By Martin Popoff
With respect to the over-riding theme to the album, Andre indicates that the tale has relevance beyond science fiction. "Basically we wrote songs going from chapter to chapter in the book, The Martian Chronicles. Every song is based on a particular chapter. The start of it is The Mission, when the newcomers are coming to Mars. The whole book, in that sense, is about what people can bring to a different culture. It's not so much a science fiction than a conventional novel. You have a starting point where people are invading Mars, but it basically isn't that much about aliens and starships. It's more about the values that we bring into a new territory. It's actually very ugly (laughs)."
Although Andre is emphatic there won't be any bonus tracks in different territories for The Mission, due to its concept nature, there are a number of peripheral recordings floating around the new album like asteroids.
"Absolutely! Lots of them. First of all we released the Intervention maxi-single, exclusively in Japan. It's like a 20-minute long song which was made kind of like an introduction to The Mission. We released half of it, it's like Intervention Part I, and we included two live tracks from our Fear tour and one bonus track, which is kind of a bluesier thing. We have more live tracks from the last tour, and we re-recorded some of the older songs from the first, second and third albums. So we had five songs we just recorded all over again, rearranged them, with of course John (West, new vocalist, also on Fear) on vocals, and we're planning to release it someday, probably after the tour, maybe around Christmas."
ROYAL HUNT - On A Mission To Mars Page 3