Intervista Blind Guardian (Marcus Siepen)

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A few days before the Battlefield Metal Fest, the only Blind Guardian‘s show in Italy in 2017, and the release of the new live album, “Live Beyond the Spheres“, here’s our interview with Marcus Siepen, the band’s rhythm guitarist.

Together we talked about the new live album, the almost legendary orchestral album and the band’s future plans.

[TrueMetal.it] Hello?

[Marcus Siepen] Guess who’s calling?

Ahah, hey Marcus, what an unexpected pleasure!

How are you?

I’m good, how are you?

I’m fine, so far everything’s good.

How were your other interviews today?

The thing that I don’t like is that they start at 9 in the morning, that’s not a good time to start interviews, but since there are people calling from Australia I can understand since it’s evening or the middle of the night there.
But, yeah, interviews are doing good so far!

So, let’s get to my interview: you first announced the release of a live album during the shows you were recording, 2 years ago. You’ve been touring a lot since then, so I was wondering, how much actual time did you put into the works for the live album?

Oh, quite some time because we recorded every show and at some point you have to listen to all that stuff in order to decide what to put on the album and, you know how many gigs we played, you’ve been to quite a lot yourself, and we decided not to try to go through all of the recordings because we would be still sitting here listening to all that stuff, so we decided to focus on the first European block which was still like, whatever, 40 shows?
The good thing is that our producer Charlie [Bauerfeind] started going through that stuff while we were still on the road, so he helped narrowing things down, but in the end we still had to listen to every show, make notes of what songs we liked from what show, compare our notes and see what we agreed, or disagreed, on and, you know, it really takes a while.
I can’t really say how much time we really put in it, weeks or whatever, but it was quite some because you have to listen to several shows, you have to make notes, you have to come back to the shows and then you compare your notes to the notes of the others and go back and forth, it’s a long process.

And what kind of work did you do on the recordings, other than the selection of the songs?

We don’t do anything anymore, because we did it before, at the shows.
Charlie does the mixing of the tracks, but that’s pretty much everything we do!
What we then have to do is put together the artwork, the booklet, select the photos, but a lot of the work is done on tour: we play the gigs and we record them, and that’s the nicest way of working on a live album.

So that’s it, recording, selection and mixing.

Yes, yes.

In this tour you played some rare songs, some songs you played for the first time like “The Curse of Feanor” which the fans wanted to hear for a long time.
You started to play it in the American tour which recordings you then decided not to use, so I was wondering if you ever considered to pick a selection of songs even if they didn’t belong to the part of tour you decided to focus on?

Not on this album because, as I said, if we wanted to go through all the recordings we would still be sitting here checking out everything.
The good thing about the first European tour which we focused on is the consistency of the recordings, because we were touring with a full production with always the same recording equipment, so there’s a certain sound consistency with the recordings which is different from when you go to the States and rent a different recording equipment.
I know that some people are disappointed with “The Curse of Feanor”, that it didn’t end up on the album, the thing is that we focused on a block of show when we didn’t play that song yet, so obviously it’s not ending on the album, but we still have all those recordings, it’s not like we deleted them, and there are some really good shows that we could release as “official bootlegs” or whatever you want to call them, or individual tracks we could use as B-sides, singles, bonus tracks.
We could still come back to that stuff at some point, but for this album we had to make a cut at some point and there are 22 songs on the album, so there’s enough going on on the album, even without “The Curse of Feanor”…I hope so [laughs].

Talking about missing song, even if it’s not a proper song, “War of Wrath” which always goes together with “Into the Storm” is also missing; since there’s “The Ninth Wave” and “Sacred Worlds”, I thought it could have been nice to have each of the 3 CDs start with one of the opener you used in the last 20 years…is there a reason why you left it out?

To be honest I don’t know, there is no special reason why we left it out, it just didn’t happen, it’s not like we left it out on purpose…I don’t know! [Laughs]
We didn’t’ really consider putting it in the album, obviously we focused on “real songs”, as you called them, and “War of Wrath” is very nice to have as an introduction of the show, but in the end not all the songs that are on the album have necessarily been played in a single show…actually I think there was a show when we played them all, we played an insane show which was almost 3 hours and we played all the long ones in there, but usually we wouldn’t play “The Ninth Wave”, “Sacred Worlds”, “And Then There Was Silence” and “Wheel of Time” in a single set because it would kill us! [Laughs].
So we tried to recreate the typical kind of Blind Guardian show with the CDs, following the flow that the live show has, so we didn’t leave “War of Wrath” out on purpose, we just didn’t think of putting it in the album.

Talking about the artwork, after some years of partnership with Felipe Machado the artwork for this new album was created by someone else, who is that and why did you choose to change?

The girls is called Andrea Christen and she worked for us quite a lot in the past, she did a lot of merchandise, she shown us her artworks and we really liked her work and we just wanted to try her for an album cover and go for something different this time, I mean, I know you are familiar with the band so you know we like to change things and not stick with the same thing all over again, so I’m perfectly happy with all the covers that Felipe did for us, I still love them, I really like them, but we just wanted to try something different and her approach is a bit more…old school is the right word for it? But anyway, it has the vibe of the older Blind Guardian covers and we liked to do something different and we like the result; I’m not saying that she will do all the future covers, but now it was the right time to try something different.

We were talking about “The Curse of Feanor”, which until a couple of years ago seemed impossible for us to hear live, now you’ll play soon in Italy at the Battlefield Metal Fest…is there any chance we could expect you to play “Battlefield”?

Ahahah, they should change the name of the festival because that’s not going to happen.
To be honest I, and not just me, everybody in the band would love to play the song, but so far it has been kind of unplayable for us, we tried it several times but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to recreate it live because there are so many jumps concerning melody lines, vocals from extremely high pitch to extremely low, overlapping vocals and everything.
We tried it before this last tour, in our rehearsal we tried it several times but we didn’t come to a result that we were happy with, so we decided not to play it.
It used to be the same with “The Curse of Feanor”, it’s also a tricky one to play, in the past we tried it a couple of time and we didn’t come to the result that we liked so we never played it in the past; as you know this time it happened, we played it and we are all happy with the result.
The only thing that I can say is, people be patient, it might work at some point, it didn’t work so far, I love the song, I’d love to play it, actually it’s one of my favourite Blind Guardian songs, but it’s really a bitch if you want to play it live.
Before we massacre it and come up with a really awkward version which doesn’t really do justice to the song we prefer not to play it aaand…even if the festival is called “Battlefield Metal Fest” we won’t play it, sorry [laughs].

You previously said you were playing just a handful of shows in 2017 to focus on the works on the albums; “Live Beyond the Spheres” is now ready, is the orchestral the very next goal for Blind Guardian?

Yes, definitely.
That the eternal, never-ending story for us…what’s still missing is Hansi’s vocal recordings, the original plan was for him to record them in the breaks between touring blocks over the past two years, but we had to abandon this idea early on because it just doesn’t work for him, it’s way too demanding for his voice.
You know that we played rather long sets and, doing this day in day out, when you have a break your voice is not ready to properly record for a studio album, so we had to leave that idea; he will record all the missing vocal this year, finally, we’ll play only this handful of show over the summer so there’s plenty of time for him to do his recordings, then there’s mixing, mastering and everything, and we’ll finally put it out next year and finally we’ll be done with it [laughs].

Aside from that we also started working on new regular songs, or whatever you want to call them, but it’s way too early to say how long it’s going to take us to finish them because we are kind of done with two songs, but we haven’t recorded anything yet, and the thing with us is that things can still change until the final version is recorded, and obviously there are going to be more songs so there’s a lot of work ahead of us, but we’re working on it, we’re just busy.
We’re enjoying summer festivals because it’s fun to just go out and play an handful of shows then come back home, you know it’s taking the nice part of playing live without the hassle of all the travelling and being apart from your family for such a long time.
So, these summer fests….I like them a lot, it’s a nice thing to do.

In terms of future plans, so, is the orchestral the next thing you are going to focus on, or if, hypothetically, you were to finish writing the new regular album first that could come out before?

It will be the orchestral album first for sure because I know, looking back at the last I don’t know how many years, it normally takes us one year to one and a half year to write a complete album, and since for the orchestral album only Hansi’s vocals are missing, you know, it will surely come out before the regular album.
The order is definitely live album first, obviously, in 5 weeks or whatever, then orchestral album, then regular album.
 

You talked about Hansi’s vocals, but in terms of instruments through the years we heard different information on whether the rest of you will be on the album so…will you, André and Frederik have a part in it?

No! [Laughs]
We’re not going to do anything, we will sit back and listen to it; but, I know some people got it wrong, it’s all original music, it’s not that we put old Guardian songs and we added an orchestra to them.
It’s all original music, it obviously sounds like Blind Guardian, all the melody lines, the harmonies, the arrangements, that’s typical Blind Guardian, but it’s not played by a Metal band, so there are no heavy guitars, no drums, it’s just an orchestra playing the music and Hansi singing.

It might be hard to imagine how it sounds like, you’d have to hear it, so you’ll have to be a little more patient, unfortunately [laughs].
I’m pretty sure you’ll like it, we played a couple of songs to a few people and everybody were pretty overwhelmed, they all said “I was expecting everything but that!”.

What’s going to happen in the next couple of years for Blind Guardian aside from the orchestral and the regular album, are you planning to play some more shows?

To be honest I don’t know yet, this year we will definitely play those few festivals, no additional gigs happening this year, we might do something next year…we did this for the last couple of records that while writing or recording we took some time off to play a couple of shows, it’s a nice thing to do but surely there won’t be any extensive touring because that would take away way too much time from the writing and recording.
What we did with the last couple of albums was that whenever we finished 3-4 songs, we immediately recorded those songs, so this gives you a break from writing, you can stop thinking about new ideas and you can just focus on what you already created; once the recording is done you can go back in creating mode and sometimes we interrupt this cycle to play a handful of shows…with the next album? I don’t know yet, there’s nothing booked yet but it might happen.

That was it, thank you for your time and I’ll see you next month.

Yeah, no “Battlefield” but I’ll see you at the Battlefield Festival [laughs] and I have to say I’m looking forward to playing live again, our last gig has been 6 months ago, and it’s itching again to go on stage and play!

Davide Sciaky