HELLOWEEN - The Hellride Is Over... Page 4
By Martin Popoff

"I don't know, but there's one thing I always say. We have a huge musical background, so those bands that come up and try to copy us... I have nothing against those people because they make our way of music a very strong faction in rock, all over the world. See you can't easily circumvent this kind of music anymore, because obviously there's something good to it. So if you want to take the other originators of that field, like Rainbow or Judas Priest... Today you can say that this is possibly one optimum way of doing hard rock, heavy metal, heavy rock, whatever you want to call it. So that's why so many people feel affected by it. It means you're doing something right, so why change it, for God's sake? And even if you weren't entirely sure that it was the optimum way to make heavy metal, you could still do it; I mean, whether it's the optimum or not. It's just a matter of conviction, basically. If you don't have the conviction, you don't have to do it. Maybe you'd rather stay at home and take on a proper job or something. Anyway, what I think many of those bands lack is the musical background. Because look, I was spending time in front of the stereo equipment of my parents, which was tubes by the way. It even had an equalizer built in and everything was run by tubes; unbelievable. And I'd be changing radio stations, listening to everything. Sometimes they had to carry me to my bed because I'd overdone things a little bit and I lay on the ground shaking or hyperactive, hyperventilating and maybe dizzy. So it was too much and I would have to go to bed. But I did that more or less every day, except maybe not on the days when I felt bad like this. But I just ate and studied all that music and kind of fed all that info and input into myself. You can say that Andi is not exactly a guy who doesn't know much about music. We all have large backgrounds. It's also a matter of the time when we were raised. Because I think the '60s and '70s were exactly the best time to get the best musical input you can make use of later on in your own band. That doesn't mean you want to rip off things. It just means you know the right means of doing music, because you've been around when it all happened. And so, for those young bands, it's not exactly an easy thing to come up with, because obviously they've been raised in a lot more boring times. And this is why many say that Helloween is possibly the best thing they can imagine. But there's a lot more to music than just Helloween, excuse me (laughs)."