Guitarist Marcus Siepen took some time to phone me from Germany and provide some insight into the entity known as Blind Guardian…

Since the album has been out for nearly a year in Germany, I was wondering what kind of sales you’ve had so far.
I don’t have any precise numbers, but I guess Germany is between 100 and 150,000 and Europe…I have no idea.  The album has been in the charts pretty big all over Europe and in Japan also.  It’s going very well so far.

Having lived with it for a year now, how do you feel about the album?
I still like it.  I mean, there are a couple of things I would change now, concerning for example the mix or something, but I guess that’s normal.

How did you first get hooked up with Century Media?
We’ve known the label for a few years because we’ve toured a lot with other bands on the label.  For example, we toured twice with Iced Earth and we toured with Nevermore.  Of course, we’re normally signed with Virgin, but Virgin in the States didn’t want to release us, for I don’t know what reason.  We came to the agreement that we could look for another company for the states and Century Media made us a pretty good offer.  I don’t know any sales yet, as it has only been out there for a few weeks, but at least we got released in the States and that’s a first step.

Have you been trying to do that for a while, get a US release?
The funny thing is, when we released our first album back in 1990, we were signed to a small indie label at that time called No Remorse and we had distribution via Virgin.  At that time, Virgin in the States would have liked to release us, but they didn’t do it because we were not signed to them.  Half a year later, No Remorse went bankrupt, we signed a real deal with Virgin, and since that time they haven’t had any interest to release us in the States.  They kept telling us that it is not music for the American market, but every American we talked to that listened to our album liked it.  So I don’t know what happened, but Century Media has released us, so we’ll see what happens now.

Was it your idea or the label’s to re-issue some of the old albums?
For the States?  I guess they wanted to release some of the older stuff, too, and not just the new one.  It’s fine with me if they release all of our stuff.  [laughs]

I haven’t had the opportunity to hear any of the older albums yet, so I was curious how they compare to the new album?
It’s different, of course.  The funny thing is, and it’s not planned that we do this, but you can always compare two albums to each other. So the first two albums we released, Battalions of Fear and Follow the Blind, we didn’t really have our own style at the time.  We played melodic, kind of speed metal, but we were still looking for our own trademark.  With the following two albums, Tales From the Twilight World and Somewhere Far Beyond, we found our own style.  We had these big choir arrangements and lots of harmony guitar stuff.  With the last two regular studio albums, Nightfall In Middle-Earth and Imaginations From the Other Side, we kept our style but tried to improve it.  For example, we worked with a lot of classical stuff on these two albums, so I guess they are more progressive than the ones before, plus the choirs and harmony stuff got even bigger.  We’ll see what happens with the next one, as normally it would be the next step if we continue to work like this.  There’s never been any kind of master plan when we start songwriting.  We just sit down, collect ideas and see what they’re going to sound like.  It’s not like, ‘We’ve gotta write two fast numbers, two classical, two ballads and two mid-tempos.’  We just write and record whatever comes to our minds and see if it works, so we have no idea what the next one is going to sound like.

Is it difficult to re-create some of your songs live?
It’s impossible.  [laughs]  In the studio, we have the freedom to do whatever we like to do.  For example, on some of the tracks, we used up to 120 to 130 tracks and of course you can’t play this live with six people.  We have some guest musicians when we play live, such as Oliver Holdsworth, who normally plays in a band called Sieges Even.  He played bass for us on tour and he also played bass on the album, so Hansi didn’t play bass on the album.  Hansi just wanted to focus on the vocals, especially live, and this makes it a lot easier for him.  We also have a guy called Andreas Kirk (sp?) who plays keyboards.  He really plays keyboards, so it’s not that he just pushes a button to release some samples or something, so he can play some of the classical stuff on the keyboards, but of course it is impossible to play the songs like they are on the album with only six people.  Nobody complains, though.  The funny thing is that all the fans sing all the choirs so that we wouldn’t have to sing them ourselves, even though we do. [laughs]  We try to stick to the main melody lines, guitar and vocal-wise, and it works.  I mean, it definitely sounds different, but it’s interesting.  Most of the time, it’s got even more power than on the album because you’ve got the feedback and the reaction from the fans, which pushes you to [a higher level].

Have you done much touring so far for Nightfall..?
We were on the road last year for about seven months, so we’ve actually finished the world tour for this one.  We played all over Europe, Asia, South and Central America.  The only market missing is the States, but I guess there won’t be any American tour for this album because we’re about to start songwriting for the next one and we want to focus on that songwriting because normally it takes us a long time to finish the songs for an album.  We’re not the type of band to write 30 songs, record 20 and release ten.  If there is going to be ten songs on the next album, then these are going to be the ten songs we’ve written during that period of songwriting.  We work so long on them, until we can say, ‘Yeah, that’s the way we want it to sound.’  There are some festivals planned this Summer here in Germany and a couple in Spain I guess, but besides that, we won’t play live this year.  I hope we can release the next album in the year 2000 and I hope we can come to the States with that album.  Of course, it depends on what we can sell in the States…we’ll see.

The production on Nightfall.. is credited to the entire band.  How exactly do you guys operate in the studio?
Recording-wise, we start with the drums, then we record parallel the rhythm guitars and the bass.  After that, all the overdub stuff, the melody guitars, solos, vocals, choirs, and keyboard parts.  Concerning the mixing, Fleming Rasmussen did the mix, but he didn’t produce the album.  He mixes a song, plays it to us, then we say ‘The flute needs to be louder there’ or ‘The guitar needs to be louder here’ or whatever, and we work on the songs until everyone is satisfied.

The narratives between some of the songs were quite well done.  How much effort did you put into getting the right people for the voices?
It’s a funny story, actually - we found them by accident.  One of the engineers we worked with on the album, Charlie Bauerfeind, had to take a break in between our recordings because he had to work with Roger Chapman on his last album.  When we worked with him, we told him that we were looking for some narrators who could record all this stuff, and he told the story to Roger Chapman.  Chapman said, ‘A friend of mine is a Shakespeare actor and he could be perfect for the job.’  He gave him the phone number and we called this guy and he was perfect and he told us he had a friend who would be perfect for the second part.  Which he was.  [laughs]  So, one day Hansi flew over to London with all the lyrics they would have to speak and everything was done in just one day.  They had no idea about Tolkien at all – they didn’t know The Lord of the Rings, they didn’t know The Hobbit, they didn’t know The Silmarillion—

How could they not know about Tolkien?!
I don’t know!  [laughs]  But they did a great job, obviously.  The voices were perfect for what we were looking for and they had fun, I guess.

The cover art for Nightfall is quite detailed and beautiful.  How important is the artwork to your concept of Blind Guardian?
It is very important because obviously the artwork is the first thing that people see when they go to the record store and check out new albums.  I mean, when I go to the shop and see any album with a really horrible cover, I normally don’t touch it or listen to it.  When we finish with the songwriting, we sit down together and think about what the cover should look like.  So, we talk about it, write down our ideas and tell them to the guy who paints all the covers, who is called Andreas Marschall.  He starts drawing some paintings, shows them to us, and we say, ‘We don’t like this,’ and, ‘We like this – could you add a little bit of (whatever).’  So, we go back and forth until it is done and we are satisfied.

Are any of the albums available on vinyl?  A lot of the covers really demand to be on an LP-size cover.
They have been available on vinyl until the fourth one – Somewhere Far Beyond was the last one actually released on vinyl.  We made some copies of the last two albums on picture disc, but they are not available in shops, they are just available through our merchandise company or at our concerts.  That was the agreement we had with Virgin, because they don’t release anything on vinyl anymore.

Blind Guardian have contributed a track to the Ronnie James Dio tribute album.  Was it difficult to choose a song?
Oh yes!  [laughs]  When we were asked if we’d like to do it, we immediately said yes because everyone in the band has been a fan of Dio, no matter if it was Dio himself, Rainbow or Black Sabbath.  At first, we said we wanted to do “Die Young” from Black Sabbath.  Shortly before we wanted to record it, we started to rehearse it and discovered that the original is so good, we didn’t know how to improve it or make it better or different.  We didn’t want to change it because the song has been done in a perfect way back in the 80s.  So we called Century Media and told them we might not do “Die Young” and asked what else was available.  They sent us a list of all the songs that had been picked by other bands, which was all the good stuff. [laughs]  So, we had some problems, but there were a few songs we talked about including “Heaven & Hell” and a Rainbow song I don’t remember right now, but finally we decided on “Don’t Talk To Strangers” and I guess it came out pretty good.

How did you come up with the name Blind Guardian in the first place?
Originally, we had a different name back in the early days.  We were called Lucifer’s Heritage – I don’t know, pretty stupid name.  We released two demos under that name and got a record deal, but we knew that we would have to change it because a lot of people who didn’t know our music and just heard the name thought we were doing black metal stuff like Venom or whatever.  We just changed it during the recording sessions for the first album.  We just sat down in the studio, we all sat at a big kitchen table and everyone was writing down tons of names.  I don’t know who came up with ‘Blind Guardian,’ I guess it was Hansi’s idea, but we just liked it the most.  We picked it because it sounds kind of fantasy-like and we’ve always had fantasy-like lyrics.

Blind Guardian has always dealt with fantasy-based topics, haven’t they?  How important is that to the band?
It’s very important.  Song writing-wise, the lyrics are not important, because Hansi starts writing the actual lyrics just when the song is finished.  During song writing, he just sings whatever comes to his mind, no matter if it makes any sense at all or not.  The only thing important during song writing is the melody line and the rhythm of the words.  So when the complete song is done, he tries to write the real lyrics with these melodies and rhythms in mind.  The fantasy lyrics are very important to us because we feel they fit best to the music and we don’t like these, I don’t know, “kill, blood, die, metal rules!’ or whatever lyrics, or political stuff because it is just not our way.  We all like fantasy stories and movies and such, so why should we change it?  It also works fine with the artwork, too.  [laughs]

Has it been difficult, going against all the trends, to get accepted by people over the years?
Actually, no.  We never cared for any trends, we always did our kind of music.  The music we play is the music we like and why should we play anything else?  I mean, we could have followed the trends that occurred during the time, but I guess we would be dead by now.  So, we stick to our style, try to improve it with every album, and that is fine with all the fans.  The basic trademarks, the choirs, the harmony guitars, all the arrangements will always be part of our music.

And you’ve never had any pressure from the label?
No, not at all.  It’s in our contract, they can’t say anything.  We deliver the recorded material and they can release it or not, but they have no influence on the recorded music at all.

There are a number of web sites dedicated to Blind Guardian.  Are you surprised by the fans’ dedication and do you spend a lot of time yourself on the Internet?
Oh yes, we spend a lot of time on the Internet – you can see it on my phone bill.  [laughs]  Unfortunately, it is pretty expensive in Germany.  I know that some phone companies in the States offer local calls for free and that’s not the way in Germany.  It’s getting cheaper, but you still have to pay some.  Especially André and me and Thomas are very much into the Internet, surfing, chatting with people, not just downloading new patches for computer games or whatever.  It’s great, you can communicate with people all over the world and see all the sites people are doing about Blind Guardian.