Grave Digger An Exclusive Interview (from "Burrn!" Magazine, June 1995) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The powerful release of the new album by the band that continues to follow their heavy metal traditions and always progresses its sound! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The German power metal band Grave Digger who managed to release two albums, "The Reaper" and "Symphony Of Death" with the half-a-year interval rapidly finished their 6th album's production. As always it turned out to be the brilliant heavy metal album which they played during the whole band's carrier. Below you can read the conversation with the leader of Grave Digger Chris Boltendahl. T - Tomo Hasegawa C - Chris Boltendahl T: Half a year after the Grave Digger reunion the "Symphony Of Death" mini- album was released. What were you doing after that? C: After that release we went on tour with Running Wild. It happened from May to June 1994. Then we had a small rest and after that started composing the songs for the new "Heart Of Darkness" album. On December 4 we went to "Principal Studio" in Munster where the recording process went on up to Christmas. The mixing happened from January 9 to 23. T: You're a very productive band. How does the songwriting process go on? C: At first Uwe (Lewis) composes the songs and then me and him make arrangements to them. And only after that me and Tomi Gottlich write the lyrics to the finalized tracks so that the whole band is involved in this songwriting process. That's how it basically happens. T: Was it difficult to produce this new album? C: Well, I guess everything went perfect. We were absolutely ready to record the songs before we entered the studio so we managed to prove to each other that we're the real band and not a 'one-day project'. That was probably the main reason of having a good time while recording. We managed to finish all the recordings of this 74-minute album in actually two weeks. T: Comparing this album to two behind it's easy to see the long duration of most of the tracks... C: Yeah, you're right. Most of the songs are basically longer than 4 minutes. The arrangements of them are much better than it used to be before. During the production of this album we all were influenced by the progressive style of music and maybe for that very reason the songs became longer... T: And did you really plan to do them all so long since the beginning? C: No, it happened naturally. We did everything just like the following: composed the songs, recorded them and then observed the running time of the new album. And it turned out to be 74 minutes. T: The title track "Heart Of Darkness" is rather long. C: It's about 13 minutes. Its lyrics are based on the "Demonic Revelations" movie. So the story behind the lyrics is from that very movie. You know, originally it was screened from the "Heart Of Darkness" book and that's where the album's title comes from. And the song is really long enough. T: Was it the very same movie that inspired you to form the concept of the new album? C: Yes, the album's cover was also inspired by that movie. There you see the harvester sitting in front of the cave and holding a blood-spilling heart. Many soldiers lie around him and the gnomes bury that soldiers in the coffins. I guess it's a nice cover, isn't it? T: And the album again has the concept? C: When we composed the songs we understood the further production of each of them. Originally we didn't want to make the new conceptual album but is has some kind of it. Every song tells the story of war, frustration, fear, sufferings and death. I guess that's the darkest album Grave Digger ever recorded. T: Seems like you're using more special effects and keyboards, don't you? C: What? Did you say keyboards? Ah, yeah, we recorded the keyboard sound in the song "Heart Of Darkness" and also in the intro to "Tears Of Madness". I personally don't like that idea but but we somehow used some special effects and technical things on the new album. Well, many of our fans want us to do that kind of stuff, they seem to be interested in it so we try doing something of that kind. You can hear keyboards in "The Reaper" album but only one time. Maybe it sounded good so there's 3 or 4 times more keyboards on the new album. T: The new arrangements are much more complicated than before. C: They really are. That's the way the band's progress goes. That's probably the reason the album became more complicated than before. When we composed the songs and came to the arrangements we wanted to do something really interesting there and something different to the previous two albums. So judging from this point the band never stops its evolution. T: There's a separate track that starts the album, isn't it? C: Yeah, I like it a lot. In my opinion, every heavy metal album should begin from the intro track. I'm the 20-year heavy metal fan and still like the intros. T: But you didn't actually have any intros on the "Heavy Metal Breakdown", the "Witch Hunter" or the rest of the albums released before the band's split in 1987. C: We had indeed. There were small intros like the plane in the beginning of the "Heavy Metal Breakdown" album or the steps and the guitar in the "Witch Hunter" album. Such intros exist of many albums of various bands. T: That's right. But there never were any separate intro track on the Grave Digger album ever. You made it longer this time. C: Yeah, and that's our new live thing along with the pyro and lights. T: Did you produce the album yourself? C: Yes. The thing is that me and Uwe perfectly know how the Grave Digger music should sound. We did together for a long time so we don't need any 'special' producer. T: And what about the engineer? C: Snoor Fabich worked there. That was his first heavy metal album but he did a great job. The things we want to leave as they are still remain the same. T: What kind of music did Snoor worked before with? C: Some kind of Guns N'Roses-stuff. Not heavy metal but hard rock. T: As far as I know there's a special edition of the new CD in the digipack version... C: It is but it doesn't differ too much from the original one. Two months after the first release we published the digipack one with some bonus tracks. It's just the re-release but we figured, 'Maybe some 10,000 people will buy this album again?' But that can be only those who are our true fans and they'll do it just because of the digipack and those bonus tracks. I thought that was the thing they would like to have. Someone suggested the digipack version. So both versions of the new album came out just at the same time. I consider this to be fair enough. T: Was that basically the band's idea? C: Yes, sure. The recording company wanted to act in the usual way - to release the second digipack edition later than the first one. But we didn't like such sort of idea. So we put the choice on our fans because the original edition had the special sticker inside. T: "Dolphin's Cry" became one of the bonus tracks and I should say that that's a good song. So why it didn't end up on the original edition and became the bonus track. C: You could be right but that was our record company who didn't like the song and decided to leave it behind that original version. We couldn't do anything with the fact. T: The second bonus track is "My Life" while the Japanese edition changes it for the remake of "Don't Bring Me Down". Why did it happened that way? C: When the mixing process was over there became 3 versions of the album: the original one, the digipack edition and the Japanese one. We wanted to supply the last one with some special track for our fans in Japan. That was my choice. T: Will the digipack version be released in Japan? C: I really don't know anything about it. It depends on the Japanese record company. T: By the way, there's a new drummer in the band, isn't it? C: Aha, that's Frank Ulrich who already played with Living Death and Holy Moses. T: When and how did he become the new band member? C: That happened before our tour with Running Wild. Jorg Michael was already in Running Wild so he couldn't play with Grave Digger. It was physically hard for him to play 2 shows a night. So we started searching for the new member and Jorg gave to us the tape with the Frank Ulrich's drumming. We liked his playing and immediately invited him to play with us. So 4 weeks before the tour started Frank was our new band member already. T: Did you know anything about Frank before that meeting? C: No, we didn't. He came to our rehearsals, we played "The Reaper" and "Ride On" and that was quite enough for us. T: Did you ever hear any album with his drumming? C: No, not a single one. T: Then I can celebrate you with your new drummer. There aren't too many professional drummers in Germany, isn't it? C: Yeah, you're right. It's really hard to find a good drummer in Germany. There maybe many drummers but only some of them are the professional ones. And now we have one of them. There actually exist only 3 of them at all - Chris (Efthimiadis) of Rage, Jorg Michael and Frank Ulrich. T: Well, the new album is already released and I guess the tour will follow. C: Yeah, we'll tour with X-Wild. We opened for Running Wild on our previous tour and now X-Wild will open for us on this one. Guess they'll do it respectively all the time. (laughs) But that's quite normal for the German music industry. T: When will the tour start? C: On May 24. We're going to play about 20 shows in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Also there will be 4 or 5 festivals with Running Wild, Rage and Dr. Butcher. T: I suppose many Japanese fans would like to see your show. Is it possible? C: Well, we'll probably tour in Japan in September or October. We don't know too much about Japan as it is. Once we come here I guess it would be great to learn Japanese. So hope we'll meet in Japan sometime in October. ------------------------------------------------------------------------