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There's
many who say the internet has been the death of decent rock music,
however for Eden's Curse the internet was actually a blessing from the
gods that brought lead singer Michael Eden and songwriter/bass guitarist
Paul Logue together to create a band that have caused not only ripples
of excitement amongst the AOR and Hard Rock community, but bloody big
tsunamis with their debut album 'Eden's Curse'.
Today we catch up with this extremely charming and very entertaining duo
to find out more about the guys, the band and the music behind Eden's
Curse.
MM
- Welcome back guys and apologies for cutting you off! (In
true blonde style I'd accidentally cut the guys off seconds into
the interview. Oh crumbs!)
Ok, let’s start at the very beginning, how did Eden’s Curse
come into being?
Paul –
Well actually we landed in a space ship from the planet Zorg and
we noticed the way the rock world was looking so Mike and I went
back to planet Zorg and got a couple of others to join us.
No, I’ll start that one again!
(Did I mention as well as being extremely talented, these
guys also have a very wicked sense of humour?)
One of
the first guys to come on board was Carsten Schulz, who
suggested we contacted a guy he was managing at the time called
Thorsten Koehne. We did and Thorsten became our guitar
player soon after. I’d previously been on the same label
as Pete Newdeck and we’d always agreed to work together if
something
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came up, so I gave Pete a call and he was in straight away.
This took place over the course of about three weeks and by the
middle of January, the four of us began to play together and
eventually we had most of the songs for the album ready.
By the middle of February we had the whole album written and so
we started recording straight away. |
We’d always planned to use
a keyboard player as well and by this time we had to start moving very
quickly. Once again Carsten, who seems to have this huge diary of
fabulous musicians we could just call upon, suggested Ferdy Doernberg.
Michael’s a huge supporter of Axel Rudi Pell and he already knew how
great this guy would be. So we called Ferdy and he joined us.
I guess that's in a nutshell how we got all together!
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MM - Your debut album
'Eden's Curse' is pure hard rock. Was this the road you wanted to
go down from the beginning, or it was it more organic that just
developed along the way?
Mike – Well that’s a tough one to answer because when Paul first
wrote back to me I was seriously thinking about doing something a little
funky, or maybe something like Simon and Garfunkel … and if you buy
that ... (That mischievous streak I
mentioned earlier is now in full flow with more merriment and mirth than
a Lambrini fuelled hens night).
No, seriously we both have the same kind of influences and grew up
listening to the same kind of music. We thought that most of that
music still stood up strong today, so we decided that hard rock was
definitely the way to go. Paul wrote these incredible songs and
sent them my way and I put my stamp of approval on them. They then
went out to everybody else to listen to. I think there was only
one song out of maybe forty that we weren’t sure on.
Paul has loads of songs kicking about, he writes songs nearly every day,
he’s amazing. In fact I think by this point he’s probably
written the third album already. But it was always going to be
hard rock right from the very beginning.
I had thought of joining Journey and becoming Neal Schoen’s puppet,
it’s true, I want to be a puppet and be told what to do. Paul
has told me right from the start that he won’t make me a puppet,
he’s rather have it that we were buddies and we do this the right way.
I'd told him I’d always had this thing, it’s like a childhood dream
where I wanted to be a puppet and have like strings that people would
pull, and these people would just tell me what to do. It’s true!
It’s always easier to work somebody when you're just be told what to
do, and when the pay checks a good one ... Unfortunately the pay check
is never quite that good though, even as a major label band.
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(That
last statement made me laugh because being a fellow regular on
the MR forum I have seen many posts from both Paul and Michael
and I know that Michael in particular is renown for his very
passionate views on the scene. The idea of someone who
fights so hard to support the scene and right the wrongs
throughout the industry wanting to be anyone's puppet just
doesn't sit with me).
MM
– That makes me laugh Mike because I’ve seen some of your
posts on the Melodic Rock forum and there’s no way you're a
puppet!
Mike – Oh whoah!
You’ve seen of my stuff on there?
MM – Yes, I’ve seen some of your stuff
on there.
Mike – Hey I’m a really
nice guy, honest! I am a beautiful person, I have a
beautiful heart and I just absolutely adore Andrew McNeice.
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| (Mike
is indeed a very big supporter of Andrew McNeice and the work he
does to support the scene, so much so that's he's been helping
Andrew right from the very beginning to promote the Melodic Rock
10th Anniversary show in South Bends, USA). |
Paul – I’d like to
clarify something to you Linda, something that happened with another
earlier band that I was in. I was about to get married and my wife
actually lived quite far away from where we were living, so I had to
move away and took a kind of 2 year hiatus from the band. I said
to the other guys ..."do me proud, go and do something, go and get
the record out there" ... I came back two years later to find
that they’d done nothing and that kind of feeling really disappointed
me.
I was actually still working on some stuff with this previous band when
Michael and I got together. I don’t think I had truly realised
until I hooked up with Mike that he was a guy that shared the same
commitment and passion that I had. My other band members just
didn’t have that at all. It was all very frustrating so when I
met Mike and we got together and started to plan out the things that we
wanted to do, we were basically like a couple of excited school kids.
We both sat down and said who would we like to produce the record, to
which we both said Dennis Ward, so we got him on board and working with
him was absolutely fantastic. Then we decided to sign with AFM and
here we are now, probably four weeks after the release of the album and
I think it’s a tribute to us all that we’ve managed to achieve all
this.
MM
- The album brings a lot of different influences into the mix,
do you think this is because of the varied talent within the
band?
Paul – Well I think that
there’s certainly an element of that because something like
98-99% of the music we’ve written has actually come from
myself. Certainly I am influenced by the bands I grew up
with in the 80’s, but I'm also influenced by the bands I came
across later on when I discovered the whole European genres with
bands like Pink Cream 69, Evidence One and Edguy. Bands
like Queensryche have also influenced. So they have all
been the main influences that have all given me the ideas of how
I would want the album to sound and the lyrical content. |
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I think Thorsten in
particular has brought forward some great guitar playing in the
vein of Paul Gilbert and Yngwie Malmsteen. He plays in
that kind of style, but mostly I would say the writing has been
shared between Michael and myself. In a number of reviews
we’ve had people comparing us to the likes of Bonfire, Fair
Warning and even Europe. Now I love Europe, but we just
don't hear those things in our music.
Mike – Yes, we both love all those bands, I think these
bands all have amazing singers, but really I’m just trying to
do what I do! Yet some people are coming up with these
really crazy off the wall comparisons. Maybe with Bonfire
it’s the guitars and because we’ve also got these driving
songs, but vocally I don’t think so.
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(We are briefly
interrupted as Michael has to take a call from the bands label in the
States. While Michael's chatting to them Paul and I discuss the
interview we did with him in his previous band way back in 2002.
Rather ironically we actually discussed the film 'Rock Star' during that
interview, the film that included the song 'We All Die Young' which
features on the new Eden's Curse album!).
Mike – I’m really
excited about this whole South Bends thing. I’ve been helping
out with a number of things and now I’m become involved in opening the
show! I’m going to go out and play a couple of songs in my
Eden’s Curse t-shirt and I’m going to be throwing cd’s and stuff
out. It’s going to be a great start to a great day. (It
has to be said Mike's enthusiasm for this Festival is second to none and
if he doesn't spontaneous combust before the day, I'm sure he really
will kick start the days events off big style).
MM - Any chance that we
might see Eden’s Curse hit the road in the not too distant future?
Paul – Well we are lucky to be signed
to a label that works hard to get it’s bands out on the road.
That was one of the reasons we signed to AFM Records in the first place.
We’d like to go out on tour so we'll have to see how things pan out.
We’ll definitely be playing some dates in support of the new album but
god knows where or when, although we have had a few tentative
discussions about the possibility of playing a couple of festivals next
year, so we shall have to see how it all works out. I guess it’s
a case of just watch this space. Mike – I’m watching
this space too! (Homing in on the
good humour these two guys have and the tremendous banter shown
throughout this interview I decide to move on to some lighter questions).
MM – OK, now I have a
fun question to ask you guys. If one morning you woke up and
discovered you’d changed into a woman over night, what would you do
for the next 24 hours?
Mike – I guess I would like to
attempt to get into the minds of all these record people who think it's
fine to mess with bands. Well you know quite a few of these guys
think they are ladies men, so as a women it would be cool to just walk
up to these guys and say ... "hey I'm in this band" ... then
just as I had them hooked, poof! all of a sudden I wouldn’t be a woman
any longer and I’d have this baseball bat in my hand.
I wouldn’t go whoring around the streets or stuff like that, I’d be
a classy lady. If I could turn myself into somebody then I’d
like to know why people do the things they do. I have to say I
think that is one of the craziest most insane questions I have ever been
asked to answer!
MM – What would you say
your motto in life would be?
Paul – Basically I would say my motto
in life would be one of Ted Nugent's line’s ... "Whenever you
find success you will make false friends and many enemies easily"
...
Mike – I would say that if someone knocks you down don’t get
discouraged just start over. When you get knocked down and hurt in
life you may feel that you have failed, but you only failed if you
don’t get back up after you've knocked down.
MM – Thanks again guys
for taking the time out to chat to us today and to close off this
interview, do you have any final words for all our readers out there?
Paul – Well I’d like to say thank
you on behalf of all the readers that go on The Mayfair Mall to you
Linda for running such a great site. I’ve read it for absolutely
years and I think it’s fantastic.
Mike – Yes I can confirm he’s not kidding!
Paul – I know you’re doing this totally off your own back and
I know we don’t get paid glorious amounts of money for doing these
things. We get exactly the same deal as hard core melodic rock
fans.
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One
of the first things we wanted to do when we first got together
was to write an album that we as fans would absolutely want to
hear and buy. I think I speak for both Michael and myself
when I say we’ve been kinda blown away by the reactions by the
reviewers.
I
don’t know how many reviews we’ve had so far, maybe around
50 or 60, but I’d like to say thank you to all the readers
because all I can do is write songs and play my guitar, but
without you I am nothing.
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Mike – Eden’s
Curse is a very special part of my life and we really appreciate all the
support everyone has given us. It’s good to know that people
actually get what we wanted to do. Andrew McNeice had the demo of
the record for six months and has really supportive towards us.
He’s a very special guy.
MM – Well we really appreciate all the
great songs you guys have put together on the new Eden’s Curse album
and we look forward to hearing lots more of it in future. We’re
also really looking forward to seeing you guys perform the songs live
too.
The band's debut album 'Eden's Curse' is available from AFM Records and
as I said earlier has blown the melodic rock/hard rock community away.
You can check out samples of the songs off the album and keep up to date
with those forthcoming tour plans by visiting the bands website www.edenscurse.com
and their MySpace website www.myspace.com/edenscurse
. Be sure to stop by and say hello while you're visiting. |