BLIND GUARDIAN - Feast Your Eyes! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"Not really," continues Siepen. "It helped me to think about not ever trying to ride a skateboard again (laughs). That's for sure. I mean, the good thing about this accident is that it didn't really affect me as a guitar player. My leg was smashed but my arms and hands are perfectly fine. If I would have broken my arm and wouldn't be able to play guitar for a couple of months, the situation would have been completely different. And this would have made me think for sure about all this stuff, not being able to do you job, not being able to do what you like to do, like play guitar. But as it is now, I've been recording and doing songwriting all morning. So I just sit here on my bed with my leg up and strap on my guitar and I'm fine (laughs)."

After saying that the next record will be "straighter," not a concept album, and with no super-long songs, Marcus dives into a description of the DVD, which is centred around a lavishly produced concert, headlined by Blind Guardian, with 7000 fans over each of the two days, an event affectionately called Blind Guardian Open Air.

"The idea was born after we played on basically every heavy metal festival there is in the world, during the last tour. I mean, we headlined most of them, but you always have to do compromises on these festivals. You can't put up the light design as you exactly wanted it, you have to compromise with respect to the stage design. So the idea was born to do our own festival, in which we could do basically whatever we wanted, concerning stage design, lights, whatever. This would be our festival. Everything would be the way we wanted it. And obviously, this festival would be the perfect opportunity in which to film DVD, because the band would be presented in the way we would want it to be. And we were pretty nervous about it. It was also the first time we recorded something like a live video. We recorded one of the shows during the regular Night At The Opera tour, and we also recorded the Wacken Open Air, but of course this was really special for us. It was a two day festival, and we headlined both days with different set lists, because we wanted to be able to film as many songs as possible, which was a good idea (laughs). And the fans decided the set lists; we had a vote going on on our homepage, and the fans chose the songs we were supposed to play those nights. And we had several bands playing with us, about 20, including Napalm Death, Soilwork, Rage, Subway To Sally, Primal Fear.

BLIND GUARDIAN - Feast Your Eyes! Page 3