Sargant Fury
If You Want Something Done, Do it Yourself

02.05.2011

Singer Andrew McDermott is no stranger to the metal crowd, as he was a singer for Britain’s premier progressive metal band Threshold for nearly 10 years. In addition, he has collaborated with Yargos and is now a frontman for power metal supergroup Powerworld. However this interview is mostly about the singer’s early bands, German melodic metallers Sargant Fury. For many years the band was nearly forgotten, but in 2009 its three albums were reissued, and we figured out we should contact Andrew (or simply Mac, as he used to call himself back in the day) and ask him a few questions aboutr that particular stage of his career.

Like I previously said, this interview will be about Sargant Fury.

It’s fine. (laughs) It’s a little bit strange but yeah, sure! But why exactly Sargant Fury?

When I heard this band for the first time, I was surprised, because it’s a very good band, it’s beautiful music, but it seems that nobody knows this band!

Oh, yeah! It’s very underground. We had fans in Germany, but outside of Germany, Holland Switzerland and Austria, the main countries, not a lot of people have heard it.

Please, tell me how did it all start to you – why did you decide to be a singer?

You don’t decide on these things, it decides for you. I’ve sung all my life since I was a child. At the age of 13 I started a band with a friend. Then we stopped doing this, and then we met up again when we were 17 or 18, and then we started another band. Once you’ve started it, I think it’s in your blood.

Who was you main influence at that time?

At the very beginning it was Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, then Paul Rodgers of Free and Bad Company, then a lot of AOR bands like Foreigner and Journey, but also there was Sensational Alex Harvey Band, quite a lot of things… There wasn’t really one main influence. I listened to a lot of Black Sabbath when I was a kid as well, AC/DC… But there wasn’t one main influence, I took my favorite bits from my favorite singers.

What can you say about your early bands Renegade, Eliminator and Mr. President?

(surprised) How do you know about them? (laughs) From the Internet?

Yes, from Wikipedia.

Of, somebody put a Wikipedia site up about me, I don’t know who did that! Strange! (laughs) OK, there was Harvest, Renegade, and Mr. President. Harvest – strangely enough, I now have a new band with the guitarist from Harvest. Harvest were my school friends, we’d been friends since we were children. We are called Swampfreaks, and the guitarist is from Harvest. And Renegade was the next version of Harvest, and that sort of fell through. With Mr. President we got very close to getting a deal with major label, but everybody was young and it was difficult to get people to take the risk and go for the music full time, which is one of the reasons why I left England and came to Germany to join Sargant Fury. They showed real potential, they were really into their music, and you knew that they were good, and they were trying very hard, which was lacking at that time with the bands in England. But we were doing some pretty good stuff - I was talking to the guitarist from Mr. President not long ago on Facebook, he was trying to find the old demo tapes (laughs). If he finds it, he’s gonna send me some across. He said they lurk down in the cellar.

My next question is about your decision to move to Germany…

As I said, I decided to do it because of the commitment from the band. I got a tape from some band called Desert Rain in Hannover. A friend of mine named Sean (Taylor) used to play drums in Mr. President and he was also in the band Pariah (aka Satan), which was, I suppose, speed metal. They were signed to a record company in Hannover, and he brought a tape across. I heard the tape, it was without any vocals and I wrote the vocals in about two days, booked a flight and flew across to Germany. I rehearsed with the band for a week, decided it was OK and went back to England. I sold what little things I had, it wasn’t very much (laughs), and then came back to Germany with exactly 87 Deutschmarks in my pocket – that all I had when I came to Germany. I didn’t know anybody, yeah, it was a big step, but music is the reason why I moved to Germany. Hannover at that time had a very big music scene. Scorpions, Victory, Thunderhead, all these bands were in Hannover at that time.

Who came up with an idea to use the title of a comic book as the band’s name?

Me! (laughs) Actually it was a combination of things. Like I said I was really big fan of the band called Sensational Alex Harvey Band, a Scottish band, and they have a song called “Sergeant Fury”. But the bass player from the band, Bauke, also read a lot of comics, he worked for a short time in a comics shop. It just developed from that, we looked for a name, I suggested that , and he was like, “Oh yeah, I read that comics!” So we took it from that, the only thing we changed was the spelling of Sargant Fury, we spelled it different, just in case of any royalty problems with the comics. That was basically my idea.

How did you get signed with major label WEA?

Yeah, it’s really complicated story. I don’t know whether you have heard about the German band Eloy…

Yes!

The singer and guitarist from Eloy, Frank Bornemann, owns a recording studio in Hannover, and also has a publishing company called Metal Media but he had links to Warner Chappell, which is which is the publishing side of WEA. So basically we got the deal with Warner Chappell first, the publishing deal, and then through the deal with Warner Chappell we got the deal with the record company. Most bands got a record company deal first and then the publishing deal, and we moved the other way round.

And why did this label drop the band after the second album (“Little Fish”, 1993)?

Actually we wanted to be dropped because the guy from the label who signed us – I cannot remember his name now –left the company just after he signed us and moved to a different company. That’s a really difficult situation to be in, because the other people in the record company, if they don’t sign the band themselves, they don’t work as hard for the band. We started to notice this during the touring in support of “Little Fish” - we had a chance to go on theGerman part of Metallica tour, which was a stadium tour, and then the guys from the record company turned up and said, “Yeah, it looks good on paper, but what does it achieve?” At this point I started to think they were crazy and said, “What the fuck do you mean ‘what does it achieve’? To play in front of 30,000-40,000 people every day – it achieves quite a lot, you fucking idiot!” We weren’t getting on very well with the company, so we asked them to let us leave and they said “No”, because, I think, we had a four-album deal. What we did was – we had to send demos of new songs all the time, and we just sent really bad demos! (everybody laugh) And then we got a letter one day saying, “Sorry, we can’t get no longer with this band”. They gave us 80,000 Deutschmarks and told us to go away, it worked out quite well!

What can you say about responses to your first album “Still Want More”? Don’t you think that such melodic heavy metal wasn’t very popular in the early 90’s?

I think the problem with Sargant Fury is that we came along about two years too late. If we’d been two years earlier it would have been a big difference in what happened with the band. When the early 1990s came along and people started slipping into this grunge and garage stuff and sort of shying away from mainstream melodic metal – and it’s not even metal, it’s rock/metal - it was a very difficult situation. Plus, it caused a hard time to the whole music business in Germany. Germany itself was also doing a hard time - when the Wall came down, basically it was a good thing but it meant a few hard years for Germany moneywise. People weren’t throwing the money around like they used to in the golden days. The funny thing was that every review, every article in every magazine or radio station – everything was good! Except the sales of the album which was hopping around OK, but nothing what the record company was expecting. And it’s frustrating for the band. And it’s strange – now since this guy in America released this new box with 3 CDs, and since with Internet things how many people get in touch now from all over the world – from Greece, from Australia, from Japan, they all go, “Oh yeah, Sargant Fury!”, even people from South America have been writing and saying how they remember this band – it should have been much bigger, but it wasn’t. But on the other side, I’m meeting Kai (Steffen), the guitarist, next week, and we’re gonna work on some new songs. Keep your ears open for some new Sargant Fury stuff!

(Regardless of this statement, no new Sargant Fury material has surfaced so far, and it is presently unclear whether any work is underway on this project.)

You worked together with producer Tommy Newton on “Still Want More” (1991). How substantial was his contribution to this album?

Actually we started this album with the guy called Wayne Ray Smith, an English guy, and Tommy came in the end to mix the album. The vast majority of the recording were done before Tommy came in, so he didn’t have that much to do with the first album, he did only had mixing, which – to be totally honest – I wasn’t really that happy with. I thought Tommy did it a bit too shiny, too glamorous, a bit too nice, which was also a problem because live the band was completely different, much harder. So when people came to see us live, they would found that the band’s much harder and more in your face than on the album. And that’s also why the second album sounds much harder than the first album.

Can you compare Tommy Newton and Charlie Bauerfiend, the producer with whom you worked on you second album?

Charlie is cool. Charlie is, in my opinion, one of the best producers in the world. It’s simply because he knows how to get the best out of people, he knows when to say “stop” and he knows when to say “start”. He really knows how to work people, to get them to do their best thing. But he’s hard, Charlie is a hard producer as well. (laughs) If you’re really bad, he tells you, “Fuck it, you’re really bad, go away, come back on a good day”. (laughs) But Charlie’s input is also very good. He doesn’t just sit there and let the band get on, he really puts a little bit of himself into the whole thing. Plus, it wasn’t just Charlie, we also had Sasha Paeth who is a brilliant musician and also a brilliant producer, so we didn’t have just one, we had two, which was a great thing. Plus, we worked in shifts in the studio, so during the day some people worked with Charlie, and in the evening we worked with Sascha, and this way we got a lot more done.

I agree that Charlie did a great job for Sargant Fury, but don’t you think that all albums he is producing now sound a little bit similar to each other?

It’s something that happens to certain studios and certain producers – when they do something to one band, then all these bands want a similar sound, they all want this guy to work for them. I don’t think it’s Charlie going out and looking for these bands, I just think Charlie’s known for getting bands to sound good, so these bands go looking for Charlie. But yeah, he’s been doing a lot of similar bands lately.

I mean, his work is still great but all the albums he is producing sound not like Helloween or Axel Rudi Pell, they sound more like the stuff produced by Charlie.

Possibly, yes, it could be. I don’t know, I haven’t seen Charlie for a long time. I’ve been thinking of giving Charlie a ring, I really like Charlie, but he’s hard to get in touch with, because he’s sometimes out of the country, and when he’s back, I go out of the country. It’s difficult when you’re a musician to meet with different people, to actually meet people, so I haven’t seen him for years. I think perhaps Charlie has started to put too much of his own thing into the bands.

What can you say about the shows with Sargant Fury? Did you play enough shows?

We played loads of shows with Sargant Fury! With the first two albums we were gigging all the time! We used to rehearse three to five times a week in the beginning, so we were really tight, and we just went out and gigged. It was good fun, we were a really good live band, because we knew our thing so well, we knew each other also well. Even when something went wrong… I remember once in Belgium when the electricity for the stage went off in the middle of the song, and we had to wait until the power went up, and when the power went back on, we started the song exactly where we finished! Without saying anything the whole band started exactly where we finished. The audience after that gig came in and said, “Hey, it was good trick with the lights going out”! But we said, “It wasn’t a trick, it was a fucking power cut!”

It shows your talent as musicians and great chemistry within the band!

Yeah, you know, we weren’t just a band, at the beginning we were really good friends with everybody as well. We hanged around together, it was more like a gang, we just happened to play music. Which is rare these days, it tends to be more like people meeting for an album and then going their separate ways and doing something else.

What can you say about the cover version of ABBA’s “Eagle” from “Little Fish”?

I still remember the day when Kai suggested it. We just came all the way back from the gig, I think it was a one-off gig, because we were in a minibus. And Kai turned around to me and said, “I wanna do a cover of an ABBA song” (laughs). And I was like, (in a greatly surprised voice) “OK… What’s the song?” He said “Eagle”, and I must admit that I said, “I’ve never heard the song”. But I had, I just thought that I’d never heard the song. And he said, “I’ve recorded it already on a four-track recorder with drum-machine”. Then somebody gave me the tape and I was like, “Yes, I know it!” It turned out that Kai used to be in the ABBA fan-club when he was young, but he was scared to tell people in the band, because he thought for some reason that we would laugh. So we tried it and it worked out really well. It still gets rave reviews, and a lot of people say it should have been a metal song from the beginning.

Why did bass player Bauke De Groot leave the band after “Little Fish”?

The band was starting to get tired of the whole music business. It’s always the same problem - when you get all these external problems, it tends to start rubbing the band members against each other. Bauke wanted to do heavier stuff, other people wanted to do this kind of stuff, and it was getting to the point when…I think the band in itself was a bit dislocated, nobody knew what exactly want to do, because we got so many good reviews, and we worked our fucking asses off pushing and trying to get the band further, and in such situations you tend to take it out on each other. It just got to the point where Bauke decided to leave for Hate Squad and we got Carsten (Rebentisch) who was a friend of Olaf (Grosser, guitars). But like I said, it wasn’t just the Bauke thing, I think we were just tired of the music business in general.

What do you think about Bauke’s new band Hate Squad? Do you like this kind of music?

(without hesitation) No. (everybody laughs) Everybody can have their own opinion, and I don’t really like that kind of music, sorry. I actually gave the singer singing lessons, I do studio coaching and vocal lessons as well now and again. So I gave the singer singing lessons so that he could do a little bit more singing and less of the growling. I’m a singer, so when I listen to stuff, I like to hear people sing, and what he does is more hardcore stuff, which is what my wife likes, and which my stepdaughter also likes. Some people like this stuff, some people don’t. I like to listen to classical music, other people don’t, they go, “What…?”

I agree once again because when I listen to the music I like to hear melodies more then screams or growls.

Yes! That’s also why I don’t like this power metal with this (sings in a very high-pitched voice) “Waaaaaah”. I don’t like this stuff either, it’s just craziness for me, that’s just people trying to play too many notes in the shortest time possible, and the singer trying to get higher and higher.

By the way, Dan Swano sang some growling parts with you on the “Dead Reckoning” album by Threshold. Do you like the result?

Yes, it’s OK. At that point I was considering leaving Threshold anyway, so I couldn’t really care less. But I think it fits in OK because it’s not the whole song or the whole album, it’s just a little part of the song, and I can accept that. He’s got a growling voice, but it’s a kind of soft growling voice, if you know what I mean.

Let’s go back to Sargant Fury for a while. On the third album, “Turn The Page” (1995), you changed your musical direction from melodic heavy metal to bluesy hard rock. Were your fans happy with these changes?

I think the earlier albums came a little bit too late, and “Turn The Page” was too early when we brought it out. People listen to “Turn The Page” now, which has a great sound, by the way. I don’t think we went bluesy, we went from typical twin guitar metal to rock, blues rock if you will, a lot more rocky kind of thing and not metal. We decided that it was time to change, so we went down, got some old bands’ old guitars in the studio and started recording. But Kai didn’t really like this, which is very strange, because Kai called me a few weeks back, like I said, and he’s doing exactly this kind of thing now. I went to England with Heiko (Heike), the drummer, for a holiday, and we were on a ship coming back, and I said, “I’m sick of doing this, we’re not going anywhere at the moment doing this stuff that we do, we have to find something different.” So it was basically an attempt to do something different. But it ended up like this because the studios were expensive, and we were sitting in the studio all day, waiting for guitarists to turn up, so it was basically myself and the drummer who were writing most of the songs.

There were changes not only in the music but in the lyrics too. You sang about love and teenage rampage on first two albums and for the “Turn The Page” album you wrote somewhat darker lyrics. What inspired you to write them? Were you disappointed at that time?

Yeah, because when you do the first albums you’re still a kid, you’re still young and all you think about is women and all this rubbish, and you think that’s what you’re gonna write. And it’s OK writing things like that – if that’s what you think about at that time, that’s what you write. But after three albums down the road and after going through so much shit that you go through… I think music and writing lyrics is really good self-psychiatrist, if you will. To get rid of the problems instead of going crazy, going out with a gun and shooting lots of people, you write your problems down. “Turn The Page” was sort of – like the title says – turning the page, starting a new and remising, thinking back of the times that you’ve gone through, trying to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong and how not to do it wrong in the future. So there’s a lot more deep thought got in the lyrics. I’m very proud of the “Turn The Page” album, I think it’s a really good album still to this day.

You mentioned Richard Mac Dermott in the booklet of “Turn The Page”…

That was my brother, he died.

What happened to him?

He had a lot of psychological problems. And he almost died at work when he was hit by a brick stone. He got into a serious depression, started drinking seriously, and then the drink took control of him, and that was it. My brother was like Peter Pan, he didn’t wanna grow, he had a big problem with growing old, which, I think, quite a lot of people have a problem with. I don’t care, fuck it! Old is old. (laughs) Feeling old is a womanly feel.

Was the song “Without You” dedicated to him?

No, no! Actually the song “Without You”… Should I tell you this? (laughs) It was sort of a joke. Heiko and myself wrote this song, and we both told our girlfriends it was for them. (cracks) Because they can go like, “You never write songs about us!” And we went, “Fuck it, let’s write a song and say it’s for them!” But it backfired, because we met at a party, and they said, “This song is about me!” – “No, it’s about me!” Lies has very short legs.

Please, tell me about the cover version of Michael Sembello’s song “Maniac”. Who came up with this idea? Do you like disco music?

Yeah, I like it, it’s OK. What I really like is the film (“Flashdance”) and the girls in the film. (laughs) I’m not sure if that was Kai again who came up with that. I think we all sort of came up with it. I don’t want to tell any lies. It’s another one of the crazy songs. The thing is that we tended to say, “Let’s not cover any metal song, because you’re just gonna make it sound like the original. Let’s take a song that is completely different and turn that into a metal song.”

Excuse me, but didn’t you cover a Bad Company song (“Can’t Get Enough”)? That may be not metal, but still hard rock…

Yes, that was sort of a bet… Do you know the band Saxon? Paul Quinn, the guitarist, is a good friend of mine. He was in Hannover at that time, and we said, “Oh, let’s throw another song in and let Paul play some guitar on it.” So we did the thing, and then Heiko said, “Yeah, but only if you do the vocals in one take.” We got Paul to play some guitar, he actually got a solo on that song as well. There are three solos on the song, one by Kai, one by Olaf, and then Paul plays a solo. And I did the vocals in one take! (laughs) Because Paul Rodgers… I’ve told you about many of my influences before, and out of all those singers, Paul and Robert Plant were the two people whom I did admire on top of all. I’d been compared a couple of times to Paul Rodgers, so I said, “Let’s do that!”

Why did Sargant Fury break up? Was it because you were disappointed with the music business?

(emphatically) Yes! It was just lack of interest – not in the music, but in the music business. Over the years I’ve learned that the business side of it is a terrible thing, it’s the downfall of a lot of bands.

Do you still stay in touch with Olaf Gosser, Kai Steffan, Carsten Rebentish or Heiko Heike?

All of them. I haven’t seen Carsten for a long time, I must admit. I still talk to Bauke. We actually had a band meeting about 1.5 years ago, we met for the first time in 12 years. Bauke couldn’t be there, he was at PopComm in Berlin, but I talk to Bauke now and again, I call him up, he lives in Hamburg now. But Olaf I talk to quite a lot, and, like I said, Kai will be coming down next week, and we’ll start working on some new material. And with Heiko we’ve been best friends for years and years. Heiko works up in Hamburg as well. It’s difficult, everybody’s got their own life now, none of them live in Hannover anymore, I’m the only one living in Hannover now.

Sargant Fury’s albums were re-released by Divebomb Records last year. Were you involved in these re-issues?

Officially no. I don’t know the whole story, Bauke sorted these things out, but I never saw any money. All I got out of that was one box-set. I think the guy made some money, we didn’t make any money – again! (laughs) I think we’re very good at not making any money in the music business! But he only printed a thousand copies, I think. But they’re all sold out. The problem was that the first two albums really still belong to WEA. We didn’t really want to touch that. I think if he had printed more than 1,000, they would have said, “No”. Really we shouldn’t have been getting any money, and we couldn’t anyway, because if we’re getting any money, we’ll have WEA proclaiming their rights. It was a very difficult and delicate situation, which Heiko said he wanted nothing to do with, so Bauke was the only one who handled that. Perhaps he made any money, I don’t know, I didn’t. Like I said, I got one album out of this. But it doesn’t matter, because it was publicity again anyway.

It’s not so bad, because I do this new stuff with Kai, and perhaps we’ll get Olaf involved as well. If we release it under the name Sargant Fury, then we’ll get a deal straight away. I’ve got an album coming out on October 22 (2010) with the German band Powerworld, you can check them out at www.powerworld.org. The album’s coming out on SPV, and the guy who’s running SPV, Olly Hahn, used to work for CMM, the company that managed Sargant Fury. I’ve known him for years, and he said, “If you do another album as Sargant Fury, I’ll sign a deal straight away.” I’m working on that at the moment. The problem is that I’ve got another band with a friend of mine called Jack Of All, there’s a MySpace of it at jack_of_all, there’ll be links to it on my Facebook, check my Facebook out. And I sing in Swampfreaks, that’s also one of my main things at the moment, which has just finished the album, and it’s getting mastered. We’re looking for a record company which will release that. With Swampfreaks we’re getting more interest in America than we are in Europe.

I still have a few questions about your past. Please tell me what you did between 1995 and 1998 when you joined Threshold.

After “Turn The Page” we continued with Sargant Fury, but without Kai. Then Olaf sort of left, so it was me, Heiko and Carsten. We got another guitarist in, a young guy, and I played the second guitar, so it was a four-piece basically. We wrote about 30 songs, but never got any record companies releasing this. That sort of felt to bits, I don’t know why, people had to do different things. Then I did a reggae album with a friend of mine (laughs), I used to sing in a reggae sound system live. I cut my hair off, and got a job as a manager of a shop selling T-shirts and posters. Then one day I got a call from Michael saying that Thomas from InsideOut, the record company, asked him for my telephone number. I gave him my telephone number, so Thomas called and asked me to sing Threshold’s stuff, which was only supposed to be one album. I still had my studio and my rehearsal room, I still did music, it just wasn’t with any record company. Like I said, I didn’t wanna get involved with record companies and the music business, I just wanted to write my music, and that was it. Although I wasn’t in magazines, I was still doing music.

You stayed in Threshold for about 10 years, even though you have admitted that you don’t like such music that much. What was the reason?

Promises! I kept getting promises of money, which I never got. I kept thinking it was going to be the big thing round the corner, also I wanted to keep my name in the magazines, and it was better than doing nothing. I don’t really like prog metal, to be honest. Let’s put it this way – I wouldn’t buy their albums if it wasn’t me singing. It’s not really my kind of music, if I like prog, I like original prog like Pink Floyd and things like that or at least the old Rush. But it gave me a chance to go on tour and do albums, and it was either that or do nothing.

Did you try to bring your own ideas to the band?

Yeah, yeah, but the problem with Threshold was that Richard West (keyboards) was a really strange guy. He didn’t want anybody else to bring any ideas into the band, which was another one of the reasons why I left in the end. I thought, “Oh, eventually I’ll be writing songs with them,” but no, it was very difficult and very strange.

I read your statement about leaving Threshold…

Oh, the statement was just an official thing. I just got sick of living the lie. I was sick of doing the same thing with the same band, and they fucking ripped me off for a lot of money. Richard West and Karl Groom were making money from Threshold, and I wasn’t. And I got fucking sick of being used. I got sick of being their stupid little puppet just to make them money. I kept saying I wanna see their books, the money, what came in, what goes out. They would say, “Yeah, next time, next time…” And in the end I just went, “Fuck it!”

But you also did prog metal in another project called Yargos. How did you get involved in this project?

There’s a studio in Hannover which I used to do some work for. The two people who were working on the project - Anca (Graterol) and Ossy (Pfeiffer) – gave Wieland (Holmeister) my telephone number, and Wieland is the guy who organized it all. He called me and said, “Can you come round?”, he wanted to talk to me. He picked me up, we dropped into his studio, he played me his stuff, it was basically only the music finished, there were no melodies and no lyrics. I suppose I said “yes” for the reason that I could get involved in the writing, and not just turn up and sing their songs. And I was getting paid for it! But I said from the start, “If it’s rubbish, I’m not doing it”. But it was good because I could do anything I wanted with it. There were no boundaries, when I was coming up with vocal lines I could put there anything I wanted. It was a really good experience. We did the second album as well, I think it may be coming out end of this year or beginning of next year, it’s been ready for over a year.

Please, tell me about your another band Swampfreaks. What is the main idea of this band? Did you form it just for your own satisfaction?

Yes. It was something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. After I left Threshold, a friend called from England, and I said, “I’ve fucking left, let’s do it”. I spent half a year living with my friend in England, just working out exactly what we wanted to do and how and just seeing what happened. The we found the drummer and the bass player, everybody comes from the same part of England as myself, so there’s no problem with humor. A lot of people in England have a problem with the North-East English humor - it’s very hard, very dry. Threshold had a very big problem. They also had a problem understanding what I talked – now I’m talking English to you, but when I’m talking my dialect, it’s a different language basically.

Swampfreaks is fun, it goes down really well, especially, like I said, in America. It’s great working with the guys, I get to play guitar, and we do everything ourselves, so there’s nobody else to blame if it goes wrong. If you want something done, do it yourself!

What are your plans for the near future, for the next few months?

The next few months, like I said, will see the release of Powerworld – end of this month in Germany and beginning of next month in North America plus Canada. At the moment we’re working on a deal to release it in Japan. At the same time I’m looking for a deal for Swampfreaks. I’m thinking about starting a small record company of myself with a guy in Jack Of All, because we also have a studio there. Plus, I’m working on this stuff with Kai and finishing the Jack Of All album. I’m a busy busy boy really as far as music is concerned. (laughs) But I must say that after I finished the recording of vocals for Powerworld and Swampfreaks, I took a couple of months off from the studio and from vocals, just to get my ears to rest, because I noticed I was turning everything on the mixing desk up full. So I took an earbreak for health’s sake, just to let my ears get back to norm. Now I’m back in the studio, I’m doing a video for Powerworld at the moment, a promo for Europe and America, I’m cutting it together, because I did the Swampfreaks video myself as well. I’m trying to get into the video as well. It’s just - keep going, never surrender, never give in! (laughs)

To round up this interview, would you like to say something to your Russian fans?

To be honest, I didn’t really know there were any Russian fans. We’re getting quite a few hits on the Swampfreaks site from Russia all of a sudden. To any Andrew Mc Dermott fans in Russia, thanks a lot, it’s nice that people actually listen to me and appreciate what I do.

Konstantin “Hirax” Chilikin
September 2010
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