Interview date: 08/29/2008
RockLine: Almost three years have passed since your show in Ljubljana opening for the Swiss hard rockers Gotthard, and a lot has changed for Heat in that time.
Roko: Yeah. Back then Heat was mainly a hard rock band. If I may say so as the band’s current leader, not all of us actually wanted that at the time. Our singer back then pushed for that style. Which is understandable, because singers in hard rock bands really get to shine. But even then I was listening to a lot of power metal too, especially bands from Scandinavia, like Stratovarius. That led to lineup changes. The new bassist came over from Croatia, Davor Pavelič. As soon as he heard our new material he said, “That’s it. I want this.” And he joined us. For a style like the one we play today, it’s not easy to find the right people in Slovenia. You have to look beyond Slovenia’s borders, to Italy and so on…
RockLine: From what I can tell, Slovenia is really strong in death and thrash metal bands right now. The hard rock scene is slowly waking up too, although it’s still pretty far from world standards, with Stone Orange, Forgotten Eden, Broken Arrow… but a proper power metal band, and a symphonic one on top of that, you can’t find in Slovenia at the moment…
Roko: We really are the only ones in Slovenia playing proper symphonic power metal. And I don’t mean the kind you often run into on the MySpace pages of bands tagged “symphonic power metal”, where two simple notes get repeated on the keyboards through the whole track. Take our song Dreams Of Terror alone: it has 82 channels of symphonies, that’s 82 symphonic instruments. It sounds like a whole symphony orchestra, and the intro of that song works a bit like the ones in The Lord of the Rings, say. I don’t know if you’ve listened to the track on our MySpace…
RockLine: To be honest, I only listened to Fly Away,…
Roko: Well, Fly Away is in the style of Vivaldi. Personally, I think Vivaldi is the best musician in the world, he’s kind of an idol to me. Of all the music out there, his is what calms and relaxes me incredibly.
RockLine: I assume writing a song in Heat is no walk in the park?
Roko: A song is a song. Well, there’s not that much work in it, but the symphonies you add on top take up a lot of time, and that’s where the huge amount of work is.
RockLine: Who comes up with the ideas for these symphonies, does anyone help you?
Roko: I write the music. Everything that’s been done so far, I did myself, but everybody can contribute their ideas, and there are already quite a few.
RockLine: Does the singer contribute the vocal lines?
Roko: Yes. And the lyrics too. Our singer also wrote the lyrics for Goran Edman (Y.J.Malmsteen’s Rising Force, Brazen Abbot, etc… interviewer’s note). Edman, who contributed vocals to the song Devil’s Sign, asked for that because of copyright. So there wouldn’t be any complications later when it comes to enforcing it.
RockLine: Where and when will we be able to hear your music live?
Roko: The first chance comes at the Oktoberfest in Bertoki, but there we play as a cover band. After that we’re playing in Labin (Croatia) at a bikers festival put on by MK Templars from Istria. Between 2001 and today we’ve racked up over 500 gigs.
RockLine: Now I guess the first goal is to release an album?
Roko: Yes. That’s our main goal right now. Other people are pressing us about it too. And it’s a pain as long as you’re without an album… What are you going to play? Enter Sandman by Metallica and Born to be Wild? No problem, we play those no problem at volunteer fire brigade parties. But if you’re not productive with your own music, in the sense of creating your own original material, then you can’t have your own concerts. You can’t take breaks either, you can’t keep playing the same old material three years in a row without recording something new. And that takes a huge amount of money. We do have some sponsors at the moment, but it’s not enough.
RockLine: Even though you’re from the Slovenian coast, Heat is a thoroughly international band.
Roko: Totally. We play a lot in northern Italy,….
RockLine: And you’re actually one of the rare ones on the Slovenian scene who are oriented entirely abroad, especially considering the style of music you play.
Roko: You freeze if you don’t go abroad. Otherwise you play a thousand times in the same place in Slovenia, with the same bands, in front of the same folks, for the same money, and people come to your gig more to party than if the crowd were made up of real “fans”. These Slovenian bands that play for around €3000 don’t have their own “fans”. The people who head out to a show by those acts say: “I’m going to check it out so I can get hammered, party…” and they’re not going there for the music.
RockLine: Well, at least metal bands in Slovenia have “fans”…
Roko: They do, because metalheads are soldiers. That’s why I’ve been a metalhead since birth, okay, I’m exaggerating, but 25 years for sure. Now I’ve passed this drug on to my son too. I went to Germany a lot, and that’s where I met these people who got me even more fired up about metal. You get contacts, you move in the right circles,… and like Bernhard (Bernhard Weiss, singer of Axxis) said earlier, there are a huge number of bands there, but the number is limited by quality. So the number of really good bands is significantly lower. The German label AFM Records being interested in our music right now is a stroke of luck in that regard, because Germany really has a huge number of bands.
RockLine: Apparently Heat offer that label enough quality?
RockLine: That parallel with Axxis is interesting.
Roko: Today we were supposed to play here before them (you can read how the concert went HERE interviewer’s note.), but unfortunately our drummer hurt his leg right before that…
RockLine: Axxis started out like you did too, as a hard rock band.
Roko: True. They also started with hard rock, and now, just like us, they’re power metallers. Although back when they started, hard rock was a lot more popular,…
RockLine: And Heat pulled off the switch to power metal much faster than Axxis did…
Davor: Playing power metal takes a lot of discipline. If you have talent, you need at least five years of constant practice to be able to show anything, and if you’re not talented, at least ten… That’s why power metal in Germany is so high-quality, because it’s a land of discipline and order.
RockLine: A lot of top-notch session musicians come from Germany and Scandinavia too, one of them is Magnus Karlsson…
Roko: “Mamma mia”… what an outstanding musician, I saw him with Primal Fear at the Morarock festival… (RockLine report HERE, scroll down with your mouse, interviewer’s note.)
RockLine: Really? Too bad we didn’t get a chance to meet there.
Roko: We’re actually talking about playing at that venue next year too. And for a Saturday slot. It would be really great if this deal with AFM Records works out.
RockLine: That would be phenomenal. Then you’re in the game. You could hit the road right away with a bigger band on a European tour.
Roko: That’s the most interesting part. A new opportunity is already coming up with Axxis. We once had the chance to tour together with Gotthard, but in the end the guys in the band got scared and gave reasons why they couldn’t do the tour.
RockLine: Do you think that, hypothetically, Heat would have stayed on the hard rock path if the tour with Gotthard had worked out…
Roko: Most likely we’d have kept rolling with hard rock a bit longer before switching to our current direction.
RockLine: Is it far from finishing the material for the new record?
Roko: Right now we’ve recorded four songs. On top of that, we’ll be putting out one more record, which will be hard rock and sung in Slovenian.
RockLine: Another album? As Heat, or under a different name?
Roko: Yes, another album. As Heat.
RockLine: So you’ll be releasing two completely different albums.
Roko: Yes. And that hard rock one, that’s older material that we can’t use in this new power metal vision of ours. The first album was in English. This one will be a hard rock album in Slovenian, with no frills, but quality. We’d like to catch the vibe of, say, Dokken, Mr. Big. So we’re doing two different albums.
RockLine: Besides putting out albums, you’re obviously really focused on breaking through abroad.
Roko: I really want to present our material, our music, to the world. We wouldn’t like to stay only in Slovenia. But it takes a ton of sacrifice, it costs a lot, and it’s easiest to just say it. Once you actually get down to work, that’s when you see how much effort and investment it demands.
RockLine: Earlier you mentioned Goran Edman.
Roko: Yes. He likes our music and contributed vocals to one song. Former Megadeth drummer Nick Menza, who lives in Greece today, was in the picture too, but he set a condition that the collaboration had to include playing on tour, which didn’t work out for us financially. We’re also on excellent terms with Jorn Lande. He really liked our material when he heard it. As for this bikers festival here in Pula where Axxis are playing today, we were torn between Axxis and Jorn Lande. I was in touch with both about playing in Pula, but then when the festival organizers heard the music, they went with Axxis. Lande is also relatively cheap to book. He charges relatively little, especially now that he’s not as hot with his solo career as he used to be with Masterplan.
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