Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Zbilje / Zbiljsko jezero / Slovenia
Interview date: 23.06.2016
Tilen Hudrap is without a doubt the Slovenian musician living the dream of everyone who’s ever worked within the magic of metal music back home. Three years ago, after many years of playing in a bunch of Slovenian metal bands, he joined American speed/power metal icons Vicious Rumors, recently he became a member of German thrash metal institution Paradox, he helped pull off a show for the legendary Testament at a festival in Montreal, Canada, and there’s no end in sight to this fairy tale. All of Slovenia, metal and non-metal alike, can be truly proud of this remarkable man!
RockLine: Tilen, it’s an honor to be sitting here with you and chatting about your musical journey and music in general. Right from the start, back in your first bands like Wartune, Thraw, Scepsis, Keller and so on, you showed that you had a spark many musicians never get. Besides that, through your work as a concert promoter and organizer over more than 10 years, you became a pillar of the Slovenian metal scene years ago, someone who knows how to steer newly fired-up fans of heavy sounds to the very heart and roots of the metal story, so they can start discovering and exploring it in the right place. Joining legends like American speed/thrash metallers Vicious Rumors and German Teutonic thrash metallers Paradox, jumping in to help out Testament live – these are things everyone dreams about, but only a chosen few get there. What can you tell us about your beginnings?
Tilen: I started my early local bands in the first years of the new millennium, and later I moved over to the Carinthian death/thrash metal band Wartune, joining them in the summer of 2004, exactly 12 years ago. My musical path as such goes back much deeper, of course. In the mid-nineties (more than 20 years ago) I entered music school, so I’m in the twenty-second year of actively doing music. My first (conscious) ultra contact with rock/metal in general happened in 1992 at the legendary tribute concert dedicated to the death of the great Freddie Mercury. I was just at the stage of first perceiving music as such, and I watched the concert together with my dad (who’s one of the biggest Status Quo fans around, and I got to know them soon after – the records “Blue for You” and the live album from the legendary Apollo had a huge visual and musical influence on me). Thin Lizzy followed, with their slightly less commercially recognized record “Johnny the Fox”, plus (logically) all the Deep Purple albums. Soon after that my uncle introduced me to the music of Grateful Dead and explained the concept of the “wall of sound”, which was my first contact with more “out there” stuff. From the very start I was “not one-sidedly” oriented when it came to music. I’ve always had a rule about that. Example: everyone knows without a shadow of a doubt what their favorite food is, but they don’t eat only and exclusively that every single day. It’s the same in music. Metal is my guiding light in life, I listen to it and live it every day, ever since I was a kid in elementary school, metal defines my individuality, but that’s of course nowhere near everything I listen to. Food and music are in constant correlation. I like to season my food well with extreme/different and exotic spices… and I like to spice up my music in a thousand and one ways too. Within metal itself I’ve always listened to every possible genre (that’s the only way to really understand this style) and I don’t play favorites. Sure, there are genres I prefer and ones I can’t exactly digest on a daily basis, but I respect every single one. Music school influenced me in the classical sense of the word (Buddy DeFranco, Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich, plus all the classical composers, among whom I give a special place to Haydn, Wagner, Brahms and Händel), but I don’t give it any special significance in terms of my personal musical growth as a whole. If anything, quite the opposite. I played in a wind orchestra for quite a few years, I kept playing until 2005, when I also took part in the world championship in the Netherlands, in the city of Kerkrade. By then my metal work made up 90 percent (or more) of my activities and I simply didn’t have time anymore. After the world championship in the Netherlands, I closed the chapter of actively playing classical music. Besides bass guitar, I’ve always regularly played a whole range of other instruments. Multi-instrumentalism is hugely important for musical development, being limited to just one instrument… would simply be a shame.
RockLine: Back then Slovenia was rising up in metal terms, and the first metal magazine, Paranoid, showed up too…
Tilen: Yes. Slovenia really did start going through an (unexpected) boom in metal terms. Reunions of Iron Maiden, Destruction, Agent Steel (and many others) definitely helped, blowing a metal wind back onto a flame that was only half burning. Especially in the period from 1999 to 2003. A really special period for Slovenian metal in terms of building things up, less so in terms of the bands themselves. In Carinthia there was of course no real activity, except for one or two events a year. We spent hours and hours back then in a small local music shop called Gogo Music, it was the only music shop that offered more than three metal bands on its tiny shelves, that’s where we’d meet up in elementary school after class and spin metal. It probably helped that my cousin worked there as a high school student, so there were absolutely no volume limits. That was the start of everything truly concrete for our generation, with our own initiative. The school radio in elementary school was metalized every break. At first I listened exclusively to English bands, mostly NWOBHM led by Iron Maiden and some bands the kids are now rediscovering but that were completely forgotten back then (Satan, Angel Witch, Jaguar, Demon, TOPT, Gogmagog etc.), plus old British bands from the 70s, for about three or four years I didn’t want to hear anything else. Of course I quickly figured out that this wasn’t exactly optimal, and I was always listening to other stuff too (laughs). Back then, in 2001/2002, we also founded our first band, and the local scene started to rise. For a while in that first band we played nothing but Iron Maiden songs, later we created in short-lived local projects. I shut all of that down after I joined Wartune in the summer of 2004. They were just preparing to record their first demo. In 2004 and 2005 we played all over Slovenia, and at the end of 2005 we parted ways with the drummer and the guitarist. We headed into musically experimental waters, I wrote about unusual themes and concepts, and later came the years when all the prog death bands (Cynic, Atheist, Pestilence etc.) did reunions, and long before that people were already connecting us with those names… we sounded fairly unusual, which was always a plus for us. My longtime buddy Lenart Mlinar joined us, an excellent drummer, top-notch, one of the best Slovenian metal drummers, born with a feel that hardly anyone has. He’s not actively doing music right now, which is a big shame, people like that are in short supply here. To jump back a year, to 2005; things were happening extremely fast. At 12, 13 I was already playing in bands we’d founded right at that age, at 15 I joined Wartune, all the members were 4–9 years older, but that didn’t hold me back: I was young, aggressive, and death/thrash metal (with a touch of black at times) was the perfect mix, which of course still works today, many years later. Of course you had to fight for absolutely everything. From a complete zero. A kid from Ravne in Carinthia, where you don’t know anyone else. Nothing. What are you going to do in Ravne? No clubs, no music “scene”, no alternative music and culture history. In Carinthia over the last 25 years there were only a couple of metal bands, and they fell apart after two or three years of playing and feeling sorry for themselves about how “nothing is possible”. That’s not exactly a great send-off. Athletes have coaches, facilities, sponsors, privileges; it’s easy to succeed in swimming, volleyball and so on, where there’s a 60, 70-year tradition, in classical music and so on with the support of music school… But who has guidelines for metal music? Nobody. For every single thing I achieved I slogged with blood and sweat, and exclusively and only with my own hands, ideas and guidelines. Connections? They don’t exist. This isn’t Ljubljana, there’s no Metelkova and so on, here you can’t play a metal show four streets from your apartment block; we were in the middle of nowhere (and we actually still are), Ravne is the Slovenian industrial equivalent of England’s Birmingham, and despite the obstacles that always gave us extra will and pride. The sounds of metal anvils from the ironworks… steel and metal are part of Carinthian blood, metal runs through our veins, we don’t break easily. The road to everything I’ve built was such that nobody can even imagine or picture it (except for those few people who followed my path from the very beginning). Anyway, within one year of my joining, we kicked up so much dust with Wartune that we made it to Kaltenbach, an Austrian open-air festival, where we shared the stage with the legendary Germans Destruction and Sweden’s Dissection, who had just done their reunion after Jon’s release, and a few other really great bands played too. That was my first international experience at a “pro” level. After that festival and the fact that a young Carinthian band played with names like that (which a couple of years earlier we could only have dreamed about), I started thinking more pragmatically and began nurturing the thought: “you can achieve something out of the ordinary even here.” Later I played around Europe with Slovenian bands years before Vicious Rumors (tons of times in Austria with Wartune, in Germany, Italy and so on with Keller, in Spain with the legendary James Rivera and Metalsteel, in Belgium and so on).
RockLine: Okay, for contrast let’s take 2016 and try to compare today’s Slovenian metal scene with the times when the scene was rising, meaning 1999 onward, when it started with a death metal revival, followed by a thrash metal revival and so on… How do you perceive the Slovenian metal scene today in 2016 and how did you see it 15 years ago?
Tilen: In one of my reflections, which I wrote in one of my longer editorials for Paranoid years ago, I can say that the scene in 1979 was similar to the one in 1999. In 1979 NWOBHM appeared, followed by an explosion of metal’s genre branches. The initial blast lasted until 1984. In 1999 the situation similarly blossomed up to 2004, when we got our first open-air fest, Metal Mania, then the first international festival Metalcamp, the first quality-produced and released albums (also internationally, say the short-lived Supremacy and so on). From 1985 to 1988 there was a golden age. It was similar here. Everything was on the rise even earlier, but the golden age was between 2005 and 2008. Especially in 2008 the thrash (and other metal) scene was so strong that there was a group of about 100 people in Slovenia who went to absolutely every local metal show (all over Slovenia) and showed ultra support, which really kept the local scene alive. That phenomenon unfortunately got lost and erased later (people just “grow up”, right? Especially the ones who shout the loudest (laughs). After 1988 it was similar to after 2008. Things went downhill. In the nineties new ways of thinking came, glam ran itself over (though in the early nineties every one of those bands was still commercially successful, after 1993 a steep decline began), it was similar after 2010 with thrash, although it stuck around and is still strong, or stronger than ever, but in metal “fashion” it was replaced by doom, later by all the quasi 70’s revival bands, of which maybe 1 in 40 is digestible and so on (as always, in a flood it’s hard to find the golden grain) and assorted other “metal hammer” bands. For the first two years, meaning 1990 and 1991, as well as 2010 and 2011, that blossoming-scene momentum still sort of dragged on, especially when it came to quality releases, but when 2012/13 came, things really went downhill (parallel with 1993). Let’s not underestimate the nineties, though: death, German power/heavy, certain prog bands and lots of experimental styles, plus of course the second wave of black metal and so on, all of that flourished and was in fact at its peak precisely in the nineties. Wacken Open Air, Bang Your Head and Summer Breeze, the three main German open-air festivals, were born in the nineties. In every “heavy” period there are exceptions and metal in the nineties actually flourished, it just moved a step or two lower into the underground, which is absolutely fine. And in 2016? The thing is drowning. People move around unresponsive and apathetic, even though it looks like everything’s otherwise just fine. There are tons of festivals, tons of events in general. Say, very specifically about Slovenia: every slightly bigger band comes to Slovenia to play a show. We used to drive to almost every other international touring band at least to Graz, or farther. Now you can choose between Ljubljana, Nova Gorica, Kranj and so on on a weekly basis, and that’s actually been going on for the last 4–8 years… Another new thing is that social networks have such an influence on the scene. Facebook and Instagram have “eaten everything”. If you don’t get a grip on that and you’re, say, a promoter, a concert organizer, you’re lost today. That’s the problem. People are on Facebook. Constantly. They hang out there. They build their lives there. They don’t move from there, they live in a parallel world. And now if I answer your question directly. It’s sad. The real spirit isn’t there. I don’t feel it. In all the genres that fall under the umbrella term heavy metal (as the legendary Neal Kay would say). In people newly joining the metal scene I don’t feel that energy I felt in 2001, 2002, 2003 or earlier. It’s not a matter of years or of us being much older (whoever’s even older would probably say the same about the eighties and so on). People have simply become spoiled. YouTube makes absolutely everything possible. You see everything, hear everything… in advance… the magic is gone, there’s no anticipation, when you didn’t know in advance what would happen at a show. The older folks know what I’m talking about, those times when we’d ask ourselves about every song, about what would happen on stage, we expected hell live. I waited months for the “Live After Death” video cassette and dreamed about how the songs I’d been listening to for months on the audio live album look visually. There’s no real energy anymore and things get performed without soul. If I compare that to the scene (just) eight years ago, I can use only one word. Disastrous. On top of that, we in Slovenia are cursed with a flood of “smartasses” who in real life are only an approximation of what they present online, where their main occupation in life is to “hate”, which in such a small country as Slovenia creates some really weird energy. People look at each other “strangely” at shows, everybody knows everybody, everyone has an opinion about someone else that they formed based on purely “x” people, and I think all that is the most destructive thing, there’s no real community of metal anymore, at least not the seeming one that once existed. That’s also a utopia anyway, one that somehow still worked before the age of social media, and which people imagine under the label “metal brotherhood”, which, as I said, never existed in reality. Anywhere. Not even in the past. If you look at the periods when the Bay Area thrash scene, the NWOBHM boom, German Teutonic thrash and Florida death metal were on the rise, there was fishing for beef between bands everywhere. When you talk to the people who actually created those scenes you see it’s completely different from what people read in magazines or online. We dream about some brotherhoods in metal, but they simply don’t exist. Often I want to block out this (real) state of affairs. I constantly listen to and create music, independent of everything. I try to skip past that level, to distance myself from it. In fact I don’t even feel part of it the way I did 10, 15 years ago.
RockLine: Let’s flip over to something else. Where was the turning point of your career, when the great Geoff Thorpe (Vicious Rumors) invited you into the band as a permanent bassist? When and how did that happen?
Tilen: Considering that all the consumers of Rockline content will be reading this interview online, I suggest they check out the interview with Geoff and me on YouTube, by searching “Grom Metaldays edition 2013” (we found the video at the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeXEgp6DjTo , watch the interview between 15:30 and 21:00!!!)
RockLine: That made for a nice read, didn’t it?
Tilen: Definitely. The phone rang. An American number. Whatever. I pick up. On the other end Brian Allen. He said: “In the middle of July we’re headlining the warm-up show at Bang Your Head!!! festival with Candlemass, Tokyo Blade and a few other bands, and Carl Albert’s son Kevin will be performing with us too (Carl Albert being the late singer of Vicious Rumors and one of the best heavy metal frontmen of all time, ed. note)! There will be a couple thousand people in the hall!” A 3-week tour was supposed to follow. Even though Brian kept insisting he was dead serious about the invitation, I didn’t want to believe him and replied: “Fine, when Geoff Thorpe calls me I’ll believe you!” Two hours later another American number shows up on my screen. On the other end was the legendary Geoff Thorpe, who said: “I saw your videos. I want you on the team! I’ve got options with plenty of Americans, but I want you! Do you have time? I’ll send you the set list with the songs we’ll be playing at the shows so you can study them. Are you in?” And that was that. I didn’t even think about it, I agreed right away. Less than a month before the Bang Your Head!!! festival an email arrived with the set list, on it were 34 or 35 Vicious Rumors songs, I’d known Vicious Rumors’ music inside out long before that, many, many years before. I learned the material in less than a month, but I simply didn’t believe it until the gig in Balingen. When we finally stepped onto the stage the atmosphere was electric. A megalomaniac show. The next day we had a signing session, an hour where we handed out autographs. We expected a couple dozen people, in the end we were signing for a good three quarters of an hour. We couldn’t believe our own eyes. When we showed up in the room, the crowd immediately started yelling: “Rumors, Rumors,…!!!” VR is of course a cult band in Germany. Something similar happened to us in South America, when we landed in São Paulo, and the airport was full of people who’d been waiting years and years for Vicious Rumors to arrive in Brazil, some for decades. Posters, flags, pictures, album covers, shirts, arms full of gifts… 20 minutes of “Rumors, Rumors” chants… in the middle of the São Paulo airport are something I’ll never forget. A football match. People who know more about you than you do yourself when you talk to them… Indescribable events, especially because it’s abroad, another continent. Unimaginable. We traveled that entire tour by plane, because of the huge distances between countries (and even between towns) in Latin America, unimaginable feelings and stories for 4 books. For anecdotes from the last 6, 7 tours I’d have to do a separate interview (laughs).
RockLine: Our team experienced that show, as well as the signing session in Germany. Tell me, where did you get those strippers who jumped on stage toward the end of your set in Balingen?
Tilen: (laughs) You’re talking about the “incident” during the song Soldiers of the Night, which we renamed Strippers of the Night (laughs). That was a total surprise. Horst, the main organizer of the Bang Your Head!!! festival, has been a Vicious Rumors fan since the 80s. We play there exclusively because he wants us to. We were shocked (in a good way, of course). And off to the side of the stage our girls with eyes and mouths wide open, as four mega hot half-naked strippers run onto the stage and start rubbing up against us in the middle of playing? Can you imagine? Well, of course you can, you were there (laughs). And for a bonus, a couple thousand more people in the hall. That was my first show with Vicious Rumors. A good start, right? (laughs)
RockLine: So you irreversibly charmed and enchanted Geoff Thorpe?
Tilen: Right the next day at Bang Your Head he said he wasn’t even interested in Steven Goodwin (the previous Vicious Rumors bassist, ed. note) anymore, he said he hadn’t felt that kind of energy in more than 20 years, so he asked me if I wanted to join Vicious Rumors as a regular, permanent member. Right after the signing session, backstage.
RockLine: So you moved up into the league of professional musicians.
Tilen: Yes. I’ve always taken playing in bands professionally anyway. Music is with me 24 hours a day. In all forms. Even though I do tons of other things besides that. I teach, lecture, study, I still write pieces for Paranoid, I work on several projects, I’m working on my winter fest “WinterStrike”. With professionalism, things are set up so that the most is expected of you. Whether in the studio or on tour. You have to be not 100%, but 200% prepared and there’s no half-assing here. My main occupation in this life is therefore doing music professionally, and everything else is of course subordinate to that.
RockLine: Well, since good news travels fast, you suddenly found yourself on stage with Testament, you joined Paradox… Things shot upward in an instant.
Tilen: Right after the European leg of the tour where we were promoting the album “Electric Punishment” – so first across Europe – an extremely demanding US tour followed, I spent almost two months there. We traveled the length and breadth of the US, Alex from Negligence was with me for the entire tour and road trip. That was one of the craziest experiences of my life, and a live album followed from that tour, recorded in Oakland, New York… After just two months as a permanent member of Vicious Rumors I took part in the band’s official video clip. In less than a year I appeared on my first album with Vicious Rumors. That tour, on which we played in countless US states and cities (New York, Las Vegas, Oklahoma, Dallas, Houston, El Paso, Chicago, Indiana, Oakland/SF, Boston, all the biggest markets, plus lots of smaller American places like Cudahy and so on), wrapped up in January 2014 with our show at the by now cult 70000 Tons of Metal festival, where we were co-headliners on the first day with a full Digital Dictator set, a first in the band’s history. Things started moving really fast. I became the first non-American and therefore of course the first European member in the band’s 37-year career to ever join, and the first musician from the southwestern Balkans, ex-Yugoslavia, to play this prestigious festival, in fact the most prestigious metal festival in the world next to Wacken (well, in the end, tickets for 70000 Tons of Metal cost between 666 and 2000 euros and more, I’d say this one is the more prestigious one, at least from a financial point of view (laughs)… it’s a special honor from the festival to play in a band that a festival of that rank sincerely respects and pays for, on top of the already ultra expensive accommodation/travel costs of the band that they and the whole technical crew have to cover). All of that happened in the first five, six months of my time with Vicious Rumors. True, joining a legendary and influential band like Vicious Rumors got me a higher rating, but my name was spread around mainly by the band’s producer Juan Urteaga. Not the kind of producer that bands pay or hire to do their thing and go home, he’s simply our brother. This is a guy who works with Machine Head, Testament, Heathen, Exodus, many world-famous names and bands that influenced me, and also with platinum, million-selling acts like Night Ranger, Ted Nugent, Rammstein. I’ve been working with him on a regular basis for years, he’s always thrilled by my hard work, and the surprise when he called me wasn’t as big as it would have been a couple of years back. On his recommendation I got a call from the camp of the Testament, the gods of the covenant, and after that we performed in Canada in front of thousands and thousands of fans. On Urteaga’s recommendation the phone rang, it was Eric Peterson, the man who wrote a few of my favorite metal songs in history, and he said “I need you, you’re the only one who can do this, Juan said you’re ‘the man for the job'”. Given their status, Testament could have called Frank Bello, Rex Brown or any elder statesman/veteran of their age group instead of Steve DiGiorgio. They called me. The experience of standing on stage with a band that has sold over 14 million albums in its career and is considered one of the most influential of the last thirty years, a band that influenced thousands of musicians… is completely unreal and indescribable. I heard the first Testament song when I was 12 years old. As kids we played Testament covers day after day, and suddenly I was there with Chuck Billy, Eric Peterson and Alex Skolnick and thousands below the stage. 15 years of playing metal flashed before my eyes when we opened the show with the legendary Over The Wall and I played the middle bass part before Skolnick stepped into the legendary solo one meter away from me, and people were slaughtering each other in the mosh pit during the song. That was the wildest movie of my life, hundreds of shows I’d played before on several continents with an equally influential band like VR, and locally before that, don’t prepare you for something like this. Testament, next to Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Priest, Maiden, Sabbath, Machine Head and “newer” big bands like Mastodon, Lamb of God, the more commercial Nightwish, Sabaton and so on, are actually one of the biggest metal bands on the entire planet. I’m telling you this as a fan. I could talk about this event for another two hours, from the first minute to the last. Indescribable. When your name lands among the musicians who’ve worked with Testament in any way throughout their career and next to yours are listed Eric Peterson, Alex Skolnick, Dave Lombardo, Chuck Billy, Gene Hoglan, Paul Bostaph, James Murphy, Zetro Souza… when you put yourself back in your head at 13, 14, suddenly nothing is clear anymore. Despite twenty years in music, moments like that always take me back to my childhood, when I’d stick posters on the wall and think “hm, one day I’ll be up there too and some kid in the middle of nowhere will be looking at me on his wall and thinking the same way”. You can’t go higher than that and I’m totally fine with that (laughs), because it’s more than I ever expected, and on the other hand I took it as a logical consequence of my relentlessness, knowledge and long years of work, with my own hands, sweat and blood. It’s unrepeatable, this (Testament) is the top of the mountain that gives me inner peace. Universal energy finds a way. Straight from Ravne in Carinthia, heh. With the utmost respect and the humble fact that I appreciate this situation more than anything else ever. As for Paradox: Charly’s email arrived saying he had the entire 60+ minute demo version of the album recorded and arranged, without bass guitar. He gave me a few days to listen through it and decide whether I’d take part in the album. It sounded awfully good and given that this year is the band’s 30th anniversary, the whole thing felt even more special and I definitely agreed. Out of pure respect for a band that’s one of the first metal acts to come out of Germany, an extremely important band in the German metal scene, and the founders of power/thrash, the melodic branch of thrash/speed metal. Every metal connoisseur knows all this. The fact that my buddy Oswald and I discovered Paradox many years ago and that I was emotionally attached to the band’s music was another surreal moment. Later Eric Peterson from Testament called me again, and we recorded the Winter Sun single with Canadian singer Leah. That project was pretty interesting and received very well globally, and it was interesting for me personally too, since it departs from everything else I do in metal. Eric and I also work together on lots of other musical things, but those are secret for now.
RockLine: One of the most important questions of this interview. Paradox released the album “Pangea” in early June, and Vicious Rumors will put out the new one, titled “Concussion Protocol”, at the end of August this year. How did the recording of both albums go, the whole evolution process, under what circumstances?
Tilen: With Paradox I’m also a full member of the band, and it was interesting that Charly (yes, the man’s nickname is Charly, not “Charlie” as many wrongly think (laughs)) actually gave me completely free hands in shaping the bass lines for every song. That’s actually my basic condition before I enter any musical project. That I have completely free hands in shaping the bass lines and total artistic freedom. To the last note. The new album came out this June, twenty days ago, and it’s the highest-charting Paradox album in the band’s entire career. Charly simply said: “Use your magic.” “Do whatever you want!” As far as Vicious Rumors go, I’m a full member of the band, co-writer of half the songs on the new studio album “Concussion Protocol”, which means an incredible amount to me. A few Slovenian musicians have played in certain international bands as session members, so “hired” members. Being a full, equal member of a legendary band is a totally different story. These songs were created primarily in collaboration with Geoff Thorpe. I titled three out of five myself, namely Victims of a Digital World, Every Blessing is a Curse and Last of Our Kind, and Geoff finished the lyrics. I’m also a co-writer on the songs Concussion Protocol, Chasing the Priest, which is our first single, and Take it Or Leave It, which will be our second single, coming out in about three weeks. That last song is also the first in Vicious Rumors’ 37-year career to open with a bass line. An official video clip will be released for it too.
RockLine: So you totally “exploded” creatively on this song?
Tilen: Yes, almost literally. I wrote and wrote. After going over it I thought it was all too much, well, in the end the band members were stunned and said: “Nothing’s too much, this is exactly what we need.” That surprised me a lot, because I always adapt to the song first and foremost and look for the ideal line that will somehow “suit” the song and support the foundation of the track as such. So: no overdoing it. It happened completely spontaneously and Geoff wanted to keep that spontaneity on the track in full. I’m extremely proud of that. The band has had a huge number of members over its career, more than thirty have rotated through the lineup to date (totally logical, 37 years of uninterrupted activity is an incredibly long time for a band to exist, “life happens” and changes happen) and of those only a handful, maybe three or four, are co-writers. Besides Geoff, who is of course the main author of Vicious Rumors music. And I have to mention the label SPV/Steamhammer Records too. We’ve been with Vicious Rumors on this legendary German label for quite a while now, and when the second-to-last VR album came out two years ago, my name appeared on the wall of the main room at the label’s headquarters, where all the records released through the SPV organization end up… in the company of names like Judas Priest, Motörhead, Saxon, DIO, Ritchie Blackmore (Blackmore’s Night), Helloween, even blues godfather B.B. King and the queen Tina Turner put out albums through SPV… In the company of those, that is, who left some of the biggest marks in rock and metal music ever and wrote the foundation of the history of music I create in. Last but not least, the great Scorpions, who last year re-released all their albums from the 70s-80s period through the same label. My father is a big Scorpions fan and I bet he never dreamed even remotely that his son’s name would one day be written next to Scorpions in the release history of SPV/Steamhammer.
RockLine: I know you’re a big fan and generally a connoisseur of Iron Maiden. How important is the figure called Steve Harris in your life?
Tilen: Very. But not in the sense of a direct role model. So not in the sense of glorifying, “idolizing”. I don’t know that. I take and understand him as a big personal inspiration. He pointed me in a direction. With his “drive”, with his “stage persona”, with his belief in what he does, with his nature, the energy he radiates. Actually with his relentlessness, to which I added a big dose of Carinthian brutality. I was often asked if I was normal, if I really believed I’d achieve anything in metal. A breakthrough looks impossible, especially from Carinthia, the odds are 1 in 60409585. In moments like that I’d always remember him and his statement from the time of the punk explosion in the mid-seventies. To everyone around him a breakthrough looked impossible, but he said: “Just wait a little and you’ll see!” Steve Harris really is one of those people who strongly influenced my life. He’s a hugely influential name for my musical development and outlook, especially in the sense that the bass guitar as an instrument in music can stand out and be emphasized just the same. In terms of physical interpretation, in terms of volume, in terms of an ultra specific sound. That model of the inconspicuous figure in the background that used to accompany bassists suddenly dissolved. Well, but that wasn’t exclusively Harris’s recipe. He learned from others too, we really mustn’t forget that. Mainly under the influence of Pete Way from UFO, then there’s John Entwistle (The Who), the first insanely loud bassist on the planet and so on… I can’t skip Chris Squire from prog rock giants Yes and his revolutionary sound from the early seventies, and Geddy Lee from Rush, there’s Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath, Martin Turner from Wishbone Ash and so on. I met Steve Harris personally years ago too, and he turned out to be an exceptional human being. Contact with him only confirmed what I’d thought about him for many years. An extremely positive guy. Iron Maiden really are the essence of metal… not to overrate them, but in my heart they absolutely hold a special place, with Steve Harris remaining the leader of this whole “operation”.
RockLine: Tilen, we have to wrap up somewhere. The conversation is excellent and it’s a tough job to cut it off like this on time. So for the end I’ll ask the classic question. What plans do you have for the near and also the distant future? You can also point out which dreams still drive you onward and which ones you’ve made come true to this day.
Tilen: Well, as far as dreams go, they’re achieved. I travel the world. Paid. By every means of transport, from planes, tour buses, trains and every other possible local means of transport. Purely because of metal I’ve flown over half the world, and all the trips that playing in bands gives me every single year I value more than most people imagine. I play all over the world, I play in all forms, from clubs to halls to mega festivals. I play with the biggest names in the world. I never imagined I’d play in the middle of Belgium with Anthrax, Exodus and so on in front of 20,000 people. Played in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (the Caribbean Sea) with Overkill, Symphony X, Carcass, while a metal cruise ship with thousands of music enthusiasts sails past Cuba toward Mexico. Stood on stage with Slayer, watched Metallica or Iron Maiden from two meters away on stage. Years ago in Croatia Sepultura opened for us at Underwall. You shared stages with 99 percent of the bands I listened to as a young hopeful. Played with bands I stuck on my walls as a kid. Music is everything, life without music would be a mistake, as the great Nietzsche said, and music has made all this possible for me through the power of will. I live what I told myself I would when in elementary school they said to me “don’t look out the window, the world won’t give you a life by itself, what we tell you will give you one”. In that moment I said to myself “no, no, life will give me what I create myself”. Seeing as many continents, countries and places on our planet as possible has always been my wish, and now that I experience it on a regular basis through my favorite music, which is my life… everything is that much more beautiful. Furthermore, I’d always wanted to play in Rio de Janeiro. That was a childhood wish. I pulled that off a couple of years ago too. Not (yet) at Rock in Rio, but at an indoor show together with the legendary Destruction, which was completely indescribable. Playing in Rio and experiencing football-stadium ovations while playing and after every song was insane. Our Brazilian merch guy sold 3000 euros’ worth of merch that night (laughs). And it’s not just Rio that fascinates me, it’s all of South America. The best continent for metal, without the slightest doubt. Playing there was otherworldly, besides Brazil it was completely indescribable in Argentina too, which is the second craziest country in Latin America. Playing on as many continents as possible was my goal and it keeps getting added to every year… giving away that moment of your time that some fans of your band have been waiting for for years and years. I know exactly what that feeling is like. It’s incredibly joyful to enjoy this devotion and sincere energy that the audience radiates in different ways and in different corners of the world when your music is played at live shows. People who are really there because of you. It’s a privilege to play with “old” bands with a long history who have real die-hard fanatics. Most musicians sadly never experience that. Signing sessions and hanging out with fans are my favorite things to do besides playing itself. I take that as an extremely important thing. We’d do anything for the fans, we know they make all this possible for us, because of them we live our dreams. When fans send pictures of their collections of your band’s albums, photos of their rooms from all over the world (the ones that surprised me most lately were Trinidad and Tobago, Syria and Iraq…) plastered with your band’s posters… wow… in the age of the internet, when every band has its own FB page and is accessible to everyone, “old” physical stuff like flags and posters looks that much better. We live for the fans and of course: we’re fans ourselves too. It’s crazy to watch people next to you who co-created metal genres (power, thrash) and still work with ultra enthusiasm (Geoff Thorpe, Eric Peterson…) that has no end in sight. To continue… the Testament show – the ultimate in my life and one of those moments I’ll be telling my grandkids about, when the bands that formed and played in the 80s of the last millennium are only a distant fantasy. An unrepeatable thing, a lot has been written about it. Likewise the wish to record in the world’s biggest metal temples with the people who make metal history came true. Recording in the SF Bay Area in America is priceless. Working with Geoff Thorpe, Eric Peterson, C. Steinhauer is a thing of superlatives, these are extremely unique metal creators and personalities, each of them has written over 100 songs in their career, their experience is priceless and when those legendary people ask you for opinions, ideas and so on on a daily basis, you feel truly flattered and humble. As far as goals go? To keep everything at least at the level that’s been reached. Even though I’m extremely busy right now, maybe even too busy, that’s the most important thing… To keep and hold this level. There are actually no obstacles. Only one. Time, of course. Short-term goals. The Paradox album is out, it sold thousands and thousands of copies in the three weeks after release, which for 2016 is actually unbelievable for a band that doesn’t play “live”. All the print runs and quantity-limited editions of the album sold out. The Japanese bought up the special Japanese version of the album with bonus tracks in a couple of days. A reprint is in the works. The album “Pangea” is something special. That’s what we wanted too, and judging by the reactions and reviews from all over the world we luckily pulled it off. The first Paradox album on vinyl since the legendary “Heresy”. As for Vicious Rumors: the new album comes out on 26.08.2016. After promotion with singles and video clips a world tour follows, starting at the end of October in Europe. We’ll be there for more than a month. The first tour with a legendary German act, which is still a secret for now, will be announced soon. North America, Japan, South America and so on follow… This project, that is the “Concussion Protocol World Tour”, will last a year and a half to two years. In between we’ll record a third part of the live album “Live You To Death”. A DVD is planned for the band’s fortieth anniversary. In 2016 we’ll also release an EP with Thraw. So three really big projects, and one still remains a little hidden for now, but that too will be revealed soon. I’m also preparing a solo album titled “Back to Bassics” (the second “s” is there on purpose). A few songs have been recorded for two years, but I can’t find the time to finish the album. My brother Domen (Thraw) is helping me with that, handling production. Domen is a studio and guitar genius and has basically always been my greatest support in every respect and my only confidant whom I trust 100%. To finish up on Vicious Rumors: a festival tour will follow in 2017 (the first confirmation is the BYH festival in Balingen), which will be especially interesting to watch, since for the last two years we deliberately skipped festival appearances. Especially after Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, which are our three biggest European markets. If I return for a moment to the opening question… what drives me onward… the mere fact that I’ve achieved what I have drives me onward. I’m a very proud person and nobody can ever take away the history I created with my own hands. That fills me with extreme inner satisfaction. On the eighth of August last year I was in Testament, Paradox and Vicious Rumors simultaneously. That’s the most important moment of my career. If you’d told me at 14 “one day you’ll be on stage with Testament in the middle of Canada in front of thousands and thousands of people” or “you’ll play heavy metal in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a cruise ship that holds more people than the Titanic”, that thousands of people around the world will hold my albums in physical form in their hands and listen to them, even in countries most people don’t even know exist, and so on, I’d have said “do you even know where ‘this, this, and this country’ is on the map of the world and where Ravne in Carinthia is?” Humbly and objectively: all of that and much more actually happened and will remain immortalized forever in photo/video archives and music recordings all over the world. Even if it all ended tomorrow… I’d know I did everything my own way, by my own principles, I never let anyone f’%&k me over, I always stood behind my words while the leaves fell around me. But it won’t end… the road is still long and for as long as my physical body allows, I’ll keep walking… every day I wake up I take as a privilege on a planet that’s tangled up in conspiracies and impure thoughts of hypocrisy, lies and maniacs who strive for domination over the weaker. Well, as long as there’s metal, which saves many people through free musical expression, everything’s fine.
RockLine: Did we leave out any important thought for the end of the interview?
Tilen: Maybe this. I’d like to tell readers not to pay attention to what others tell them, especially about what you can or can’t do. Or especially what others think. Don’t pay attention to them. Do only what you yourselves feel is important for your life. Be humble and proud. Only that will lead you to what you want and desire. To your goals. Follow them. I once said in a utopian way “anyone can make it”; I don’t say that anymore, because it’s definitely not true. Only the one who invests himself in his faith, his whole life, and multiplies that threefold through every aspect of his existence can make it. Don’t kid yourselves that someone can succeed by chance, everything has its purpose. Nobody succeeds by chance. Of course, it’s true that luck favors the brave, the bravest. The exceptional succeed thanks to many factors. They have something in them. Alongside all the extreme work, they have an added value in them that can’t be described. Universal energy. So you have to find your destiny. Another thing: thanks go to you, RockLine, for all the support, for the persistence, for keeping the scene alive and rolling, for taking your free time so people can read about quality music and are also well informed about what’s going on all over Europe. Thanks Aleš, for this old school chat over drinks, I certainly couldn’t have been bothered to type out this long audio recording that you’ll have to work through (laughs). Thanks for the extreme support you give! Sincere congratulations to RockLine for the first 10 years of active “ultra” work. I wish you at least the next 30 years. And to finish: “Metal lives!!!” Thanks!
RockLine: Thanks to you too, Tilen, for this really insanely comprehensive “confession”. Great conversation. On behalf of the RockLine team and our readers I wish you full bloom in every respect, in all areas of life. And above all in the one that concerns musical art.
The photos are taken from the RockLine archive and relate to Vicious Rumors’ performance on the warm-up day of the Bang Your Head!!! festival in 2013, you can read the full RockLine report on that show HERE!
Vicious Rumors – Chasing the Priest (lyric video):
Vicious Rumors – Take It Or Leave It (official video):
Photo Gallery
