Peter 'Peavy' Wagner (Rage)
January 2008
Since the release of the previous studio album you went through a member change in the band. What happened to Mike?
Well, he was nearly 8 years in the band and 4 years ago he moved away from Germany to Copenhagen in Denmark and from that point he started to change personally so in the end it was nearly impossible to work with him. First of all he was getting very negative and he didn't seem to be interested in the band and in music in general. He liked jazz music more and started to talk bad about heavy metal and we felt like that we have to excuse him that we wanted him to play metal stuff with us. (Laughs) At least we could still work with him but in the end during the Speak of the Dead tour he was getting aggressive and in the end kind of violent against us, especially against me. He was spitting at me after one show for no reason. There was no fight or trouble, he was just in a very bad mood like everyday. We just thought that it's gone too far now and couldn't really work like this getting that much aggression from the drummer. We told him that we want to think about this and tomorrow we'll have a band meeting to discuss where we can go from here but he just refused meeting with us. He didn't speak to us anymore so after a couple of months when nothing has changed, we decided to look for a new drummer. We really didn't know how to make a new album with these conditions. He didn't say anything about this, he didn't ask us to turn our decision back, so we thought, "Ok, Mike is not interested anymore" so we told him that he was out. (Laughs) It was in December 2006.
Did you talk to him ever since?
No, not at all. He completely refuses to talk to us. There was no contact between us anymore.
How do you look back to the years you spent together?
In general I think it was a fruitful combination especially musically. I mean I still like him as a drummer, he's definitely a fantastic drummer. For the first four years it was really good. We made some really good music together. I was a little bit disappointed that he changed that much and he never explained what has actually happened. You can only guess... maybe he was in a midlife crisis or maybe he was eating too much steroids. He's been body building and he was eating too much chemistry. (Laughs)
What do you think what was the best period of the eight years?
Best period I'd say was around "Unity" I think. That was when we were the best together both personal-wise and music-wise. He lived here pretty close in our area and we had a lot of contact and when he moved away I don't know what happened.
Did you do an audition for drummers?
We were kind of lucky because when we fired Mike we were working on the Nuclear Blast 20th Anniversary sampler called "Into the Light" and we had three different studio drummers for this and one of them was Andre. During the recordings we just realised that he's a very good drummer with a great technique and also he's a very nice person. We just found out that he lived in our area and he was pretty much our kind of guy and we also found out that he was a Rage fan and he knew all the old material of the band. Then we set a jamming on the old songs just for fun and it sounded perfectly. And after auditioning a few other drummers we realised that we found our guy already and it's Andre. We asked him and he was excited about the opportunity.
What should the fans know about him?
Andre has worked a lot as a studio drummer. He recorded a lot of albums with different people. Besides he was playing in a couple of bands. He released a couple of albums with Silent Force and he's still doing this by the way but it's more like a hobby thing for him. He is also playing in Axxis but we agreed that Rage is his top priority.
André has done a great job on the album but how about live shows? Mike was an important part of all Rage shows...
Well, we already played a lot of shows and festivals with Andre behind the drums and he's already pretty much into the whole thing. He sounds really really good in the live setting. We don't really miss the situation it was before. I mean Mike was a showman and Andre is doing it a little bit different: he's not doing this ego show and solo thing, he's more with the band. And in general the whole stage feeling is a lot funnier and we're a lot more together live. The mentality is different. He's very positive, he's always laughing and making jokes and it also comes through for the audience so I think the band benefited from the change.
Between the two studio albums you have released yet another live DVD. How did you end up recording a Russian gig?
Basically we had this opportunity. We did a short festival tour over there and we had the opportunity to record this show in St.Petersburg for relatively cheap. It still wasn't cheap but if you would do the same show here in Germany and try to film it here, it would cost a fortune, we couldn't afford this. But we got this opportunity and we discussed it with Nuclear Blast and they didn't have any live material from us so they said okay.
How was the shooting?
It was really good. It was a huge sports venue, we played in front of nearly 20,000 people there. We just thought that this one combined with the very first DVD we released a couple of years ago would give a full picture of the band. The first DVD shows us in a small and more intimate club atmosphere and this second will show in more like a huge stadium atmosphere. Also we did a lot of other recordings in Russia so I think with the bonus material it's a really good package.
Does it matter when you have to play in front of cameras?
No, not at all. When you are on stage you don't even think about this. I'm always with the audience and that's where my focus goes all the time.
Your previous album featured the more symphonic side of Rage with the Lingua Mortis orchestra. How was that welcomed by the fans?
It was received pretty good. A lot of our fans still like the era that we had 12 years ago now. I think that's a well accepted and recommended part of our style, so it was very good to have that 10 years anniversary kind of orchestrated album. Of course it's not the biggest part of our style so we won't do that on every album but from time to time here and there where it fits very much we'll use this element. Like we did in the last song of the new album "Lord of the Flies". There are some orchestra elements in that song.
You're releasing albums regularly since the eighties. How can you keep your music fresh?
Generally the driving factor is sill the music. We still love this kind of music, we love to write these kind of songs and we love to perform them. We really try to reinvent the band with every new album so we don't just wanna copy the material we did on the album before. We always try to create songs that don't sound what we did before. We try to use different sounds and different elements. On the new album there's one element that makes it extra fresh and that is the line-up change. We have a new drummer that loves metal music and you can hear this on the album. Also we were still into this style from the Nuclear Blast sampler where we did some pretty straight material and we're still under this impression and I think that led us to write more heavy and straight material for the new album. But this isn't something we decided from the beginning, we only knew that we wouldn't do much orchestrated stuff again. We just collected our ideas and then we just met and jammed until we had ten songs that we really liked. We have changed a little bit in our working way. In the past we have rehearsed in kind of a bunker where was a pretty miserable sound but now we rehearsed in the same studio where we recorded the album. So the sound became lot better and we can record everything in perfect studio sound. It's a lot easier to work this way and I think this helped a lot to have a good album out.
Taking a look at the songwriting credits of each song I was surprised to see that Victor has more songs to his name than you do...
We always have this agreement to compose 50-50 so if we make ten songs five would be from him and five from me. The reason why he got some co-credits on four of my songs is basically that he worked over my riffs and he added some of his solos. This time he worked more on the material than usually because we had this new rehearsal situation. And I just decided in the end to give him co-credits because he worked more on my songs and made more guitaristical things in there. He plays a lot better guitar than I can do. (Laughs) I just thought it's fair because he had a lot of work with my stuff to get it more guitar oriented.
It's quite amazing how well he's adapted to the Rage style.
Yeah, he's really a brilliant musician and he can feel himself pretty well in the style that I have invented over the years, this kind of style the band is known for. Of course he checked out the old stuff when he joined the band and he understood pretty easily of what the trademarks are so he just composes in this style. You should know what all he's doing. He's doing all kinds of side projects and studio jobs. He can also compose perfect pop songs that you wouldn't even know it's from him. (Laughs) He can compose classical music, he can compose nearly everything. He's so educated, he studied so much about music. He knows how to compose. I compose out of my stomach just the way I feel but when he composes he understands it, he knows what he's doing.
You already mentioned the one exception on the album "Lord of the Flies". To me it sounds like part of a soundtrack to a Tim Burton movie.
Oh yeah. (Laughs) That was the last song we wrote for the album. It started as a ballad of mine, I wanted to make it sort of a semi-ballad thing like "Alive But Dead". After we did the first version of the songs we weren't 100% satisfied. I think we jammed on this one for more than two weeks and we had like ten different versions of the song. With every new version some instrument more appeared in the song and in the end it became more complex and we added the orchestration later. We just thought that it needed it.
Who were the backing vocalists on this one?
She's Jen Majura... she's a very talented singer and she's a very beautiful girl btw. (Laughs) She lives in our area. She's good friends with Victor. When we needed some female vocals we just called her and she did it. She's also appearing in the video clip that we did for the song.
Do you also have other guest musicians on the album?
Yeah, we had Thomas Hackmann, a good friend of mine. He's always helping us when we get to the end and recording the choirs. He's always singing the harmonies with me.
What was the inspiration for your lyrics this time?
Well, the album doesn't have a concept but there's a red line going though the album. The lyrics are kind of cynical and very dark statements of mine about the misdevelopments in our society, in our every day life. I like this dark black humorous stuff that is very cynical. The song "Drop Dead" for example a very cynical thing, you shouldn't take every word serious. (Laughs)
What would be your favourite song on the album?
That’s very hard to say. Basically I like the whole album. I think this is one of the best collections of good songs that we have done over the years. Maybe the title track “Carved in Stone”... “Open My Grave” is a great one too. Also “Lord of the Flies” and “Without You”... so... (Laughs)
And what is the most personal song for you lyric-wise?
They are all pretty personal I would say. Maybe “Carved in Stone” is the most personal. That is an anti-war song where I complain about all these political leaders that just waste all these young men for their personal needs. Basically war today is a big money machine where some people make billions of money. They get fucking rich with other people’s death. “One Step Ahead” is another very personal song. It is a statement against religion, which I think is only a lousy crook for people who are too lazy or too shit-faced to face life. I think this would be better without religion. Religion is always misused like a power tool and it’s blinding the people to understand how life functions in real.
Have you already made up your mind about what songs to play live off the new album?
Not 100%. We didn’t really discuss the setlist so far. We’re gonna do of course the opening track, we’ll definitely do “Open My Grave” and we want to do “Lord of the Flies” and “Without You”. And maybe also “Drop Dead”. At least we wanna do four or five songs.
And can we expect any new old material?
I’m pretty sure about this because like I said our new drummer is a very old fan of the band and he’s always kicking our ass to play the old stuff. He loves the old material and I think he’s gonna come up with a lot of suggestions from the old albums, so I’m pretty sure that there’s gonna be surprises in the set.
Have you ever written down on paper of what songs you already played live?
No, I don’t even know how many songs we have released over these nearly 25 years. It must be nearly 300 songs all in all and of course from every album there’s only one or two songs that are gonna stay for long in the setlist. And the majority of an album won’t be played live. (Laughs)
Do you like the bands that are gonna support you on the upcoming tour?
I only know Edenbridge and they are fine. And of course I know the guys from the Russian band personally but I never really heard them on stage. They are good friends of Victor and he wants to help them a little bit in Europe.
I just received a promo CD called Bassinvaders the other day and surprisingly I found your name on it...
That's right. (Laughs) Basically it's a fun project initiated by Markus from Helloween. We are good friend since ages and when he got the opportunity to do this album he asked me if I was interested. Basically it's the Japanese record company of Helloween that were interested in this album in the first place. He asked a couple of his friends including me to help him out. Also Schmier from Destruction and Tom from Sodom were involved in the making of this album. He invited tons of guests and soloists and singers, so all in all I think it's an interesting and funny album that sounds a little bit uncommon. It's a little different from the regular metal albums.
It sounds pretty weird...
Yeah, it sounds weird. It's something unusual. It something else because there are no guitars in it. It's a funny thing, I wouldn't take it like a serious album that a band would regularly do but it's very interesting for a fun project.