Interview date: 16.11.2007
A chance to sit down at the same table for a chat with legendary Helloween bassist Markus Grosskopf doesn’t come around every day. The guy is a true pillar of the European heavy metal movement today, living and building it practically since its very beginnings. With Hellowen he’s lived through absolutely every moment, in joy and in pain! He’s come through their times of huge success as well as the toughest moments of their career, the ones Helloween had to fight their way through stubbornly just to survive and become what they are today. One of the biggest, most respected and most admired European power metal bands, slowly but surely taking on the venerable status of legends.
Rok and I ended up last on the list of media wanting an interview with Helloween in Belgrade. Things got a bit tangled for RockLine, since we ran out of time to do the interview before Helloween’s soundcheck. Markus reassured us in advance that we’d do it right after the soundcheck, and that’s what finally happened, once a guy from the local promoter Terranostra Promotions’ crew came to fetch us, and Rok and I happily made it through…
RockLine: Markus, it’s a huge honor for us to be talking here with you!
Markus: No problem. As far as I’m concerned, we can talk about your girlfriend too, ha, ha, ha…
Markus (glances around the table we’re sitting at and sizes up the amount of drink in the glasses): I noticed you two are perfectly in sync when it comes to drinking beer.
RockLine: Absolutely. The Police would call it Synchronycity.
Markus: Ha, ha, ha, ha…
Rok was just taking a deep breath to fire off the most ambitious question of the evening, and Markus was straining his ears with all he had to deliver the most ambitious answer of the evening, when he got up from the table and went to close the door of the backstage room. A thunderous racket had already started rumbling up from the ground floor, as the fans were pouring into the SKC hall through the pouring rain.
Markus (comes back, sits down again): Hope this helps at least a little.
RockLine: It finally happened! Helloween and Gamma Ray on tour together!
Markus: It sure did! And here we are!
RockLine: In beautiful Belgrade!
Markus (who barely caught the comment): Sorry, what?
RockLine: In beautiful Belgrade, Serbia!
Markus: Of course! And for the first time in Heloween’s career, too.
RockLine: So what got the two bands onto a tour together?
Markus: The idea started taking shape about a year ago. Well, the idea is actually a couple of years old, but back then there simply wasn’t time. We kind of waited until both bands had recorded and released their own new studio albums, and then right after that it would be the perfect moment to hit the road together.
RockLine: It’s barely been a month since you released the album “Gambling With The Devil” in October this year. What’s behind that title?
Markus: Ufff, a lot of things. For example, what price you pay for your success, in this case, since we’re all musicians, success in a music career. You never know what’s going to happen. What you gain, what you lose. The point is that you’re gambling all the time, you’re betting in life, and you don’t know what to expect. You just play because you enjoy it, because it thrills you, because the risk of profit and loss draws you in. And what price you pay, you simply don’t know, so you’re really gambling when you get into a game. If everything were clear in advance, it wouldn’t be exciting or interesting at all. That goes for every area of life. Well, the music business is a pretty risky thing, and the word gambling probably stands out even more in music. So the album “Gambling With The Devil” invites you to play. At least you get to choose whether you’ll play the album’s game or not.
RockLine: “Gambling With The Devil” is once again a darker Helloween album, one of the darker ones. An interesting mix of the sharpness of “Better Than Raw”, the epic feel of “Keeper Of The Seven Keys Pt. II – The Legacy” and the dark atmosphere of “The Dark Ride”.
Markus: We wanted to make a different album. No complicated concept, no longer songs. That can get boring, you know, stuffing a long song onto every album. We wanted to make a somewhat more aggressive, punchier album, where the shorter songs with a direct riff stand out. I think we pulled it off.
RockLine: How did the recording of the new album go?
Markus: The groundwork was done by us band members sending each other files with ideas over the internet. What’s the trick with that? When we got back from the previous, very extensive tour, we took a few weeks off, of course, and devoted ourselves to our families, everyday life. Now, since recording in studios means work that can take several months, we avoided having to be locked up in a studio for months by starting to experiment with sending each other files with ideas, and it worked really efficiently. You know, it’s very hard when you’re away from home the whole year. Sure, there are shorter breaks between tours when there are no shows, but that doesn’t help much, the regular tour of halls in Europe was soon followed by a festival tour. Then we went to South America. You get sick of each other, and the bus really gets way too small for 16 people at that point. I have a studio at home and that’s great, because I record all my bass lines right at home. Then I send them to the producer.
RockLine: You record the bass lines, Andi contributes his ideas, which are recorded separately…
Markus: No, no… Of course we in Helloween see each other in between. Like, we take a week off to meet up and talk about who likes which ideas, agree on the direction for individual songs, or ideas, motifs, and then we all go back to our own homes. Drum recording starts, guitars follow, we get it into stereo sound. Then we send the whole thing to the producer. It’s become pretty simple. You can stay home, be with your family, go to the movies, I can go out for a drink with friends, see my relatives and so on. It works surprisingly well. At first it was meant as a bit of an experiment, and then a great album came out of it.
RockLine: Would Helloween go on tour, like you’re doing now with Gamma Ray, with your former singer Michael Kiske too?
Markus: Hell no,… what would Kiske even do? How could a guy who tells the whole world he hates the sound of heavy metal guitars go on tour with us? I don’t think a guy like that would last long on tour with us. That absolutely wouldn’t fit together.
RockLine: What about Michael Grosskopf and the solo career? Are you preparing anything on that front?
Markus: Aha. I’ve just recorded an album, it’s due out in January 2008 on Frontiers Records. End of January. It’s an album with melody subordinated to the bass guitars. It’s going to be called Bass Invaders. The album will have completely normal songs. No endless soloing and stretching things out, of course there will be solos woven into those compact songs, even double bass solos, I mean multi-part solos. There’ll be drums and there’ll definitely be vocals too. The basses will be distorted, with a sound that builds up a riff-like background. It’s going to be a really interesting thing. Scmier from Destruction takes part in the album, and Tom Angelripper from Sodom, then there’s Peavy from Rage. Those three are the real Bass Invaders, because they’re all bassists and singers, and I took advantage of that in the ideas for this project. The parts I play on bass will be sung by Apollo Papathanasio from the band Firewind. There’ll be lots of guests on the album. They’re mostly in charge of the solos. Among others, there’s Rudy Sarzo, Billy Sheehan, DD Verni (Overkill), then Sonny Rocker from Stray Cats, Dirk Schlächter from Gamma Ray, plus Eggi from Edguy and Joey Vera (Fates Warning, Armored Saint).
RockLine: That sounds fantastic! Tell us, Helloween, you’ve been through a lot, a whole lot of changes. The lineup changed many times, there were ups, there were downs. And you always survived. How did you manage that?
Markus: You simply persist. You never give up. You just keep pushing your vision forward. In fact, you often feel inside that you want to express something differently than reality allows at that moment. Of course friction happens, people just don’t see the point in continuing anymore. They quit. But it’s willpower that keeps you going. I’m very happy with the current lineup. In fact, I can say I’m very happy about it.
RockLine: We can consider Helloween legends. You basically laid the foundations for the development of power metal, you defined it. How do you see the situation for heavy metal today?
Markus: I think traditional heavy metal is slowly coming back to the scene. I really like that. But then there were the nineties, when everything that sounded even a tiny bit like heavy metal was despised. Everybody laughed at you if you played heavy metal, they laughed at running around the stage with long hair and so on,… Basically they laughed at everything that had anything to do with heavy metal. There was a general feeling of hatred toward heavy metal music. And before that, in the eighties, people loved heavy metal. Okay, it’s logical that there are things you love and things you hate. But the way I see it, you have an opinion, and if I say, for example: “I like this”, I’ll always like it, and if I don’t like something, I’ll stand behind that too. What I don’t get is how somebody who swore by heavy metal for years can then say they hate it. I don’t see any sensible reason for people to change their opinion like that. It’s so fake. Funny, isn’t it, you grow up in heavy metal and then you say you don’t like it, just because some other music showed up on the scene. Sure, the new music has good stuff too, but there’s a lot of crap, which is in no way enough of a reason for me to hate the music I grew up with. I’ll never understand that. The nineties were very unfavorable and unfriendly to heavy metal.
RockLine: MTV also did a lot of damage back then, shoving the grunge movement down people’s throats.
Markus: Okay, of course there’s nothing wrong with new music showing up on the scene. But if you say you like something, then stick to it. Don’t go changing your opinion. Be honest with yourself and be who you are. Pretending is not the answer. You lie to yourself first.
RockLine: I think the German bands are like one big happy family, holding up a big part of the metal scene today and bringing it closer to young people. You just stick together. If someone’s missing from the lineup of one band, someone from another band jumps in. You help each other. That’s the feeling, anyway.
Markus: Yeah, that’s about right. We really do help each other. But it took a good stretch of time to get there. We learned a lot from experience about living side by side, too. You achieve so much more if you stick together, I mean so much more for the heavy metal scene, than if there’s some open or hidden competition of low blows. That would bury us all.
RockLine: What kind of tour manager is Kosta Zafiriou (drummer of Pink Cream 69, editor’s note)?
Markus: I love that guy, really! He treats people very well, he’s a great organizer. Basically there are three people watching over everything to keep the tour running smoothly. If something goes wrong, it’s clear exactly who screwed up, and if something goes wrong, the mistake gets fixed right away, the problems are sorted out by the next day at the latest. That way things run smoothly and we’re all happy. It was different when we had a management company with between 300 and 400 people on staff. You asked a question, you got an answer.. And a wrong one, which reached you 6 weeks later. None of us knew what was really going on back then. The organization of the current tour, though, is truly super successful when it comes to efficiency. Every initiative gets realized ten times faster than when a whole horde of people had a hand over you.
RockLine: Did Axxis drop off the tour as the support act? They’re not playing here in Belgrade today?
Markus: No, no. Axxis will join us. I think only in December. I think they’ll be with us exclusively at the shows in Germany. It’s a bit harder for them, they don’t have much budget, they have to do more number-crunching to make ends meet. They’re respected in Germany and a large number of fans will come see them there, at least that’s how I see it. It’s great that Axxis are on the tour with us too. By the way, their drummer André Hilgers contributed half of the drums on my Bass Invaders album.
RockLine: Which bassist would you name as the most influential on you as a musician, as far as your playing style goes?
Markus: That would definitely be John Entwistle. If he were still alive, he’d surely be playing on my solo record. I’m going to dedicate this album to his memory. Sadly, I was a bit too late with my idea for Entwistle.
RockLine: Or was Entwistle too fast for you?
Markus: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… we can put it that way too, yeah.
RockLine: A guy from the local promoter’s crew just signaled to us that our interview time is running out…
Markus: Ah, is that so? Okay then…
RockLine: …which we’re very sorry about. Tell us, Markus, what’s your message to the Slovenian Helloween fans?
Markus: Come to our show, we’ll party together and have a great time. We in Helloween bring you a lot of fun. And otherwise, live easy and take it slow. Life is too short to screw each other over.
RockLine: Markus, thanks for your time. We wish you a killer gig tonight here in Belgrade!
Markus: Thanks to you two as well.
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