HELL INTERVIEW (LANGVERSION,
ENGLISCH)
Alte Metal-Legende will es noch einmal wissen. An und für
sich nichts neues, im Falle der Band HELL wird sich dieses
Vorhaben vielleicht auszahlen. Mit zugkräftigem Label im Rücken
und einer Killerscheibe "Human Remains" in der Hand könnte für
die alten NWOBHM-Haudegen doch noch einmal der zweite Frühling
anbrechen. Wir unterhielten uns mit der Band, genau genommen
mit Cheffe Kevin Bouwers:
.rcn: Hello and congratulations on the great
record. 28 years after the single it finally worked out. Please
tell our readers something about the early years of the band
and the tragical split up back in the 80s.
Kevin Bouwer: Hello to you, and thankyou for
your kind words. The short version of the story is that HELL
formed in 1982, we worked incredibly hard for many years and
were seen as pioneers of occult metal. We finally signed an
album deal with Mausoleum in 1985, but the label went bankrupt
three weeks before we were due to start recording. The
band had toured for the best part of five years, we had worked
intensely hard, and the only thing I had to show for all of
that was a huge pile of record label rejection letters, a
record deal with a label who had stalled for over a year before
going bankrupt, huge personal debts, no job, no home, and no
real prospects for any future. So I took the decision that
unless I made some serious changes to my life, I would really
be in trouble. It was me who left HELL first, and although they
hired in another guitar player for the last few months, it was
like the magic had just gone and they broke up for good several
months after that. Then of course Dave Halliday took his own
life for reasons which still haunt me to this very day. I still
endlessly question what would have happened if I had stuck it
out for another year.
.rcn: What triggered you to try a comeback 25
years later? Only few Heavy Metal fans will remember the name
"Hell".
Kevin Bouwer: After Dave died and the band
broke up we all just went our separate ways, we got jobs, got
married, got divorced – all the usual stuff. The only original
member who continued playing was Tony Speakman (bass player)
who spent quite a long time touring on the covers/tribute
circuit. Myself and Tim Bowler just drew a line in the sand and
stopped playing practically overnight. My attitude was
essentially that HELL was the best band I was ever likely to be
involved with, and as a person who always had a hard time
accepting second best, I just quit – I sold all my gear and
moved on without a backwards glance. During the ensuing
two-decade hiatus, I went through a messy divorce, resulting in
me losing contact with my son Tom for almost 5 years. By the
time we were reunited - the short, chubby kid I had last seen,
had transformed into a six-foot metalhead who started playing
me all these CD’s by Trivium, Exodus, Opeth, Nevermore and many
other bands who I’d never even heard of. Whilst casually
leafing through the sleeve artwork, I saw that they had almost
all been produced by this ‘Andy Sneap’ guy who I immediately
realised must be the same 14-year-old kid who Dave Halliday had
given guitar lessons to, who I had known so well back then, and
who was a permanent fixture on the front row of every gig HELL
played 20 years previously – having spent so long out of the
frame, I had absolutely no idea that he had gone onto achieve
the production success that he had, it was obvious that
Andy was my son’s absolute hero, so – just to impress him in
the way Dads do, I told him all about Andy Sneap the young
HELLfan kid back then – and of course he didn’t believe me, so
he contacted Andy on a forum to find out if it was actually
true. Andy was so pleased to hear from me after the best part
of two decades’ silence. We met up the next day, we had a beer
or several, we talked about old times, we gelled again almost
instantly, and within a few days, I found myself sitting in the
control room at Backstage Studios holding a guitar in anger for
practically the first time in 23 years, putting down a few HELL
song guitar guides to a clicktrack, just for fun….but the buzz
it gave me was just immense and it was extraordinary how it
just came flooding back. Andy had this permanent, cheesey,
Cheshire-cat grin on his face, and he kept saying – “We’ve got
to do a HELL album. We just have to….” Then - before I really
knew what was happening, phone calls had been made to Tim
Bowler & Tony Speakman (the drummer and bassist), the band
was back together, we were doing the album and I was out
spending every penny I earned on guitars, synthesizers and
other gear. It’s great!! It has been literally like being born
again – that one phone call has transformed my whole
existence.
.rcn: Do you have any tour plannings? Many
of your former NWOBHM-companions are still alive or back again:
Angel Witch, Blitzkrieg, Jaguar, Tygers Of Pan Tang and Saxon
of course. Wouldn't you like the idea of a nice little tour
with some of your peers?
Kevin Bouwer: Yes - to start off with, we
thought it would be cool to go back to where it all started, so
we’ve organised a one-off local gig at the MFN club near
Nottingham on May 20th to celebrate the album launch, but also
to give us a chance to hook up again with the many local fans
who supported us back then. There will be a lot of familiar
faces in that audience for sure, and it’s going to be a great
night for both them and for us. After that, we hit the festival
circuit with shows at Rockstad Falun in Sweden, TUSKA in
Finland, plus three METALFEST open-air gigs in Germany,
Switzerland and Austria – and for the UK we’ve just been
confirmed for DOWNLOAD. We’re also likely to drop onto a more
extended tour sometime later in the year. We’re all loving
playing again, we’re really looking forward to it, and I have a
feeling that once the initial nerves wear off, we’ll have an
absolute riot....But I also have to say that whilst it’s great
to see some of the bands you mention out playing again, it’s
not so great for me seeing some of my former heroes walking
onto a stage, bald-headed in a cowboy hat and a pair of jeans,
with a huge beer gut hanging over their belts...I hope with the
way we look, audiences will realise that we are 100% totally
serious about this.
.rcn: For me the biggest surprise are the
eccentric but absolute fantastic vocals of David Bower, who was
– as far as I know – only second choice after Martin Walkyier.
The idea of making David the singer, why wasn't it realised
earlier?
Kevin Bouwer: What happened here was that
Andy spent ages trying to find a singer whose voice would come
somewhere close to replicating Dave Halliday’s – he tried Rush
tribute bands, he thought about asking John K from
BIOMECHANICAL – just all sorts of straws were being grabbed at
with no result. So eventually, we decided to try something
different and Martin Walkyier (from SABBAT) recorded all the
vocals for the album in its entirety, but as he’ll freely admit
himself - he really, really struggled with a lot of it, simply
because he’s a vocal brawler whose style just didn’t mesh
particularly well with a substantial proportion of the HELL
material which required high-pitched, defined melody, along
with the kind of light and shade which Martin just doesn’t do.
The other issue was that his sound and style are both so
individual, and the singer’s voice is the
instantly-recognisable sonic signature of any band. So, after a
great deal of work, we ended up with an album which no-one was
really 100% happy with, and which sounded more like an
unreleased SABBAT set than a HELL album. We therefore decided
amongst all of us that it wasn’t to be – sometimes you try
stuff and it just doesn’t work out. David first became involved
when I invited him along to do a small narrative – a voiceover
on ‘Plague and Fyre’ in fact. In between takes, he just started
casually singing along with the track, and Andy (wearing his
‘producer’s hat’) immediately realised there was something
special going on. I had no idea David could sing like that,
honestly, and once I’d heard him do a try-out on some other
tracks and agreed that it was worth pursuing further, it was
then just a question of him working alone with Andy to capture
what you’ll hear on the album. He’s done a killer job and I’m
very proud of him. He’s also dropped into the frontman role
brilliantly well, which is largely as a result of his extensive
acting career and the acquired ability to be totally
comfortable in front of an audience whilst doing wacky
stuff.....David was absolutely the perfect final piece in the
jigsaw, and the straitjacketed lunatic-behind-the-microphone
was exactly what was needed to really kick this material into
2011 and give it the original HELL vibe. One of HELL’s key
objectives was to put on a show, and he does that in spades, as
do we all. We’ve rigged him up with a headset mic which
basically frees him from the conventional mic and stand, so
he’ll be able to do things which would normally be out of reach
for a metal frontman – but like anything else he’s done, it
took him some time to get his head around this performance and
really get ‘into character’ for it.
.rcn: I'm sorry, but a few words of
criticism. You are all children of the 80s with roots in the
70s. Don't you think a more dynamic and more old school-sound
with less keyboard, less choral singing and less spoken intros
(and outros) would have fit the song material better?
Kevin Bouwer: Hey – criticism is good and
your opinion is 100% respected. But there are three important
things you have to know – 1 - The intros, outros and keyboard
parts were always in there, right from day 1, they were always
an important part of the HELL sound, and to remove them would
make it less authentic, not more so – the only difference is
that some of the technology I have used to create the sounds is
modern – and to my ears – much, much better, it’s crystal-clear
and it sounds as heavy as hell. If you don’t like
whroland
at we do – that’s totally up to you, thanks for listening
anyway, but we are what we are and we do what we do. 2 – I
think the production is fucking fantastic. If, by ‘old-school’,
you mean a recording which sounds like Venom playing in
someone’s garage recorded with a microphone made of pig shit,
then we already have that on the old demo tapes, and Nuclear
Blast are releasing the album as a 2CD Digipak which contains
remastered versions of all the old demos, so if you like that
kind of sound, it’s still available to you in a cleaned-up
form. But the most important part is 3 – it’s not the
production or the technology which makes or breaks the metal,
it’s the MUSIC and the way it’s written and played. This is the
reason why I don’t like modern metal at all - There’s
absolutely no comparison – today, anyone with a guitar, a
laptop and a half-decent audio recording programme can churn
out an album, cut & pasted into perfection one note at a
time, whereas back then, a band actually had to be able to
play. And to me, it really shows - by virtue of the fact that
there seem to be a hundred bands out there who all sound
exactly the same. It’s kinda depressing – you just hear the
same drop-tuned guitars playing the same swept arpeggios,
drummers doing the same kickdrum blastbeats, the same growled
vocals with lyrics you can’t decipher – it’s all become a bit
stale and uninspiring, and when you take all this
computer stuff out - there’s just no song there..... And
I hate the obsession with pigeon-holing bands into genres,
sub-genres and sub-sub genres which serves only to cruelly
limit a band’s potential audience before they even get off the
starting blocks. How many kids out there won’t even listen to a
Dimmu Borgir album because “That’s symphonic black metal and I
don’t like that - I only like category 4 subsection 3 pro-death
anti-grunge emo non-symphonic melodic Viking part 3 (subsection
2) metal-grind-thrash-speed-core?” One significant thing about
HELL is that we have always been totally impossible to hole or
label like this because there’s so much variety, so many
extremes of light and shade in what we do – so you either have
to just accept us for what we do, or take a walk. It’s all
become just too formulated, too generic, and I just can’t
understand why talented young players spend years learning
their craft – only to enter a band which sounds identical to
dozens of others. What’s the point?
So for me now, the comparison between the original HELL demos
and the new album is like having two cars in your garage – you
have a beautiful, ultra-cool old 1960’s VW camper van – and a
brand-new BMW M3 with the 400PS V8 under the bonnet. The VW’s
great for sunny weekends two or three times a year – but give
me the keys to the M3 for the other 359 days please…...
.rcn: Between 1980 and 1982, you and Tony
were members of the band Paralex, which released one magnifcent
and rather rare EP named "White Lightning". Is there any
possibility that this material will see the light of public
again?
Kevin Bouwer: Being honest, I think that’s
unlikely. I spoke with Phil Ayling (former frontman/vocalist
with Paralex) a few years ago – he wanted to do what HELL have
done in terms of re-recording some old songs, but I have to say
that I declined the offer because my heart wasn’t really in it.
I enjoyed my time with Paralex, but I left to form HELL for
good reasons, and those reasons are still valid – principally
because I wanted to be involved with something which was way
more challenging than Paralex ever was.
.rcn: Thank you for the interview and best
wishes for the coming 25 years.
Kevin Bouwer: Thankyou too, for your time and
your interest, we really appreciate it and we hope to see you
at METALFEST. Let Battle Commence!
Interview/Fragen: Peter Kraus
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