Intervju - Blaze Bayley, Blaze



Blaze Bayley: Hi, this is Blaze Bayley of Blaze.

Mikael: Hi.



BB: Happy Birthday!

M: Thanks. How did you know that?

BB: I have special powers.



M: All right! How are things with you?

BB: Oh, terrible. I have the flue. A really bad flue so I have to speak as quietly as I can and drink lots of water, you know just stay quiet.



M: Did you get the flue here in Sweden?

BB: No, it was the end of the British tour, so hopefully I have got rid of the worst of it tomorrow.



M: Nice to talk to you again, I did an interview with you last spring, just when you had released As Live As It Gets. You have a new album out now, Blood & Belief, and I believe you said in the last interview that you were going to record the new album live in the studio. Have you done that?

BB: What we done was to get as close as we can to that live recording, so we got the songs, the lyrics and the arrangements all finished before we went to the recording studio. And we rehearsed the whole album as if we were going to do a live gig and play the album live. So we got a sense how all the songs fitted together and what the shape of the album would be. And then we recorded it very quickly, we didn't worry to much about being perfect, or exact or precise we just thought do this feel good? Did we get it right? Does it fell good, than that's enough, lets move on. We tried to keep as much of the energy and emotion, that raw edge from those first few takes, the excitement and I think it worked out really well, because it sounds very different to what we done before, but it still got the classic edge of the two strong lead guitars, a strong lead vocal that carry the melody.



M: Were all the songs written before you entered the studio?

BB: Yeah, more or less completed, just one or two odd words here and there. But they were mostly written and arranged so we just rehearsed and rehearsed. When we came to the studio we knew exactly what we were doing. We tried to keep things simple as well, not complicated. We were asking us self all the time; does this feel good? Is this what the song need? Does this tell the story? Does it stay true to the idea we originally had?



M: I think it is an amazing album, in my opinion it's the best album you ever released from Wolfsbane to Iron Maiden to Blaze.

BB: Thank you very much.



M: Were there any songs from the sessions that didn't make it to the album?

BB: No. The way we wrote it this time with the three main writers, which is myself, Steve Wray and John Slater and we just sat down together and we worked on one or two thinks and then they would leave me with rough demos of guitar parts and I worked on them with my lyrics and melodies and then we got back together and see how we felt about things. Because it was only the three of us it was a bit more focused we didn't go into so many you know silly places. We just tried to make an album full of metal, full of music that we like. That's why it worked. We said at the start, lets try to keep this very simple, I'm really pleased with it, I was unsure because it was so different to the first two studio albums, but I loved the sound of it.



M: What I like most about it is that the lyric is a bit more personally.

BB: Yeah, it's quite emotionally.



M: Especially "Life and Death", it's my favorite for the moment.

BB: Great.



M: Is it only you who write the lyrics?

BB: All the lyrics are mine.



M: Which lyric from the album are you most satisfied with?

BB: I like them all you know, because I really feel proud of everything I have done, I did it completely for myself, and I wrote for myself. Steve Wray and myself did compose I bit during the tours of last year and he said; perhaps it's time to start thinking about writing a bit more about the way you really feel instead of disguising your feelings behind a character. So I certainly listened to what he said, and maybe it's time to be really honest about the way I feel and about how I think about things. I think everybody shares dark times and feel depressed about things and everybody has times when they feel aggressive and want to fight back, so perhaps it's easy for people to identity with the lyrics. But I think that the lyrics that I like the most, maybe not the best ones, however you quantify that in a record like this, is "Hollow Head". It's funny and it tells a story of me going to a psychiatrist who tells me how stupid I am sometimes, and completely denying the truth of the situation. It came from a poem I had written and I read it to Steve and he said; yeah I liked that. He came up with this really wacky guitar part and it just went together straight away, that's the one that really make me smile every time I listen to the record.



M: I believe that some of the songs on the album deal with your alcoholism.

BB: Yeah, I have had some massive problems. The police phoned my wife and said; we have a man unconscious on the street and we think it is your husband. After that I had to take a pretty hard look at my life, and think why is that happen? Something inside my made me want to drink myself unconscious to the point of oblivion. My wife forced me to go to the doctor, I did go to the doctor and did all this tests and the doctor said; well, basically you suffer from clinical depression. I just thought I was moody or had a bad temper or something like this, but I suffer from depression, and that's a thing that's happened to me in my whole adult life. I didn't know what depression was, but now I think, ok so that's that feeling, now I am aware of that sneaking up on me, I am aware of that ugliness and that darkness trying take a hold of me and my life. With medication and with seeing a psychiatrist and things like that, I have been able to live a much more satisfied life, I have been a lot more happier and spend less time drunk and more time sober and working on the music and the things that I love, but unfortunately my marriage didn't survive. I survived it, I healed but the marriage didn't.



M: I'm sorry.

BB: Yeah, it's a shame really. You know these things happen. I met Angry Anderson from Rose Tattoo and he said exactly the same thing, he said his wife had forced him to go see canceling for his bad temper and he changed and changed as a person, he changed so much that his marriage felt to pieces. And that was exactly what happened to me, I changed, instead of being so materialistic and such an arsehole all the time, I was just interested in things that I cared about, I wasn't interested in being famous or being a rockstar, I only cared about the really important things, I really love singing, and I love singing this music, I really don't care about being famous or anything like that. I'm not the best singer in the world, but I just love to sing this music, and that is what I live for really.



M: Are you totally sober now or do you enjoy a beer now and then?

BB: What I do now, I got people around me who help me, I'm just really sensible, I have one or two beers here and there, but that's it. I never touch hard drugs or anything like that.



M: It must be really hard because drinking and drugs is a part of the rock life, if you want it or not.

BB: When I get the band together I said no hard drugs, because it is supposed to be about the music, about to be a great musician and to perform to your absolute best every night, no matter if you are in front of 50 people or 5000 or 50 000. It is supposed to be about being a great musician not about going to a great party all of the time, you suppose to do it because you love the music and you love performing for the fans, not so you can get drunk every night, so that's the attitude I started with, but of course you know, I didn't realize I suffered from this depression, and now when I do, my life seems to make a lot more sense and a lot of that is in the lyrics of the album, it's the sober positive me, talking to that negative, drunken me that is in denial. A large part of the album is a conversion between these two parts of my character.



M: Which song from the new album is most enjoyable to perform live?

BB: I think "Ten Seconds" so far, We got about six new songs in the set and "Ten Seconds" goes down great, so does "Blood And Belief", they all go down absolutely great.



M: "Blood And Belief" is a great song.

BB: Yeah, it's so difficult to sing though. It's a very challenging song.



M: Do you perform "Tearing Myself To Pieces"?

BB: Yeah, we do that one as well.



M: That's one of my favorites. But now when you have three Blaze albums, do you still have space to include some Iron Maiden and Wolfsbane songs? BB: We try to. I'm proud of my past and was I come from and all the songs I wrote with Wolfsbane and with Iron Maiden, but we want to focus on the new material and the new album. We are so exited about it, we love all the songs and we just want to play them. People know me from the Iron Maiden years and from the Wolfsbane years, each tour I try to play a different song that people haven't heard for a while. On this tour we are doing "Virus" from the Best of The Beast Album. On the tour before we did "Man On The Edge", so we change it round as much as we can.



M: You have two new members of the band now. A brand new rhythm section.

BB: Jason Bowld came in just for the record, because we didn't have a drummer at that time and I wanted someone with really great footwork, for the double bas parts and I asked Andy Sneap if he knew anybody and he said; I think this guy is the best. He was really excited and really solid. He made the songs come to life and Wayne Banks had done some live shows with us during the years, if you can imagine musicianship of Steve Harris with the attitude with Sid Vicious that's our bas player Wayne.



M: That sounds very interesting.

BB: That's mad.



M: Does this feel like it is the line-up?

BB: Well, I am hoping that this is it. I hope that this line-up is going to stay together. So far it feels good, we were a bit shaky at first with all the new songs but it is getting better and better. Last night (Helsingborg) was absolutely fantastic, I had the flue, my voice was bad, but with the third number we were on fire, I loved every minute of it.



M: You were once new in a band, Iron Maiden, did you learn anything from that experience now when you have two new guys in your band?

BB: Yeah, I suppose. A lot of the feelings I had back then were really uncomfortable, because Iron Maiden was a really big band. I try to keep it with my band to try to be a bit more human about things and basically just have a good time. As long as everybody understands that the single most important thing is the music and doing the best possible show you can for the fans, then that's it. To be doing this and make a living of it is fantastic. Whenever a new person comes in to the band we just try to make them feel comfortable, we all been there, don't worry too much. I'm really proud that the fans we have are so supportive and loyal. It's incredible.



M: How is Andy Sneap as a producer?

BB: He is quite tuff, but we didn't take too long in the studio. We put most of the time in the rehearsals. I really don't enjoy being in the studio, every time I been in a studio I found it an ordeal, from the first album to this one. Once I been in the studio for a week I have had enough.



M: But what do all these bands do when they say that they have been in the studio for a year?

BB: I think they have been picking their nose; it's a load of bollocks to me. I hate it, absolutely hate it. The best album we made was the live album, As Live As It Gets, it took two hours to record, a lot of rehearsals, a lot of planning, but the basic recording took two hours. And to me, that's brilliant. When we were planning the Blood & Belief album, then I said, I want the same as the live album, it doesn't have to be perfect and Andy said, make sure that everything is ready when you come to the studio, and that worked out.



M: Ok, what book is you currently reading?

BB: Stupied White Men am I reading for the moment.



M: Michael Moore.

BB: Yeah, I would advise everyone to read it.



M: I read Macbeth after I spoke to you last time.

BB: Did ya? Brilliant. Do you know what happened today? They put me in this hotel in Helsingborg, and Hamlets castle is over there. And I go wow, but I am stuck in this hotel doing all these bloody phone interviews. "Yeah, you can get a boat trip," No, I can't can I. Its going to fucking dark before I am finished with this lot.



M: Well, I won't hold you any longer then, I hope your flue gets away so you can get well. Nice talking to you and I wish you all the best.

BB: And you, happy birthday.

M: Thanks.



Blaze - Official website


< Tillbaka