Savage Circus
Midlife Crisis

04.05.2012

Архив интервью | Русская версия

*** ARCHIVE ITEM - DATED 2005 *** Germany's Blind Guardian were always considered among the most stable metal bands - they never had a member leaving from 1988. However, this tranquillity fell apart in spring 2005, when drummer Thomen Stauch announced his departure. Details of this sensational breakup can be found in the exclusive interview that Thomen gave us just a week after the beginning of his "independent voyage".

(EDITOR'S NOTE - THE YEAR 2012: Those of our readers who have been following HeadBanger.ru for a long time are aware that the website was not born out of nothing. By the time it was established, all of our original authors had several years of experience with other Internet and print media. At that time we came up with a lot of materials, but, for various reasons, some of them are not available on the Internet at all at the moment, or are available in incomplete versions. The fifth anniversary of our webzine is the perfect moment to look back and put them online again. Why? First, because some of these conversations matter a lot to us personally. Second, we know that there is still interest in them on the side of our readers...) 

Let’s begin with recalling the latest gig you played in Moscow in autumn 2002. When the show started, there was a bomb threat, somebody called the police and said a bomb was in the venue, and all the audience were evacuated. What were you doing and thinking at that moment? Did you consider canceling the gig?

Of course, we had big discussions down in the backstage room, we discussed what would be happening. Our tour promoter Henry came in and told us about the situation, and he said he would certainly understand if some of us would think, “OK, let’s better cancel the show, it’s too dangerous.” Some of us have a family and all this at home, and we don’t want to risk anything. But he also told us that the people in the club were really fighting to solve the problem, and finally we were only thinking it could be really difficult to put all the people out of the venue and let them in later in a short time. We were sure there would not be any control left, and if somebody would bring any bomb or gun inside, we will have a venue full of unprotected people. This was the risk we had, but then we said, “OK, we trust our fans and hope there will not be any assholes doing such shit, so let’s go on stage, let’s do it, and then we’ll see what happens.” In the end, you maybe saw that we were a little big nervous onstage in the beginning, but finally after one or two songs we all felt, “OK, everything seems to be fine, let’s go on and do a good show.” And it became a really good show in the end, I think.

Your album “Live” (2003) includes some of the songs recorded in Moscow, but what are these songs, do you happen to remember?

Oh, I must really tell you I don’t know anymore. (laughs) In reality, I don’t remember now which songs were from which show.

OK, let’s pass on to the latest events in Blind Guardian. You said that for several years you had musical disagreements with other members of the band. When and how did these disagreements start?

I think they started in the last two to three years, when we were starting to work on some stuff, when the songwriting began. There were a lot of problems musically-wise, but the point is that I don’t want to talk so much about this, because I think it’s really an internal thing of the band. We came to the decision to split our ways, and the most important thing for us as a band was to keep this information away from our fans as much as possible. You must look at this like a marriage – when you split a marriage, it is important for the people outside to know, “OK, this pair is not together anymore.” But you will never tell outside people what were exactly the internal problems that you had in your marriage, because the people will start going, “Oh, you are right!” or “No, he is right!” This is a situation in which we don’t want to bring our fans, because they were really loyal to us over all those years, and if we start doing any shit like that now, we will have a big problem with our fans, and we really don’t want this. We don’t want them to take sides - some people will be with me, some with the band, but we just want them to accept what we decided because – and I can say to all our fans that I’m 100 percent sure about it – that we made the best decision for the music and for the band in the end. This way we managed to stay friends, and this is the most important thing after 20 years of working together. It would really make no sense to talk about any details in this situation, I hope you can respect this.

Sure, no problem! But would you call Blind Guardian a democracy from the musical point of view? Did the four members decide together which way to go, or were there any people who were basically setting a course for the whole band?

I would say the main songwriters were always Andre (Olbrich, guitar) and Hansi (Kuersch, vocals). Of course, as they were the creators of this band more or less, when it would be coming to a very hard decision, they maybe had a slightly higher percentage to decide which way it will go. And everybody in the band respected this. It doesn’t mean that Markus (Siepen, guitar) and me could not decide with them, they always asked us, and we could say, “No, we don’t want this,” and they accepted it, too. Only in very hard times, if we had problems that we had to solve together, their votes were worth a bit more. The democracy we had in the band was always good for staying together for such a long time. We still had it in the past two or three years, but we found out that even the democracy doesn’t help anymore, when the views on the future development of the music are so different among the band members. It cannot be good for the band and it cannot be good for a single musician, which was me at that moment, to say, “OK, we stuck together for our fans.” This cannot be a fair way for our fans, and this cannot be a fair way for ourselves. That’s why we made the decision we made, and now I’m really happy with it, because I feel free now. I’m free to do what I want, and this is what I’m doing at the moment in my new project with the singer of Soilwork, which will be more or less in the vein of nu metal, or rather modern metal. But this is only a project, I’m really having fun doing such a thing once in my life. I want to make this experiment to see how it feels playing like that, it interested me for a long time. But this is not the way I’m going to continue in the future, this is only a one-time side thing I will do for fun, because it makes a lot of fun playing this, as I experienced already in the studio. My new main band is called Savage Circus, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it…

Yeah, we downloaded two songs of this band from your website today…

Great, and did you like them?

Both of them are very nice, and they’re more in the vein of early Blind Guardian…

Right, this is the point! That’s the way I want to go in the future, because that’s where I come from, that’s where I feel home, and that’s what I feel comfortable with. I think we created this style with Blind Guardian in the early years, and I was really happy with Blind Guardian until “Nightfall In Middle Earth” (1998). I was still really happy with “A Night At The Opera” (2002), but I think we could have gone a little bit different way already. We should have stuck with the old times a bit more. It is a really good album, but I think it’s too progressive, and it’s a little bit overloaded with all the melody parts that Andre composed. I really like the songs, but we could have worked differently with the songs. I still support this album, I support everything I did with Blind Guardian from the early days to the end, but it doesn’t mean I have to go on like that.

Blind Guardian has been one of the few metal bands that remained on a major label for a long time, while other metal bands switched to independent companies long ago. How do you evaluate the work that Virgin Records has been doing for the band?

I think Virgin did a very good work over all these years, but starting with the latest DVD (“Imaginations Through The Looking Glass”, 2004), they didn’t do such a good work for Blind Guardian anymore, and that’s why Blind Guardian is not with Virgin anymore, I don’t know if you’ve already heard it.

No, not yet.

They cancelled the contract with Virgin, and as far as I know, they are still searching for a company, that’s what Hansi told me last time. (A couple of weeks after the interview it was announced that Blind Guardian had signed to Nuclear Blast – ed.)

So what will the future hold for Blind Guardian? Do you have any idea who will be the new drummer?

No, I’m sorry I don’t know it. I only can tell you that I gave them a hint at who I think could be the best one for them, at least for the first time. I told them they should ask Uli Kusch from Masterplan, because Uli is a really good drummer, and he’s the only one I know that could be able to play…. Well, not exactly play, I know there are a lot of drummers that can play like me, but to have ideas for the songs to create the necessary kind of drumming. In this sense I think Uli would be the only right person. Maybe I’m wrong, it is only my way of thinking now, but at least I told them that, and what they do is their decision, of course.

More about record labels – with your new band Savage Circus you are signed to an independent label Dockyard1, moreover, it’s a brand new label. Why did you choose this particular company? We’re sure you get a lot of interest from bigger labels – SPV, Nuclear Blast or whatever…

Yeah, for sure! That has two causes. First of all, we said, “OK, we want an independent label that will work more for the band, not only thinking about money.” We really want somebody who will be able to support the band, and Christine and Dirk have a lot of connections, because they worked at Sanctuary before, and Sanctuary is a really fucking amazing great company! To come from there brings you a lot of experience, and you have a lot of connections to people, and we thought it would really be the best way. The second thing is that Piet (Sielck, Iron Savior), who is in our band too, is a part of this company, so I can be sure that they will do the best possible for this band, which I would never have with another company. It doesn’t mean that they will not do a good job, but here I automatically have the security that they will do the best they can for us, because Piet is in the company and in the band. He would be crazy to do any stupid shit with the company to the band, because he’s a member of it. It was the perfect way, and they anyway made a really fair deal with us, they are already supporting us like hell. I must say the work they are doing with us is already more professional than everything I saw over all these years during being with Virgin. Everything is organized better, and I don’t have to think, “Has she done this already? I should better call her, maybe she forgot about this.” If I wanna do so now, even before I do so, I get an answer to my e-mail inbox, “Thomen, I already did this!” So I think, “OK, I can save myself this call again!” (laughs) It’s really perfect, I’m really happy there, I hope it will go on like that, and we will never have any problems.

In Savage Circus you work with two members of the Swedish band Persuader. How is the songwriting process going in the band, especially given that you live in Spain and the guys are from Sweden?

I was going over by plane or sometimes even by car, I would visit Piet at Hamburg, the guys from Sweden came to Hamburg too, and we worked there in the studio. We had a midi-drum, on which we made the compositions, and then we recorded the drums with Piet in Karo Studios, where we recorded the first Blind Guardian albums and where I also recorded the drums for my nu metal project. Every one or two months we would meet and stay there for some days, and we were writing new songs. We were working in a really professional way, and it came out really well in the end. When we said, “OK, let’s meet to make another song together,” we would mostly come up with two or three new songs. (laughs) It was perfect, we had so much fun! The Swedish guys are incredible, they are only talking about drinking beer, having a barbecue (cracks) and that Thomen is a fucking ugly asshole! (everybody laughs) “But it doesn’t matter, he’s a good drummer!” they would say. (a new burst of laughter) So it was like that. I must say with these guys I feel like being 20 years younger. They are really young, they are now 22 or 23, they are the good students of our band. (laughs)

The singer Jens has a voice that is very close to Hansi. Did you specifically look for someone that is singing in the style of Hansi, or did you just happen to hear Hens once and immediately think, “Yeah, that’s the right guy!”?

Initially I came with two or three songs and I called Piet one day, because he’s still a good friend of mine. I said, “Hey, can we meet? I want to play some songs to you.” And he said, “Hey, I will be in Andalusia in Spain next month anyone, so I invite you to come over. I have rented a house there, and we can have a cool weekend. I will listen to the songs and I will tell you my opinion.” So went down to Andalusia by car, we met, listened to the songs, and he said, “Hey, this is fucking cool, man, this is really good stuff that reminds me a little bit of old Blind Guardian.” And I said, “Yeah, this was written for Blind Guardian, but I thought it would not fit with the new stuff for the next album. Now I want to do a project with this, and I only wanted to hear what do you think about it.” He said, “Yeah, do it! It’s a good idea! OK, wait.” And then he started searching among his CD collection that he took for the holiday. He said, “I hope I have it with me,” and then he took out a CD and put it in the CD player. While doing this, he was laughing and smiling and telling me shit like, “Ah, I think it will remind you of something.” (laughs) I listened to the album and said, “Hey Piet, what the fuck is this? This cannot be, he sounds like Hansi in the early years.” And he said, “Aha, that’s what I wanted to tell you.” (everybody laughs) I said, “Give me the contact of these guys, I want to contact them. Do you think they would like to do something with me?” And he said, “Yeah, I can imagine that. They are really nice guys, they’re on the same wave length as you, everything’s fine.” And I said, “Yeah, man, my dreams are fulfilled.”  So I went back to Madrid at the end of the weekend, and then I contacted these guys, and they were totally happy. They were like, “Yeah, let’s do it, come on man.” I sent them the mp3 files and we decided to go on with the songwriting. Shortly after this I decided to ask Piet to join, I thought, “He gave me the contact to these guys, I didn’t even know about this band, and he’s anyway a good guitarist and producer, let’s work with him together, let’s ask him.” And Piet was very happy, so we were already four members. (laughs) Then we would always meet in his studio, we worked some songs out and finally we had nine killer songs! I hope so, at least. (laughs)

Will you continue with Piet, or will you search for a touring member to play bass?

Yeah, we will search for a bass player for touring, we are not sure who it will be. In the studio Piet played the bass guitar, that was no problem for him, so we have some more time to concentrate on the album and later on search for a good bassist. Maybe some people will ask us if they can play with us when the album comes out.

Let’s now discuss your other project, the one you’re doing with Bjorn “Speed” Strid from Soilwork. First of all, how did you happen to meet Bjorn?

(laughs) It was a funny story. Me and Michael Schuren, the keyboard player of Blind Guardian, had the idea on the last Blind Guardian tour to make a project together in a modern metal way. We came up with new songs, it was the second songwriting phase I had here in Spain, and we were doing it in between the Savage Circus stuff, so I was switching between the songs. It was horrible, sometimes I didn’t know anymore what I was working on last time. (laughs) Later on we searched for other musicians, and I had a guitarist here who is a friend of my wife’s sister. He’s a good guitarist and he’s one of my best friends, too. I told him, “Hey, would you like to join us?” And he liked it. We started writing songs together, because he lives in Spain in the same area like me. Then me and Michael Schuren got the second guitarist in Germany, he’s pretty unknown, but a really killer guitarist. He can play every style from jazz to heavy metal without any problems, and this is really amazing. When you hear him playing, he’s so fucking straight in the studio, he nailed the tracks in just a few days. Even Klemens, the engineer from Karo Studios, was really surprised, he was like, “Guys, you decided to hire a really good guitarist!” (laughs) When we were still writing songs, we came up with the idea to do pre-production here in my home studio in Spain, so the guys came over, we recorded the material only to listen to the completed songs, but without vocals, because we still didn’t have the vocalist. And then we said, “OK, now we have to start making contact with vocalists.” We first thought of getting Skin from Skunk Anansie, but then we decided it would not be the right choice, because she’s only doing fucking pop music now. Then we were thinking about harder stuff, for example, the singer from Fear Factory, but we decided he’s too rough, and we needed somebody who could do both sides – the melodic stuff in a really good way and the brutal stuff in a good way. Then I came up with the idea, “Wait, what I love really is Soilwork.” I played their music to the guys and they were all happy with this. I called our old Blind Guardian guitar technician, Jesus, and he told me, “Of course I have contacts, I was the technician for them on the tour.” Then I called Bjorn, played the songs to him, and he said, “Hey, you have written really good stuff. Let’s do something together.” So it happened, and we were a band, or a project, that was completed in the end. (laughs)

How do you think the Blind Guardian fans will receive your new music?

I think they will kill me for this. (everybody laughs) Yeah, I think they will kill me for us, but I think that somebody who doesn’t like something should not buy it. I’m not doing this for my Blind Guardian fans, I’m doing it for my own satisfaction. Like I said, I want to do something like that once in my life, and I think it will only make me a better drummer if I play the stuff that is totally different from Blind Guardian. If I play the same style all my life, I will never be able to play something really good in another band. This way, I have to practice a lot to get this style, to get the groove of the drums, and that’s what I did in the past. And if a Blind Guardian fan doesn’t like it, he should not buy it. What I hate a bit when I check the Blind Guardian forum is that some people already complaining about it, “Oh, fucking asshole Thomen, how can you do something like that to us?” And all I can say is, “What the fucking hell do you think you are?” I have the right to do whatever I want in my life, and if you don’t like it, don’t pay attention to it, don’t buy it. (laughs) I think that’s the easiest way. Why do people always have the feeling they have to insult somebody? This is what I don’t understand. I never waited the Blind Guardian fans to like my nu metal stuff, I never said this. I don’t know what to say more about this. Some people seem to always be 12 years old, this is a thing that makes me a little pissed off sometimes. But I hope that they will understand one day, and some people in the forum already wrote, “Don’t buy it, nobody forces you to buy this album.” Of course, I will be happy if some of Blind Guardian fans will like this stuff, but if not, OK, I respect this.

Which album will come out first – Savage Circus or the project with Bjorn?

Savage Circus will be released at the end of August or the beginning of September this year, and with the nu metal project we are still searching for a deal. If everything runs fine with record companies and we find a good deal, we will release it in February next year.

Oh, there’s still such a long time to wait…

The problem is that after releasing an album with Savage Circus we may have to tour with this, and if you release another thing that you’re doing more or less at the same time, one or two months later, the attention that people may pay to this will be lost in the end. Nobody will notice that something new came out from Thomen if they already saw something released a month ago. They will think something has changed or they understood something wrong. It’s better to keep at least half-a-year pause in between releases.

We would like to ask you a couple of questions about the history of Blind Guardian, if you don’t mind, We’ve heard that after “Nightfall In Middle Earth” you planned to release an EP with “Harvest Of Sorrow” and two other songs to complete the lyrical concept of “Nightfall…” What happened to these two tracks?

These tracks were already recorded during the “Nightfall…” sessions. The point is that Markus and me wrote more songs that didn’t make it to the “Nightfall…” album, but as we recorded them anyway, we said, “OK, we can always use them as singles or B-sides.” A lot of people were asking to finish the “Silmarillion” stuff that Hansi did, and we thought it would be a good chance to release these songs and finish the story with this. But in the end… I’m really thinking why we didn’t do it… Maybe there was a time problem, or we would have needed to record something with Charlie, and Charlie didn’t have time at that moment, I don’t remember exactly. In the end we didn’t do it, and we soon started touring, and after touring we thought that the songs didn’t fit that much with the new times. Then we started writing new songs for “A Night At The Opera”, and they didn’t fit anymore at all, so we let it be.

At the press conference in Moscow in October 2002 fans and journalists gave you several Russian translations of “Harvest Of Sorrow”. Is there any chance that a Russian version of this song will be released?

Oh, I can’t answer this anymore, I would have to ask Hansi.

But did you consider this at any point?

I really don’t know, this is a good question.

Who came up with the idea for the video of “Mr. Sandman”? This is probably one of the funniest metal videos we’ve ever seen…

It was a mixture of Virgin and the band that came up with the idea. After the release of the album “The Forgotten Tales” (1996), we thought that we could have a really big success with “Mr. Sandman”, and we would have to demonstrate a new video, which we didn’t have. So we came up with this idea, and the video company DO-RO from Austria made the script. We said, “OK, let’s do it like that,” we were very happy with it in the end, but it didn’t get as successful as we expected it. It cost us a lot of money, but its success didn’t meet the expectations of the band and Virgin, so we said, “We will never do a video that expensive again.” (laughs)

And how was it like playing the drums and wearing a clown outfit?

Do you really want my humble opinion? (everybody laughs) OK, I was dying. I was sweating, I was dead. But I can tell you that this costume was still funny and OK. The worst was standing and sitting and walking the whole day in these fucking women’s shoes. (a new burst of laughter) This was real hell, my feet were burning. After that I said that I will never tell my wife, “Oh, I would like to see you more in these shoes, dear!” I know how it feels like. (laughter continues) Even though women must be more comfortable wearing this than men, I still imagine that it must be similar to some women. If somebody again comes up with such an idea for a video with me, I will tell him, “No, you better forget about it.”

We’ve heard that in the early days of Blind Guardian when you were still called Lucifer’s Heritage, your father hated your band. When did he and the rest of your family members change their minds about Blind Guardian?

It wasn’t so extreme, you know. The point is that I was the youngest member of the band, I was 13 at that time. And what do you do when you are the parents of the guy who’s playing in a heavy metal band, and the singer, who is 17 years or something, is drinking beer and vodka the whole day? And your 13-year-old son tells you, “Mom, I will not get back tonight at 9, I will get home at 12 or 1 in the morning.” You will naturally go like, “What did you tell me, my son? You only wanna be drinking alcohol with your friends from the band!” (everybody laughs) That’s how this story was born. In the end, they of course told me, “You will never be successful, it’s really hard nowadays, you have to master a good job.” My father was a roofer, he had his own company, and there was nothing easier than to work in this company for me. And as a child I wanted this job too. But when I became a musician and started to play drums, I had different wishes, and my father was very disappointed, because I was supposed to inherit his company, and then he saw all of his dreams flying away. So it was a natural thing, let’s put it this way. Nowadays my parents really support me, they are really proud of the, and everything is fine. It’s always good to have a family that’s standing behind you and protecting your back, it’s always important, I think.

Looking back, is there anything you regret doing or not doing with Blind Guardian?

The guy from my previous interview asked me something similar, and I told him that the only thing that I would change now is maybe working in such a way on “A Night At The Opera”. We worked 13 months on the production, and I think this was really too much. I still like this album, I recorded this, and I would never have recorded something that I don’t like. But I think we could have made a much better album, if we would have worked in a rougher and straighter way. What came out is too bombastic, it has too many melody lines, it is produced in a too professional way, there is not a second on the album where you can say, “Here it can be played in a better way,” and as a result, it is not natural anymore, in my opinion. This a bit sad for me, because I think the songwriting was really good, but we destroyed it ourselves, including Charlie, in the course of working for such a long time. The album came out more progressive, and even in my drum playing style you can you can notice much more progressive elements than on old Blind Guardian albums. I think we could have made it easier to listen for the fans.

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

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart" Patrashova
April 2005
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