U.D.O.
One Lone Voice

30.10.2007

A U.D.O. gig in Moscow is no longer a surprise or a groundbreaking event for Russian metalheads, but it’s still an event to be noted and visited. Even though Udo Dirkschneider has visited Russia close to 10 times with both U.D.O. and Accept, he still puts on a hell of a show, and attracts crowds no matter where he plays. Moreover, unlike many other big names of his generation, he continues to release albums, and these albums are nearly always excellent. His latest effort is called “Mastercutor”, and even though it has no dramatic differences from the previous few releases, it’s still a great effort, 100% pure German heavy metal with some very catchy songs. Which means, in turn, that there are more than enough reasons to continue doing interviews with the man, as he still has a lot of interesting things to say. By the way, over all these years it was our first face-to-face interview, and we are really glad that we finally managed to do it…

Your latest album “Mastercutor” entered the German national charts on the number 39, which is the highest mark in the band’s history. First of all, congratulations for that! But the question is: in your opinion, what made this album so successful? It’s a great record, but you have had other great records in the past…

(laughs) Maybe we did much better songs, and people like it more! We are not really thinking too much about it when we are making an album, maybe we just did the right thing at the right moment. Moreover, we have been really working over the years, and U.D.O. has been getting more and more popular. Maybe that’s why the album is so high in the charts.

The sound of the new record is a bit more modern than what fans have got used to hearing from U.D.O. Whose idea was it to upgrade the sound, so to say? Did you want to attract a new younger audience?

Not only the younger audience. When you listen to new records in 2007, the sound is more modern. When we start working on a new album, we need someone to be with us in the studio, and this time it was our live sound engineer, he also did the sound yesterday. He was in the studio all the time, and he is responsible for 70% of the sound on “Mastercutor”. It was important to have somebody from the outside, and he always said, “Your live sound is different to the old U.D.O. albums,” in a way it was his idea to change the sound.

Would it be correct to say that “Mastercutor” is a concept album? Is there any concept connecting all the songs?

A little bit. (laughs) The Mastercutor is the host, he is directing the whole album like a TV show. That’s why we have this intro – “Welcome back everybody…”, it’s like opening up a TV game show. And most of the lyrics are done as if you see what’s happening on a TV screen. That’s why the CD is a bit of a concept album.

One of the most striking tracks on the new record is “Tears Of A Clown”. How much personal is this song for you?

It is personal in a way. An actor in a theater or a musician has to always be on stage to entertain people. Someday something serious happens, and you’re not really happy to go on stage, do your thing and perform in front of people. Maybe somebody is dying, somebody is sick, a lot of things can happen, and you don’t feel like being on stage. That’s the connection with the clown – the clown always has to make people laugh, but inside he isn’t willing to do so.

In your opinion, how much do a circus performance and a metal show have in common?

I don’t know. (laughs) I don’t thing the song can be interpreted that way. The story is about a clown in the circus, but that’s just a person. Sometimes we are also clowns on stage! (cracks)

Who is pictured on the cover of “Mastercutor”? Who came up with this idea?

It the beginning we had the idea of the Mastercutor, and this girl, Katja Piolka, did the whole artwork. She also took the pictures, and I think she did a great job.

In the song “Vendetta” you obviously sing about the times of the Prohibition Law and the Great Depression in the U.S. What made you handle such an unusual topic?

The idea came to us, when we saw the movie “Untouchables” about Al Capone. After that the idea to do a song about this came naturally. (laughs)

By the way, most of the lyrics in U.D.O. are credited to Dirkschneider and Kauffmann. How do you and Stefan work on the songs? Is one of you the author of an idea and the other the author of the exact words, or do you have any other way of writing lyrics together?

Stefan and me together are like one person in a way. Sometimes he comes up with his own story for a song, and sometimes I do. When we start working on a new album, we begin with lyrics, and we always have a lot of ideas. Then we have a person from England, his name is Frank Knight (the former singer of X-Wild – ed.), he’s always with us to make sure we use the correct English words. I mean, we can speak English, we can write in English, but when it comes to lyrics, they need a real meaning, and we need somebody to do make sure we do it in the right way. (laughs) That’s the first part of the work on a record. And when we are doing lyrics, we already have some melodies for an acoustic guitar or something like that. Then Stefan mostly comes up with music, I work on some ideas at home using keyboards, and that’s how we work. For this album, Igor (Gianola, guitarist) and Fitty (Wienhold, bassist) came up with a lot of stuff as well. So we usually have about 25 songs that we want to do, but by the time we go to the studio, we have 17 or 18 of them left.

You said that at home you try our ideas on the keyboards, but the only U.D.O. with the real sound of the keyboards, not samplers or effects, is “Faceless World” (1990). Why did you stop using them after that? Did you try it and dislike it?

Oh, it has nothing to do with us disliking it. Songs on “Faceless World” needed something else, and we used a lot of keyboards. It’s the same as on the new album we have piano, and in the song “Tears Of A Clown” we have cello. In the old days everybody said, “Oh, heavy metal can only work with two guitars,” but now when you do an album, and you say, “I need saxophone,” for instance, you just put it on. I don’t have any problems with that anymore. Maybe next time we will do an album entirely on piano, I don’t know. (laughs) It doesn’t matter anymore.

The Russian edition on the new CD contains a bonus track called “Plachet Soldat”. As far as we remember, the original plan was to record this song with the Russian pop band Faktor 2. Why did it never happen?

Somebody from the record company came up with this idea, but I never heard anything from these guys anymore. It was planned that they will join us onstage here in Moscow, but they disappeared. (laughs) But the idea to do “Cry Soldier Cry” in Russian remained. We already did “Poezd Po Rossii” before, and in a way this a tribute to Russian fans. We like it very much here in Russia.

Don’t you think that the Russian translation of the lyrics contradicts the original idea of the song? In the English version you sing that the soldier cannot even cry anymore, but the Russian lyrics say that the soldier is actually crying…

Yeah. (laughs) We had somebody who’s perfect in Russian, and we had somebody from Moscow working on it. But when we started to sing in Russian, it wasn’t easy. You have to keep the melody and the meaning, and in the very beginning we got the right meaning, but I couldn’t sing it. Then we changed the meaning a little bit.

Speaking about relations between the fans and the band – for this tour you asked the fans to vote for the new songs they want to hear live. How much does their choice correspond to your choice?

The voting is important for us to see which songs people like most. It helps us to create the setlist. But for Russia it worked differently. We played here last time in 2004…

2006 maybe?

Yes, but it was only Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I mean a full tour. So what we did this time was playing two songs off the new album and a mix of other U.D.O. stuff. In Europe we will play two more new songs and change the old stuff as well. It’s always different, for instance, when we go to Spain, we change one song, because we know that we have to play a particular song in Spain. If you’ve been around for so long, you know what songs you need to do.

OK, but there are also your personal tastes. How much do they have in common with the choice of the fans?

In a way… (pause) You see, we know which songs are working live. When you have a new album, not all the songs are working live, and after all these years on stage we have a feeling which songs will be working and which will not. The voting helps us to see whether we are right or completely wrong.

Can you say a few words about the best-of compilation that is coming out in December? What kind of unreleased material will it include?

There will definitely be two new songs and some live stuff.

Speaking about the visual side of the band, the cover for “Mastercutor” and your latest videos are more brutal than the stuff you did previously – all these S&M elements and Igor trying to rape a woman in the video for “Mean Streets”… (Udo laughs) Where are all these ideas coming from?

I don’t know really. We’re not thinking like, “Oh, we have to be more brutal,” we just look at the lyrics we have and see what kind of video will correspond to them. When you have a song like “The Wrong Side Of Midnight”, you need a video like the one we did, though it was not easy to create Mastercutor in this clip. But there’s no deep meaning that we have to be more brutal now, it comes naturally.

How did your record label react when you presented them the video for “The Wrong Side of Midnight”? We guess they expected something different from you, right?

The idea to do a videoclip for “The Wrong Side Of Midnight” came from the record company. Then we were talking to Katja Piolka, and she said, “OK, let’s start thinking what we can do.” The band had the idea to film a video for “Mastercutor” as a game show, but the record company said they wanted something different. So…

Before signing to AFM Records you had your own label Breaker. What kind of experience did you get from running your own label? Did you enjoy that, or was it a burden?

After the “Solid” (1997) and “No Limits” (1998) albums, I had enough of record companies, so I said, “OK, I’ll open my own one”. (laughs) I had a good experience with it – I released “Holy” (1999), “Man And Machine” (2002) and “Live From Russia” (2002) on my own label. It was very interesting, but U.D.O. was getting bigger and bigger, there was more touring, and it was no longer possible for me to do everything on my own. We had a deal with AFM coming up, and they have been doing a good job so far. The whole back catalogue of U.D.O. is still on Breaker Records, and I have some Accept stuff on it, this is easy to handle. Maybe in one or two years we will sign some other bands to Breaker Records, but at the moment I’m too busy. (laughs)

Going back to the videos - you have only had one DVD (“Nailed To Metal”, 2002) over your entire career with U.D.O, but there are only nine live tracks, not a complete set. Have you considered doing another live DVD some time soon?

Yes. We are already filming a lot of behind the scenes stuff, we have a cameraman with us, and he’s filming all the time. We have stuff from Mexico, and at the moment we’re looking for the right venue to film a live concert. Maybe we will do it in Sofia, the Czech Republic or Germany, so we will see. At the moment we’re waiting for the information on the size of the stages to see whether we can put all our equipment on. There will definitely be a DVD with the whole concert.

There were also plans for Accept to release a live DVD recorded a couple of years ago. Do you know will this ever happen?

Don’t ask me about this! It’s a nightmare! (laughs) I don’t know what they have been doing. Here’s the story - three days before we played a show at Wacken in Germany they came up to me and said, “Oh yes, we’ll record the whole thing.” And you can’t say that you are going to record a whole show just one or two days before it. You have to prepare beforehand, you need at least two weeks of preparations, you need to discuss everything with the sound engineer, and blah blah blah – oh, a lot of things. So when I saw the material and listened to all the recordings… (laughs) In the end, even the rest of Accept said, “Let’s make a best-of, not a complete show,” but it didn’t work either. A lot of people think it’s my fault, they believe I said “no” to this, but it’s not true. I was the one to say, “Come on, this may be the last chance to capture this on DVD.” But OK, shit happens. You never know, a lot of people are asking me whether it can happen again, whether we can do some festivals. I say, “Why not?” We had a lot of fun, there was no pressure, we were not thinking about doing a reunion and a new studio album. It was just, “Do it!” Maybe if we have a break with U.D.O., we will play some big festivals like Sweden Rock, Bang Your Head, Graspop or Gods Of Metal. I don’t want to say “no” to this, this is easy for me and for the rest of the guys in Accept. However, a lot of people were thinking after those festivals that we were doing a real reunion, even though for us it was clear from the beginning that it wouldn’t be a reunion.

In general, how much do you listen to other people’s albums and watch other people’s DVDs? Can you name some bands that have impressed you lately?

There are a lot of cool bands. For me it’s easy, my son is 14, and he listens to this kind of music, so when he plays some stuff, I sometimes go like, “Wow! Who is it?” (everybody laughs) I’m always informed, as he’s coming up with a lot of new bands, but they have such complicated names nowadays that I can’t remember them. (laughs)

You did a guest appearance on the latest Lordi album yet before they won Eurovision. What was your reaction when you learned the results of the contest? Did you expect them to become number one, or was it a surprise for you?

That was a surprise for everybody. (laughs) When I was working together with Lordi, nobody knew that they would win the contest. When they took part in the Finnish national competition, they did it just for fun, they said, “Let’s try it”, and then Finland sent them to Greece, and they won the whole thing! (laughs) It was funny! I was doing a festival in Italy with U.D.O., and my wife called me and said, “You cannot believe it! Lordi won the contest!” I said, “No way, this is a joke!” (everybody laughs) I think it was good that something like this happened, but it was a big surprise.

And the last question – we can’t even remember how many times you have toured Russia, it must be seven or eight times, so this is no longer an unknown country for you. Does this country still manage to surprise or impress you in any way? In your opinion, how much has Russia changed over the years?

We were here with Accept for the first time in 1993, and since then I’ve been in Vladivostok and everywhere deep inside Russia. You can see a lot of changes going on, the country is getting more and more open, just like everywhere in the East. That also means that you can play in more countries, nowadays we’re even talking about China. I think it’s a good thing that you can play nearly everywhere now.

U.D.O. on the Internet: http://www.udo-online.de

Special thanks to Irina Ivanova (CD-Maximum) for arranging this interview.

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Grigory “Starbreaker” Vorontsov
September 22, 2007
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