EPICA : Paradise lust

We had left Epica, last year, on the road to Paradiso, we meet them again in the Nuclear Blast express, their new label, promoting ‘The Divine Conspiracy’, their brand new album, out in September. Crystal-clear and epic like a changing ocean, this new record is also a commentary on today's world and women's oppression at the hands of men and religions, whatever they are. It is a deep and beautiful concept album, full of emotions and pain, but also musically brutal, like a lyrical blaze in the modern sky, after the Maya themes of the previous record. Epica is a name that definitely fits the band. We met the lovely and gorgeous Simone, a queen of anger and love. Beware, (im)mortals…

-Since the last time we met, Epica lost a member: what happened? Do you have a new member now?

-S: We don’t have a new member yet. The thing is, after the American tour last year, our drummer decided to leave the band, because it wasn’t his cup of tea anymore, to travel around the world, he preferred to stay home to practice and teach, so we don’t have a drummer. He still finished the tour before he left, but we had new songs we had to practice in studio. We already had somebody in mind who could do the album, a friend of the band, Arien Weesenbeek, drummer of God Dethroned, famous Dutch metal band, and that went really well. Mark knew he would be the perfect drummer, and so he even adapted some of the songs to really hard songs because he knew that Arien could drum it. We have another session drummer, called Koen Herfst, also in a band, and both of them switch. So, till now, we have always Koen with us, Arien was in the video clip, and after that we’ll do the American tour with Sonata Artica tour with Koen. We had other drummers in audition, but they cannot compete with the level we had on the album and we really want to have that live. Good drummers are hard to find, and they are mostly already occupied!

-Since then too, you have been signed by a new label, Nuclear Blast, after Transmission: why and how did it happen?

S: Well, we were actually thinking of signing with Century Media before, because they showed a lot of interest in us. We were looking at the contract, trying to make it better. But then, at the last moment, Nuclear Blast came with an offer, totally out of the blue. We didn’t know they had any interest in us, and it felt so good! We checked it and Mark and Yves went to the office in Germany to talk with them and Marcus, the boss, who was there, saying that he loved the album and that gonna be its and Epica his band! It felt good because we knew that Nuclear Blast had a lot of cool bands, great promotion, what we need, and great distribution, what we also need, so it seems we’ve found our next step! There’s many things, but I think now of the last week, I went to Vienna and did a photo shoot for a German economical magazine, not a music magazine anyway, but the editor is a big metal fan. Nuclear Blast has a lot of good connections. That’s what we need now, and we’re gonna take all the possibilities we have, for example going to Vienna to do a cover shoot, my first ever cover shoot. It was really nice, and I now we really feel that a bigger label have more power, more money, more resources, is better organised, works more professionally.

-New record: ‘Divine Conspiracy’, what’s behind this title? Adam and Eve, and their fall from grace? Is it a concept album, which could be dubbed “the embrace that smothers’?

S: The title is also the title track and the one of the last song. I guess you can already imagine that it’s a little bit about religion and about the negative aspects of the human mind, and well as nature again. ’The divine conspiracy’ is about all the religions, with different gods, eventually coming out to be one religion and there’s just one god, it’s not Allah, it’s not God, just one power source. It’s the conspiracy that Gods made those religions as a test to see if people see that the message is all the same and stop killing each other and all extremities should be gone. There’s also ‘The embrace that smothers’ which finishes on the album, which is referring to Islamic culture and to Christianity, those two meeting in a dream made alive. ‘Death of a dream’ is a about women, who in Islamic culture but also in European culture, are not equal to guys. That has to change, in my opinion. And also there are some women who really fight for their rights, they write books about it and come to TV, like Waris Dirie from Somalia. She’s very straight about how Muslims treat the women, but she had some death treats. Here, we have the liberty of speech, I think that women are equal to guys, we have a bigger brain than you and as many talents as you. So the true storyline behind ‘Death of a dream’ actually really happen, it’s about a young Muslim girl who fell in love with a guy who’s not Muslim. She’s got pregnant, and her brother killed her. She was trying to fight for her dream that every women from every religion would be the same, you can marry whoever you want, if you’re gay or not, Muslim, Christian, to me it’s all the same. But she got killed, so it’s the death of the dream. But still, some women are broken up by these things, some women are afraid because they prefer to live a little bit on the lowest side of the guys to escape it. ‘Living in lies’ is about Christianity, it’s also a true story, about a couple expecting their first child which is going to die after being born because he is missing organs, that what the doctor and all the scientists says, but they don’t believe it, they joins a cult and they prey for the baby. As a baby’s born, so he has to live. But he dies after being born, but the mother still believe that the baby could come back, and the whole cult is praying, trying to bring her baby back to life. For me, that’s so sad. When people want something, they got strength with religion, but they’re totally blind, they don’t see the reality anymore. In understand it, they are desperate, but, on the other hand, it’s easy for me to say it, because I’m looking it from the outside…So, ‘Never enough’ is about grief, ‘Chasing the dragon’ is about drug addiction, that’s a little bit the idea of it all. Then the album, and me on the cover, totally naked, as Eve in the garden, but it’s only a small detail: I wanted to show that people are born naked, and as you goes through life, you make mistakes, which changes you on the inside and on the outside. That’s why I have tattoos, and why I referred to Eve, because she made a choice, to refuse to be immortal, and she became mortal. There’s not something bad. I don’t want to be immortal, I would say I’m happy I will die one day, but I hope I will still get old. There’s a Dutch expression saying that you’re ‘drowned by life’, and there a bit the overall concept of all the lyrics. Many people will not expect that, there’s also a provocative thing. We wrote it fifty-fifty with Mark, trying to keep that balance because Mark has some good ideas about songs and we worked together on all the lyrics. For ‘Chasing the dragon’, as well as another track, you have two versions, with grunt or clean lyrics, and he wrote the grunt version and I wrote the clean one. So, for this album, we worked more together than on the previous one.

-Do you expect to play it all the way through?

S: ‘Divine Conspiracy’ will be cut a little bit, because it’s too long, and I can’t stay on stage all the time, I don’t sing at the end anymore and I would say goodbye to the audience before the band quit playing, so that could be weird. We play some songs live already, and we’ll play more during the American tour. We cannot play it all, because there are always some old good songs that people wants immediately, so it’s fifty fifty. We’ll see!

-What is the meaning of this strange title, ‘La petach chatat rouetz / The final embrace’?

S: That’s a good question, because I don’t know. I guess it’s translation of ‘Death of a dream’, but Mark has to answer to it…

Mark, coming around for a second:

-Mark: It’s an Hebrew term, it means : ‘Sin is crouching at your door’!

-We can find many examples of religious music, Christian as well as Oriental, but also classical music, in ‘Carmina Burana’ style…

S : …yes, for the choirs ! Mark wrote the majority, and Yves also sometimes, and they are great admirers of film as well as classical music. Mark is a great fan of Chopin and Rachmaninov, mostly for their piano works, and Yves, who’s originally a piano player, loves Danny Elfman. He composed the ballads ‘ to Paradise’ and ‘Never Enough’, and myself am a great fan of Danny Elfman, more than Hans Zimmer I would say, because the ambiance is more like a fairy tale, Zimmer being more epic. So we have both in the band. I recently bought a soundtrack of the movie ‘The Perfume’, and that’s really nice and I think that the director also wrote the music: you have to buy this album too!

-Did you use a real orchestra and real choirs this time?

S: No, it’s all samples, because this time, all the things were very complicated and we didn’t want to spend so much time on a real orchestra. And something can always go wrong, and when it’s recorded, you can’t change it so easily. You hear the difference, of course, but for this album we chose to have samples. We don’t know if, for the next one, we will go for the ‘Nighwish style’ with a full orchestra, in Abbey Road studios in London, but no, this is good like this. We were flexible, and Mark and Yves also arranged it on the computers. For the choirs, we needed actually, three days instead of one day, because we really love choir parts, it still went really fast, I was there, it was really fun to record. On most of the choirs, I sing a lead on top of it.

-You told me last time that you were a fan of Dimmu Borgir : they used an orchestra twice for their records : were certain songs, like ‘The obsessive devotion’ for example, influenced by them ?

S: Well ‘The obsessive devotion’ is a very personal and powerful song, the music and the lyrics fits well together, and Mark and Yves and fans of Dimmu Borgir. I like it, and I’ve already heard people comparing some of our songs to Dimmu Borgir, because it’s very powerful. We deliberately choose to have a really hard album this time, sometimes we were afraid to go to the commercial side, but I think this album is more metal than the previous ones.

-Yes, and, after the Maya concept…

-S: …It’s a hard reality!

-Tell me about your producer, Sascha Paeth…

S: We worked with Sacha at the Gate studio from the first album, and it’s very familiar, we know how they work, they know what we like, and it’s a little bit like a second family. Sacha is actually very busy, maybe a little too busy because he does a lot of things at the same time, but we really like the job he does. That’s why we started with him, and he’s also a good friend. It’s so much fun to work with him; he’s very talented, creative, passionate and always smiling and funny: I really love him!

-I’ve read that your gig in Cologne, in Germany, June 21th, has been filmed for German TV: no hope to see it on a live DVD?

S: It was for Rock Palast, but I think it’ll come on You Tube, where you can find everything. But we think Nuclear Blast could also use it as promo material, because Rock Palast is big in Germany, so they could use it to set foot on ground Epica in Germany. We’re doing great in France, but there it’s a bit low. But now we have a German label, and they’re doing their best.

-There’s a new video for ‘Never enough’: when and where will we see it?

S: I don’t know yet if it’ll come out with a limited edition of the album, we’ll see. We recorded it in Serbia, with three computer screens, so there’s a lot of animation, it’s very nice. We hope it can be available in August, before the album is released.

-You will participate to the new Primal Fear album…

S: Rolf contacted me through MySpace, saying that they like my voice and were interested in using it on their next album. I’m always interested in something new, because that’s a bit like Kamelot, but more prog metal. So we did, spend time in the studio, where I sung the whole song, but at the end, they cut it and took only what they liked. I start the song, and it’s not common for a guest singer to do it. But I really liked it, as they did, we recorded two hours. After that, Rolf sent me a message saying it they had a listening session, and the label said they would be use as a single, because they really liked it, thanked me again. So I sing along with Rolf, but you can hear something different from me from what I do in Epica.

-Tell me about this book with CD: ‘Road to Paradiso’…

S: This is kind of a biography by Epica. It’s for the fan, but also made by the fans, which sent us photos and stories, as we had a website open for it. It’s really a piece of art, and for me, it’s nice to see how we have done this and that and how I was young at a time or another. It also contains a CD, with demo tapes, live stuff and an extra song. I think it’s very special for the fans because they are also in it. There are some stupid photos, including this one with three naked asses: that’s during the first tour we made with Doro and Blaze, there was just three shows and, at the end, he had his underpants with Blaze on it, so I wrote B-L-A-Z-E, with an exclamation point. I could touch their asses, and that was nice! This is for the fans!

-On ‘The road to Paradiso’, you covered ‘Crystal Mountain’ by Death: do you have other covers on the way, or which songs would you really like to cover?

S: We did one, for the new record, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it, ask Mark. But it’s metal, of course, and I sing in a very different way; it’s not an epic song at all. It’s really metal, with a lot of guitars.

Later, at the end of the interview, Simone and Mark told me:

-S: The cover song is ‘Replica’, from Fear Factory. It’s a little bit of a joke, because many people at first called us Replica, after Mark left After Forever, so that’s why we recorded that song.

-Not in Angela Gossoff’s style?

-S: Oh no, I can’t do that, that would sound really bad, I think, and it would kill my throat! I can’t do it, it’s a pain. Angela lost her voice many times, and I don’t wanna do that.

-Another project of soundtrack like ‘the score’?

S: we will do that eventually again, and this time also with me singing on it, but we don’t know if it will be after this album or after the second Nuclar Blast Epica album. And I would also love to sing in an official score one day.

-Mark and ‘La Marmotte’, 7th of July, a bicycle marathon in south of France (174 kms).

-S: Yes, it’s for WWF, Mark collected the money: everybody could pay like so many cents per kilometre, and then, when he would get to the finish gain an extra fee. So he drove 174 kms, he trained for a very long before that, and I sponsored the team with some of my money, even if I don’t have that much, but just for the idea. He did it on 7^th of July, in the big mountains in the Alps, for twelve hours. We had a show that day, with a guest singer, because I wasn’t sure Mark would be there. But it was ok, Marl was totally dead, he had to throw up after that. He did it a bit extreme.

-And yourself? Did you go too?

S: Not, I don’t like bicycle as much, I like inland skiing and ice skating and swimming! I’m not so extreme, I just do it for fun, but he’s a good sportsman. Because he was meant to be a cycler when he was younger, he was in a professional team, and then he got really sick, and then he started making music, but he always kept on riding the bike, there’s a little bit like a climax for him! Epica fans gave money too, and he gave it to WWF. On our website, it was a link, with a subscription form. Mark will let everybody know that that he made it, and gave us code number, and we transfer the money.

-Were you amused by the fact you were supposed to be, as well as many other female singers, the new Nightwish frontwoman?

S: Yes, I was one of them. I think that, when Tarja left, my voice came closest to hers, so many people thought there would be a logic thing, but Tuomas is a friend, and he never asked me if I would want to be their new singer. I met him again at the Tuska festival, and he said that if people were making photos of us, I would be in magazines as the new singer of Nightwish. They were here yesterday with Anette, and we’ve been drinking absinthe at the bar. You can buy bottles here, actually. It’s pretty expensive, and I don’t drink so much alcohol. I drunk only one glass, that was nice. I feel a little bit honoured that I could be the new singer of Nightwish but, on the other hand, Nightwish is not my band, I would be there as following success of a very good singer, who has a certain style of singing. Many fans are gonna like Anette, but also some won’t like her, because she has a totally different voice, and I don’t want to be in her shoes But for me, I fit with Epica, which is a bit lower, but I can grow with Epica, I don’t want to start here and go down, I wanna go up…

-Yes, Epica is your thing, your baby, in a way!

-S: Yes, my baby, in a way!

-In France, in November, you’ll be touring with Sonata Arctica: but when will we see you headlining again in France?

S: Yes, in touring with Sonata Artica, we’ll have like forty minutes. I hope next year, in 2008, we’ll do a headline tour. Those are just little plans so far, but we have to see how the Sonata Artica goes, and then we have to decide which countries we’ll do, but of course, we’ll come to France, because we’ve already played here, at La Loco, 3 times, l’Elysée, two times. we’ll come back to play more than forty minutes, because it’s not that much. It’s good because we just came back from an American headline tour, and we were just totally tired then, and you do just support tour, you can have fun on stage, drink a little bit, talk to the other bands, watch Sonata Artica and go to bed again. I don’t have to worry about if I get sick, because forty minutes are manageable if you get sick. Not that I want to, but…

-You’ve toured in South America, this year? Because I remember you’ve been sick several times there…

-S: Yes, once I had an infection, an appendicitis, and I’ve got an operation in Mexico. But that’s part of the game, you can get sick somewhere else and you have to trust the doctors there. Luckily, everything went well, I also finished the tour. I still have stitches in my belly, but I guess I’m a tough cookie now!

Interview made on July 12th 2007 in Paris by Jean Paul Coillard.

Thanks to Valérie.

Visit the Epica website : www.epica.nl