Rage
I Have To Feel Good About What I’m Doing

11.11.2021

It’s strange that this band hasn’t yet written a song called “Unbreakable”, because they’re exactly that. Germany’s Rage came through numerous ups and downs over their 40-year-long career, but they just keep on coming out stronger every time they seem to be broken and over. Once again, in early 2020 the band parted ways with guitarist Marcos Rodrigues, who played a big part in rebuilding Rage in the previous five years. But Peter “Peavy” Wagner (bass, vocals) and Vassilios “Lucky” Maniatopoulos (drums) quickly found a solution, recruiting two young and hungry guitarists and recording “Resurrection Day”, an album that a lot of reviewers call their best in years. We caught up with Peavy, who has been leading Rage pretty much since their inception, to find out more about this turbulent but successful time in the band’s history…

The last time we saw Rage live was at the Big Gun festival outside Moscow in 2019. How did you like playing at the festival? We heard that you had some troubles with your baggage…

Oh, to be honest, I cannot remember anymore. In the end it was something, but I cannot remember exactly what it was. Maybe the flight company lost some equipment or whatever. I just remember the festival was very nice, and we played a good show. I would love for us to come back.

At the festival you surprised everybody by jamming with your former drummer Andre Hilgers. How did that happen?

I think it was just a coincidence. He was there with Bonfire, the band he plays with now. I was not so happy that he just entered the stage, but in the end it was a kind of loose jam session. We tried to play “Solitary Man”, and he fucked it up pretty much, he doesn’t know how to play it anymore. (everybody laughs)

More about playing live – last October you did a livestream from a church in Germany. Could you tell us more about it?

This was actually a real live show under corona conditions, everybody was seated, with a mask and all this crap, and we streamed it. It was in a church near my hometown, it was not the first metal concert there, they sometimes use it for concerts. I remember it was a very nice show, one of the very few we played in front of an audience last year, there were only two or three shows that we had during the whole year. And the day before yesterday we played a live show again in my area. It was at the Rock Hard Festival, maybe you know the Rock Hard Magazine, and they have an annual festival over here. It didn’t happen last year, this year they couldn’t do the normal version either, so they finally made a one-day festival last Friday. It went down really good: nice weather, lots of people, and very good mood, very good reactions from everybody.

How did your current two-guitar line-up come together? What makes Stefan Weber and Jean Bormann the right guitar players for Rage?

(laughs) They are nice guys and good players. They come from my area. For many years we had people from all over the world in the band. Now everybody in Rage is from my area, we all live really close together, which makes it a lot easier to work with each other. The thing is that by the end of 2019, when Marcos was still in the band, we already thought about bringing a second guitar into the line-up, because in the last years we had orientated more towards the albums of the 90s, like “Black In Mind” or “End Of All Days”, and those were recorded with two guitars. For example, for a tour we had a guest guitar player. So we thought, “Why don’t we just bring a second guitar into the proper line-up of the band? Why don’t we just become a four-piece band again? There’s nothing holding us back from this”. (laughs) At this point Stefan was playing in Marcos’ side band – Marcos had a Dio cover band called Dio Legacy, and Stefan was a guitar player in this band. The idea was to bring Stefan into the band after we had finished touring for “Wings Of Rage” (2020), and for the new album, “Resurrection Day”, he was set already. Then in February last year Marcos got very serious private problems that forced him in the end to leave the band, so we had to replace him. I knew Jean from another band from my area here, and I remembered him being a great player and also a very nice guy. We tried as an experiment to bring both guys together, and, yeah, it worked out. They like each other, they work together really harmonically, which is very important because when you have two guitars in the band, you don’t need any competition or ego problems, as this would make it all very difficult, I think. After we found out that both guys really like each other and worked together really good, it was clear that they were gonna stay in the band, and we would include them in our future plans like the new album or touring. And here we are!

Are you still in contact with Marcos, and if yes, how is he doing?

We’re still good friends, so of course, I’m in contact with him over Skype. He’s OK so far, he moved back to the Tenerife Island, which is in the north of Africa, really far away (laughs), so, of course, we cannot see each other so easily anymore. He still has his problems which force him to stay there. I promised him not to make public what exactly they are, because that’s a private thing that he wants to keep to himself. Apart from that, he’s OK, he is still playing guitar, but he’s not doing anything in a band.

How did the pandemic impact the life of the band? It’s obvious that most of the live shows have been cancelled, but what has become different apart from that?

Like you said, we had to cancel everything last year, we could only play a few streaming shows and two corona shows with separated audience and this kind of stuff. We are pushing our touring activities to a next future point, we are basically just waiting until the pandemic situation is over, and we can get back to normal. Our hope is that we can play a European tour in November - December this year, I don’t really know if this works out, because here in Germany the situation is still not 100 percent safe. At the moment you cannot really plan that much, because every week the rules change again. I think you in Russia have the same problem. We have already set up a Russian tour, next year in March we wanna tour Russia, the dates are already booked, but I’m not sure if it’s possible. Let’s hope the situation gets better and we can get on the road again.

The new album, “Resurrection Day”, is one of the heaviest Rage albums so far. Is this the direction you chose intentionally before writing the material, or did you just write whatever comes out of you and then put it together on the album?

In case of “Resurrection Day” I already had rough skeleton ideas for songs already by the end of 2019. When we started working on the material, I just showed all I had to my musicians, and they brought in their ideas that my stuff inspired them to. I think you hear this freshness from the new guys, they wanna show the world what they are able to do. They’re young, they’re very energetic. (laughs) I think you hear a little bit that everybody is fresh, and everybody is hot for doing something. These thrashy elements, of course, have always been a part of the Rage sound, and especially Stefan is a great fan of old Slayer and old Metallica stuff, he brought in some really nice ideas. Jean was very creative on this album too. I think it was a really good teamwork that we did in the end, even our drummer Lucky brought in some riff ideas, so it was the first time that the whole band was involved in my songs. We all like the results really much.

Have your listening preferences changed during the lockdowns? Did you discover any young interesting bands?

(laughs) To be honest, I don’t follow this too much anymore. Usually I’m just developing my own ideas and working on new songs, so I rarely listen to other bands, and I don’t know what new bands are out at the moment. I’ve heard some stuff from a band called Portrait, I think they’re from Sweden, this sounded nice to me, but it doesn’t really sound very new. I think they sound more like Mercyful Fate (laughs), but they’re a new band. That’s what I can remember right now.

One of the songs that stands out on the album is “Traveling Through Time”. Could you tell us about what it was inspired by?

Yeah, this is inspired by a musical dance theme from the Renaissance age by the Italian composer called Giorgio Mainerio. I’ve known this theme since I was 9 or something when I wanted to start learning classical guitar, I’ve always played it. Over the years I had a couple of ideas how to make a rock song out of it, but I never really thought it would fit Rage. When we had this big lockdown over here, we could only work through Skype or through Zoom conferences, so we would meet in front of the computer and play our ideas to each other. I was just playing this song, and Jean asked what it was. I said, “Oh, this is an old thing and blah blah blah, but I’m not sure that we should do it for Rage, I don’t think it would fit the band”. But he was like, “Come on, I like it, show me what you have, and maybe I will also have some good ideas”. I showed him all this stuff, and two days later he came back with the demo that he had done for this. I realized that he misunderstood something, and he set the rhythm completely different, but I liked it even more than the original idea I had. This was the starting point when this song started to become a Rage song. We worked more and more on it, and in the end we added this big orchestration that it has now, coming back to its origin. I think now it fits the picture, the style of the band.

The album ends with a very dark song, “Extinction Overkill”. Do you personally believe there is no chance for the mankind to learn, and that it will all only become worse in the future?

(laughs) That is basically the message of the album. At the point where we are now, it’s in our hands whether we have a resurrection, if we come out of this in a positive way, or if we make wrong decisions and have a very bad ending. Of course, hope dies last, I would say.

“Resurrection Day” is your second album in a row on SPV Records. You already worked with that label almost 20 years ago, but back then your cooperation ended after two albums. What has changed at SPV and in their approach over the past 20 years?

Not really that much. We still work with the same people, it’s Olly Hahn, the guy who is our A&R and does our promotion. I think he’s a very talented and clever guy for marketing metal albums. I trust him very much, and it was the same 20 years ago. The reason why we left SPV was that SPV was going bankrupt at that point, they had some really big business problems, and Nuclear Blast just made us a much better offer. We saw that in that situation we could get damaged by the problems that they had at the label. Meanwhile over the years they re-established their label again, and when we left Nuclear Blast and went back to SPV, it was the same situation at Nuclear Blast – it was sold to Believe, a Dutch digital company, there was a lot of chaos going on, and at that point SPV made a better offer. In the end, between all these labels, there’s not really such a big difference. They’re working pretty much the same, they’re doing everything through the same channels, we just try to avoid damage when a label gets into problems, it cannot be good for the band. That was basically the only reason for us to change. In the end, you work with people, and for us it’s Olly Hahn, he’s the guy that I trust at SPV, and at Nuclear Blast it was Andy Siry, but he left the label, and that was also a reason for me to leave them.

Rage has gone through a lot of line-ups over the years, and there quite a lot of difficult moments in the history of the band. Have you ever had the desire to stop making music because of all the troubles, and if yes, what has helped you in such situations?

No, I’ve never really thought of stopping to make music, of course not! In the end, I’m the main songwriter for the band, and I can do this band with anybody, I would say. Of course, it’s not my wish, and it’s not in my interest that people leave the band. This problem with Marcos was very private, and it’s no one’s fault, I don’t blame him for this. I would actually disagree with you that we’ve had so many line-up changes. Compared to other bands, I think Rage has been more stable. Of course, there were a few changes over the years, but this band has existed for nearly 40 years. It’s a very long time, and we’re not Metallica or AC/DC or Iron Maiden, these bands that make such shitloads of money that it would mean a big loss for people to leave them. But Metallica were also really close to ending their cooperation, they were hating each other, and they brought in a psychologist to ease them, to get them together again. We don’t have the money to do all this, you know. (laughs) Rage is an established band, not an amateur band, but we don’t have the money or the perspective that would hold the musicians forever. Sometimes musicians have different musical plans or private plans, for example, Manni Schmidt back in the day – when he left in 1993, he had got married and got some kids, and he wanted to have time for his family, not tour around the world in a rock band. That’s a very understandable reason to stop doing this, I would never blame him. If I had decided to have kids and a family, maybe I would have done the same. (laughs) There are reasons that lead to changes, a love or romantic connection can also change over the years, it’s natural, I would say. However I will never stop doing this. I hope that people stay with me, that we can still have a base to work together. But sometimes it just doesn’t work out, for example, with Mr. Smolski, I had to fire him, because these guys were cheating on me, and this is not how I work with people, so I had to change something, because in the end I have to feel good about what I’m doing.

What is currently happening with Refuge? Are there any chances for a second album?

Of course, there are all chances! (laughs) The band is on ice at the moment, we’re not very active because I’m busy with Rage, but we’re still there, and we see each other. We’re not in a hurry, because Refuge is not a professional touring band that is into this cycle of touring and making albums. We did this album (“Solitary Men”, 2018) just because we liked it, it was never planned to do this in advance. If we ever feel like writing new songs and releasing them again, of course, we will do it. But at the moment we don’t plan anything.

We were very sad to learn about the passing of Jochen Schroeder, who played guitar in Rage in the early days. You said that you had no contact with him lately. And what about the other guys from that era – Tomas Gruning, or Alf Meyerratken, for instance? Are they doing alright?

Yes, Alf is doing alright, and I have all the contact with him, every one of us are in contact. We actually met two weeks ago and talked about Jochen. Everybody lost contact with Jochen, he was very depressive in his last years, as far as I know from his cousin, that was the only guy who had contact with him. Jochen was hiding a bit from the world, that’s what he told me. But I have contact to all the other guys, and we were all really sad and shocked when we heard that he had passed away.

How did you end up singing with Andy Frank on the new Brainstorm single, “Escape The Silence”? As far as we know, you don’t do a lot of guest appearances…

Yeah, I’m not doing it too often, but of course, when the guys asked me, I did it, because they’ve been good friends of mine for a long time, and also Seeb from Orden Ogan, who was producing their album, is a friend of mine. It was an honor for me to sing for them. (laughs) It’s good fun, you know, and we’re friends.

We started with Russia, and let’s finish with Russia. Have you heard the Russian-language tribute to Rage that was published a few years ago? If yes, what do you think of it?

Yes, I have a tribute that they sent me from Russia, and if that’s the one you’re talking about, I like it very much. Very nice versions, and they made all this work to translate the lyrics into Russian, really fine.

Rage on the Internet: http://www.rage-official.com/

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

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Live photos by Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova, promo photos courtesy of Soyuz Music
September 20, 2021
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