Interview Moonspell

Artiest: Moonspell

Geïnterviewden: Miguel Gaspar (drummer) & Pedro Paixão (keyboard)

Interview afgenomen op: Alcatraz Hard Rock & Metal Festival

Label: Napalm Records

The last time you were here at Alcatraz, you arrived just in time for the concert, was it less hectic now?

Last time here? We came straight from a flight from Portugal. We felt like we were sent from the plane to the stage.

Is Moonspell actually a festival band? Or do you rather prefer to play in dark clubs?

It’s always different. I think as a band we prefer the club shows. It’s a different kind of comfort. You get to improve every day, we are in a routine, we have a comfortable tour bus. I think that’s very important for bands to do amazing shows. The festivals are much more hectic. It’s like a birthday party, it’s very busy, there are a lot of people, you just have no control over it. So I think we are more a club show band, but I also think we look even better on a bigger stage. Because I think we actually fulfill the stage quite well.

In November your new album will come out. It's called 1755, referring to the Great Lisbon Earthquake in that year. How did you come to that?

Maybe Fernando was walking on the street and stepped on some stone and he thought about this... No, it’s a very interesting subject. This earthquake changed a lot how Portugal and even more countries started to think about religion and also they started to think about scientific things and even politics changed a lot in that time. So it was a natural event that actually happened on the first of November and everything was very special, that was the moment when the church lost at least half of the power that they had. It’s a very interesting subject which encloses a lot of different subjects like politics and philosophy, belief, faith. All these matters were very interesting to work on. We actually started to work on it after a song that we did for Alpha Noir, a Portugese song. The whole album is in Portugese.

Did you do a lot of research on that?

We met with people who did studies on earthquakes, we really went deep. We also have friends that know the subject and they have been telling us things as well. For example many people died and they didn’t have enough space to bury them, so they did that in shifts, they even just dropped them into the ocean, a lot of bodies tossed down from the rocks. It’s a part of Portuguese history, but the story itself is really interesting We looked at it as a story as well.

Lisbon was like a hub for people to trade, it was very rich and afterwards it was really chaos. It needed time to get back on its feet. The streets are now wider, they needed to reconstruct. If you go to Porto, you see that everything there is more original.

There were also very interesting things like the churches were higher than all the other buildings. After the earthquake they decided that churches didn’t have to be the highest. So we see how the mentality changed.

Will it be again a more heavier album, or more back to a softer gothic sound, or both?

Compared to the previous album, Extinct was basically almost like all the time singing. It’s not very heavy, well still a heavy sound but not really a really heavy album like parts of Night Eternal or Memorial. But this one is again a bit heavier, I think so. We also went back to some of the earlier influences that we use in our music from back in time, like African, Indian. In Portugal we had these influences from all these other countries.

There is also a new dvd coming up if we heard correctly. Can you elaborate on that?

It was recorded in the beginning of the year in February. We recorded three albums live, Wolfheart, Irreligeous and Extinct. It was a long process, with all the camera people, the studio, … It were many weeks of preparation. Of course those days we have 4000 people to play for but somehow it felt like we were doing a video. We had to maintain that energy to perform. But we’ve seen some images and sound end everybody is very exciting about it. It will only come out next year. Nice venues as well, a bull fight arena! But no bulls and no fight, haha.

You will be playing on the new Swamp stage in the tent. Do you think that is a better place to perform than in daylight on an open stage?

I vote for yes, definitely. We can do a light show, we can use smoke machines. We will play Irreligeous entirely. Tents are really in the middle. You get a big stage but it’s like a club, that’s a good thing for Moonspell. At Graspop we always play in a tent, in front of 10.000 people or something. It’s amazing, you really feel like you are close to them but it’s massive.

What do you prefer; playing together with bands that are close to the genre of your band, or playing with bands that are quite different from each other but attract a various crowd.

In the beginning we liked bands closer to ourselves like Type O Negative, Anathema, even if our first tour was with Morbid Angel which is a more extreme band compared to us. These days it’s becoming harder to find bands like us, into our genre so that became more complicated. But there are always bands to tour with, we have so many friends and finally after a couple of years we can start touring with them. But sometimes they put us in the middle of different genres, With Full Force festival for example which is mostly hardcore bands. We as Moonspell were just in the middle, or sometimes it’s just black metal bands and they put Moonspell in between. Sometimes we can cross over to many genres, like the gothic fans like us as well. How many metal bands can do gothic festivals? In ’98 or ’97 we actually had a summer full of festivals, but mainstream festivals. But we had this kind of music then that made it possible to do that. We can play anywhere.

In the past, you have done a collaboration with Anneke van Giersbergen, for Scorpion Flower. Would you think about doing a similar collaboration in the future?

We would love to! Anneke is invited into the band officially, totally, haha. If she wants to join us, she can come. We are such big fans of Anneke. We toured with The Gatering in ’96 or something like that and ever since that we’ve been good friends with her, fans of her voice. She’s one of the brightest people that I know, she just has this light around her, I don’t know, when she sings like a goddess, it’s perfect.

As a final question we’d like to get a view on the Portuguese metal scene. As you are all coming from Portugal, when you look back to your beginning years with Moonspell, how would you describe your evolution in your own country? And how did metal in general evolve there?

I think it changed a lot. Compared to when you come to Germany or Belgium or Holland, there is still a huge lack. Things have changed since we have internet now. Back then all was difficult, find instruments, play it, record. But now all is much easier. Now there is the first generation that has music in its full power, they have access to everything. So they learn how to play, there are bands that can play now in Portugal. But the thing is, in creativity they are not very original. I think that’s where we are behind. You can find really competent bands out there, not that often, not like in Germany or probably Holland and such. But it’s the creativity that I think we miss the most. There are original bands, yes, more than in the past, but it should be even more at this moment. But there is a lot of motivation to do it.

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