Intervista Accept (Wolf Hoffmann)

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Hi Wolf, how are you doing?

I’m doing great! Why wouldn’t I? It’s a fabulous day, I’m in a huge festival and we’re going to go out there in a little while, so…

You’ve played a couple of gigs earlier this month, but apart from those you’ve been resting since February, how do you feel being back on the road?

It’s great, it’s always fun to go out again.
I wish we could just keep going the whole year around but, you know, sometimes we have to take a break; if it was up to me we would play pretty much non-stop.

Last year you released “The Rise of Chaos”, your first album with Uwe Lulis and Christopher Williams, how has their presence influenced the album?

Positively, I think.
Every time you have new band members you have some fresh wind in the band, it brings you good energy and that happened this time too; I think we have a great chemistry in the band, we have a great camaraderie and we get along great which is half the battle.
If you have someone in the band who doesn’t like to be there, for instance, who’s sort of miserable, he brings everybody down; now we have five guys in the band who really want to do this and I think it’s great.

Going back a little more, with “Blind Rage” you reached the number one position on the German chart for the first time in your career…

I know, insane!

…and, also in terms of affluence at your gigs, it seems to me that you’re getting more popular than ever; how does it feel to achieve this kind of success so late in your career?

It almost feels like a second time around, I mean, we had a really great time in the ‘80s, then we really dipped down and the band was not in existence for a while.
To be back so many years later and to be back to the same level, or maybe even go beyond, it feels amazing!
It’s really…I think the band is having a better moment in their career than ever before, to be honest, because we have four consecutive album that are very strong and very similar, there’s no up and down or sideways, it really seems to go on a straight course.

Last year you also released “Restless & Live”, your first live album in a long time, why did you feel that was the right moment for a live album?

Because we have enough material with the new lineup now that we felt was worthy to represent us on a live album.
People have been asking ever since we came back, “When are you going to do a live album?”, and we always felt, well, we’re gonna do a live album now and we’ll play mainly old material and maybe a couple of new songs; three albums down the road, we felt it was the right moment and happened to film a good show, we were really happy with the performance and we felt, this is probably the right time.

In 2016 you released “Headbangers Symphony”, your second solo album, which came almost 20 years after “Classical” and which, again, sees you venturing into Classical music. Can you talk me a bit about this album? Did you work on it for a long time?

I did, indeed.
The origins of that album go back to even before Accept was reunited, it was 10 years ago that I thought, “I really want to do this one day, to play with an orchestra and to really make a follow-up album to my classical project”.
I started working on it, I met with an arranger and I talked to all these people, made some demos, and all of a sudden Accept came back together and it was priority number 1, so this came to a temporary hold.
It sat on my hard drives for a few years until I finally found the time between tours to finish the whole project, that’s when it finally saw the light of day; now that it’s out there’s really quite a big demand for us to perform it live, that’s why we did it at Wacken for the first time, we played with a 15 piece orchestra from Prague live at Wacken, and we didn’t just play material from the “Headbangers Symphony” album, we also played some classic Accept songs with the orchestra which was amazing.
That whole concert will come out as a live DVD in the Fall now, so another live DVD coming out, but a totally different show, of course.

That was going to be my next question, are you planning to tour in support of that album?

Yes, as a matter of fact we’ve announced on our website just recently that next year we will do a tour, a sort of the Wacken show on a smaller scale, we’re gonna go to smaller venues – we can’t always do it in front of 80.000 people – we want to take it on the road.
We have a clear concept of how it’s gonna work, I think it’s gonna be tremendous.

When Accept split up in the ’90s you started working as a professional photographer, do you still do any photography work?

Not as much as I’d want to but, at some point, you have to ask yourself…you can’t do everything all the time, right now I said to myself, “It’s time to really be honest and be a musician full-time”.
For a long time I was doing photo-shoots on the side, but a year ago, two years ago I said, “You know what? It’s not worth it anymore, I can’t be everywhere all the time”, the choice has always been clear, it’s always music that take the number 1 spot.

You’ve seen and lived the evolution of the music business, same are now disillusioned and think “Rock is dead”, like Gene Simmons said not too long ago; how do you feel about the music business today?

I can’t say, I can only speak for myself, I can’t speak for the whole genre, I know Accept isn’t dead and I still like doing it, and I know the fans are not dead, they are still there.
So, as long as this is the case, we keep going; you know, people always ask me about the general state of Metal or music business and why would I know any better than someone like you?
Everybody has their own definition of what it’s like for them personally, but nobody really speaks for the whole genre or the music industry, and I can’t either.
We live in our own little world and in our own bubble, looking inside that bubble it looks pretty good, even if people constantly tell me these things like, “Oh, album sales in general are going down every year”, yeah they do, but we’re still here, we’re still doing it so something seems to work.
It’s not getting easier, but if I look back 30-40 years ago it was never easy, even back then in the so called “Golden Era” it wasn’t like everything was laid out for you, you had to fight really hard for your spot, it was equally hard, maybe even harder back then, I don’t know.
In my prospective, that part really hasn’t changed that much.

Talking about evolution through the years there has been a big technological evolution too; do you think the production process of music is better today than when you started, or something was better back then?

I’m a big fan of technology, so I would tend to say that things are better now than they used to be.
I mean, there’s people who say, “Everything was better back in the day when everything was recorded manually onto tape”, we actually wrote a song about it called ‘Analog Man’.
I happen to be more of a digital man, even though I still remember the analogue days, I have to say a lot of things are really convenient now, they really do make things easier.
Do they make better songs? Of course not, but once you have a great song it becomes a lot easier to put it down.
Back in those days you had to go to a really expansive recording studio and you had only 3 hours to do it, or 3 days or whatever, so that wasn’t easier, I don’t think it was.

Next year it’s going to be the 40th anniversary of your debut album, have you thought of any way to celebrate it?

I don’t know, should we?

Maybe?

People are so obsessed with these anniversaries, I mean, we have probably 35 years from one album, 30 years from another, so realistically we could an anniversary tour every year and so far we’ve always said, “We’re so occupied with what we’re doing now, so why worry about all these anniversaries?”.
Maybe one day, when we’ll retire we will make all these anniversaries releases.

Davide Sciaky