ways with anyone because of reasons like that. But fact is that I founded the band and I always wanted to give everything for the band to push the band to the next level. And I also expect this way of engagement from the other members. Of course I understand that everyone needs to work or study to live from something. But on the other hand everyone connected to Stormwarrior has to understand that from the beginning on I never wanted to do anything else than living Heavy Metal and express that with Stormwarrior and that I really would die for the whole thing! So, to always guarantee the maximum of what the band is able to give at every single level the band has reached at each point, it is understandable that over the years some people were simply just not able enough to give everything for the band (performance-qualities, but also time-reasons due to jobs or studying, etc). So of course, since stopping the band or splitting up completely never came into consideration for me, as soon as there had been some problems concerning that, we had to talk about it, and mostly we came to the conclusion that it would be better for Stormwarrior to part ways with the concerned members then. So, of course some people might say that Stormwarrior would never had a stable line up, but on the other hand nearly every other band having these problems would have already split up completely or would have continued under a different name, which would not be better anyway...

So I think, as Stormwarrior is still existing and definitely stronger than ever before, every single line-up change has made sense at each time. So if something like that could not stop Stormwarrior, what else could?!? (...”what doesn't kill us, just makes us stronger...!”)

Can you say a few words about your record studio Thunderhall? What is the studio like? Who else is recording there?

The studio is run by Falko and me and so far we recorded two other projects there with smaller bands from Hamburg. But we will only record other bands if there is enough time for doing that. Mainly we built it for the work of Stormwarrior. But if there is any time we really give the best to get the maximum results out of our equipment. The studio is built on a ProTools system on two computers with some great outboard pre-amplifiers and some quite expensive and professional microphones. I cannot run a whole list of the equipment here right now, because it would be too long for this interview, I guess.

What we did so far with Stormwarrior have been the recording of the whole “Heavy Metal Fire” EP, the recording of all instruments except of the drums for the “Northern Rage” album, the whole mix of the “Live in Japan” album, and the whole recording-production of the new release “Heading Northe”.

What would you like to add to round up the interview?

First of all, great thanks to you for your interest in the band and for doing this nice interview, and of course we would like to wish every Metalhead in Russia great fun with our new album “Heading Northe” and we hope to meet you all sometime this year when we hopefully will have the possibility to play some shows in great Russia! Cheers!

Stormwarrior on the Internet: http://www.stormwarrior.de

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

Ekaterina Fyodorova
February 28, 2008
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