MM -
Firstly thanks for taking time out from you busy schedule to do this
interview.
Lahannya - It's a
pleasure Barry.
MM - How has the
tour been going so far?
Lahannya - At
Stockton we had a bit of a shock when we found out they only had a four
channel mixing desk so that required quite a bit of improvising there.
Newport was crazy, I just have to say the Welsh just are a really weird
bunch but they do know how to party. They appear really scary but
they are very friendly. London was a record six bands in four and a half
hours and it ran on time as well. That was absolutely incredible and it
was the hottest day of the year so far and the venue was boiling, so
we’ve had it all we had the strange, the unexpected and the great,
it's been really really good. That’s touring!
MM - Absolutely
you can’t plan everything you try as much as you can but there’s
always a surprise waiting for you around the corner.
MM - After the tour you have a short break before a few European
festival dates. Do you do anything differently when preparing for
the festivals rather than the tours?
Lahannya - Yes,
the first festival is on Monday 1st of June. It's the world's
largest Gothic festival in Leipzig. We’re playing an
amphitheatre that holds around 3,000 people so I’m really looking
forward to that. Then we're playing the headline slot on a Polish
festival in North Poland it’s called the Mrock Fest, and we’ve just
got conformation that were also playing a festival in September.
My band are already starting to laugh at me because where ever I drag
myself along there always seems to be a little unusual. The one in
September is called the “Elf Fantasy Festival”. It's about
20,000 people who descend on this castle somewhere along the border
between Holland and Germany, it's in Holland and 90% of them dress like
elves and orcs and fairies, medieval warriors and I think this is the
first time they’ve had rock bands playing. They normally have
Medieval Bands playing but this year they have Tarja headlining,
they’ve also got Qntal, Elane and us. Then we're rounding the
festival season off with the Metal Female Voices Festival in Belgium.
MM - Yes I'm familiar
with that festival but not the Elf Fest.
Lahannya - Elf
Fest is hot off the press, I only got conformation yesterday so you’re
the first to hear about it officially.
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MM
- 'Welcome to the Underground' EP was well received by the
media, do you have any news on the new album?
Lahannya
- It’s almost finished. All the songs are written, half
of them are recorded and the second half is half recorded and in
various stages of being recorded and finalised. It's kind of
like of a continuation of the 'Welcome To The Underground' EP in
terms of style, but obviously it won't have the re-mixes on
there because they were just for the EP. So it’s quite
rocky, certainly it’s the darkest most aggressive release
we’ve done so far and I’m really loving it. There’s
some fantastic new tracks on there and we’ve been playing some
live as well. It's been really exciting to get the
reactions, there’s one song in particular called ‘Dying
Inside’ and everybody seems to really, really like it.
MM - When do
you write your material do you set out days or sessions or do
you just jot down ideas when and where they arrive?
Lahannya
- It depends, sometimes we do set out and say lets try and work
on a new track today, there’s two of us who write myself and
Lutz who plays bass. Lutz kind of works like that, he sits
down and say’s I’m gonna work on a
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| new
track, and we talk about what do we want from this new track,
should it be fast, should it be slow, what should it be about
... you know a rough subject area and a topic that is should be
about. Then he works with the drum rhythms, tempos and put
a bit of bass to it and some guitars. But I work
differently, sometimes I’m physically in the same location as
him in the studio with him in Germany and sometimes I’m back
home in the UK. So I’m not there when he’s playing
around with things, so when I’m in the studio I kind of like
to be in the same room so I have much bigger input into how the
songs is developing. I write the vocals and the vocals
lines as we go along, and they then influence in turn how the
guitar sound should be, what the rhythms do and if I come up
with a vocal line that has a certain rhythm then he can change
what he does with the bass. If I’m in UK and he’s
worked on a track in Germany in his studio he sends me a rough
copy of what he’s done and I take this in my studio and play
around with it and then record different ideas and then I send
it back to him. He then works on it so it's sent back and
forth, and sometimes with bits of melody they just happen, if
I’m walking along and a rhythm comes into my head then I
record it to my mobile phone and work on it later in the studio. |
MM - Where do you take
your experience from?
Lahannya -
Well I think the first album ‘Shot Gun Reality’ was definitely based
on things going on in my life, emotions that I was feeling and emotions
my friends were feeling. Issues that were affecting people around
me. But since the EP 'Welcome To The Underground' we have
basically started writing songs based around a future world, a brave new
Britain so to speak, where surveillance technology have taken the upper
hand and we're not free to live the lives we want to and basically the
songs are about a small group of rebels who have decided they don’t
want to be a part of this surveillance technology. We want to
fight this and are drawn into the underground and fight back at the
system. There are still stories and songs about emotions and everyday
situations but I write them where I put my self into that scenario.
MM - Like a concept album?
Lahannya - Yes and I like writing that way because I make it very
creative. You're not struggling to snap stories or emotions out of
your fingers, you can actually put yourself into this persona and really
feel what would you do in that situation.
MM - A sort of third person thing?
Lahannya - Kind of, but the characters that are in this particular
world in the back of my mind that I’m writing about are based on me
and the band and people that I know, so it's not particularly third
person, it's what if we were five years into the future and this is the
world we live in, how would we react, what would we do, how would we
deal with the situation.
MM - Are still DJ-ing at Slimelight in London.
Lahannya - I haven’t been around London club scene for the last
year, because I’ve been so busy with touring writing the new album and
stuff and because I run the label. But recently I did some DJ-ing
in April, that was really nice. I didn’t realise how much I
missed it. I’ll be DJ-ing on Monday when we are playing at the
festival and I’m hoping to return to Slimelight maybe every month or
every six weeks.
MM - The whole
Goth and Alternative scenes seem pretty far out to some, what attracts
you to that whole scene, is it the individuality of it all?
Lahannya - In the UK I don’t really see us a Goth band even
though I DJ at Slimelight and enjoy being there. We seem to fall
more into the Alternative Rock genre so every city we played has been
very different. In Birmingham for example we played in a Rock Club
and there was a rock audience, then in Glasgow the same thing we played
in a rock club and had a very rock audience. Then on the other
hand we played club nights in Leeds, we played the Black Sheep night,
that was the Gothic night. It really varies and also it depends on
who your playing with.
I mean in 2007 we played
with this crazy Japanese girl called Moon Kana, she’s is this J Rock
kind of princess of Japan. She’s twenty-seven and looks like
she’s seven. She sings about bunnies and chocolate and she’s
got this really heavy Metal band from France behind her. She sings
with this rather unusual voice and when we were touring with her, we had
all these fifteen year old girls in the audience, well they looked
fifteen wearing these sort of Lolita type outfits, so that was kind of
unusual and then we obviously played with Emile Autumn and there we had
that Gothic Lolita look. A lot of Metal people like Emile Autumn
and Sonic People so it really varies, and I like the fact that we can go
to a city and the audience is very, very diverse and it’s not just a
small scene that accepts us, but a much wider range of people, it's been
just great.
MM
- Have you tried out some of the new material on this tour?
Lahannya - Yes, last year when we played live in September
and October, we already played two songs from the album live and
they went down really really well. One is one of my
personal favourites, it's called 'Our War’. It's quite
an aggressive song and I love singing it live. This time
we're doing 'Our War' again and three other new songs,
especially ‘Dying Inside’, that has been a favourite of
everybody. You never know how things are gonna come about
because I thought ‘Interference’ and ' Brave New World', the
two other new songs we play would be more popular, but 'Dying
Inside’ is the one that everyone says is brilliant, so it's
great for us to know that.
MM - Apart from the festival dates any other plans for the
rest of the year?
Lahannya - Well we definitely be playing another UK tour in
November. One date has already been booked Wednesday 25th
November in London at the Purple Turtle and were busy putting
dates around that, we’ll definitely be playing Sheffield, |
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| Glasgow
and Leeds and I’d like to include Newcastle, Liverpool and
maybe something around the Bristol or Cardiff areas, but the
exact details I don’t know yet. We have a few more weeks
to sort all those out and hopefully we may also return to
Germany in November for a few dates, or maybe play another tour
in the new year. |
MM - So what are there
differences between the European fans and the UK fans, if there are any
differences?
Lahannya - The
only thing that’s springs to mind in that the hardcore fans that
travel far to see us, is than in the UK they seem to be male and Germany
they are female. I don’t know if that’s pure coincidence or
what but the ones that contact us through MySpace and Facebook and want
to run the street teams or do photo projects about our band they are
female in Germany and in the UK they are male, that’s the only
difference I see.
MM - When I looked at the website I noticed that the band always seem
busy.
Lahannya - No rest for the wicked and I must have been very, very
wicked.
MM - Do you have a release date for the new album yet?
Lahannya - Still working it out but it will be released in the week
of the Metal Female Voices festival. I always get this confused
because the release dates for Germany are on a Friday and the UK is on a
Monday, so in the UK it will be either the Monday before Female Voices
or the Monday after.
MM - Well I just like to say thank you Lahannya for taking time out
from the tour to chat with us, you're playing Manchester tomorrow I
believe?
Lahannya - Yes, we're having a barbeque beforehand with our friends
for Dionysus who are playing with us. We’ve decided to meet up
at a truck stop somewhere outside Manchester and have a barbeque, so
it’ll be good.
MM - Any last words for our readers and your fans?
Lahannya - Big thank you to everyone who came out to see us and
supported us through the years and who will becoming to our future shows
and we look forward to seeing them.
MM - We'd like to
thank Lahannya for taking the time out to chat with us today and wish
her and the rest of the band every success with their music and
touring.. |