It all started again with a concert at Keep It True festival in Germany in 2010. That is already a long time ago. What did you feel afterwards?
You are talking about the KIT festival? 2010, yeah that pretty much started everything again. Oliver deserves a lot of credit for that. He wanted to bring the band over there. It must have been the first indication that we had that there was still a demand for the band. As you know, we had those two albums, but once that grunge took over in the US, everybody just got pushed aside and it was a very difficult time. We lost our record deal, Ted was going back to university, becoming a dentist surgeon. Everybody just went separate ways. So it was a tough time in terms of the existence of Fifth Angel. We were thinking it was the end of it right there.

But it wasn’t, because in 2018 you made a glorious comeback with ‘The Third Secret’. I think that record was very well received in Europe as well, isn’t it?
Yes, thank you. We tried to write songs from around 2012 on. We tried different combinations, like Peter Orullian, the singer that sang at KIT festival in 2010. We tried to do some writing with him. It seemed like no matter what we did, nothing sounded like Fifth Angel anymore. It sounded like something completely different and then Kendall and I started working on some demos. Kendall sent me some demos that he sang on and I said: ‘Kendall, your voice sounds amazing. Why don’t we just let you sing?’. Then we started writing together and we came out with three songs. I think the first three songs were ‘We Will Rise’, ‘Queen Of Thieves’ and there was one other song. We sent it to Jaap from Nuclear Blast and he was very impressed. He said: ‘This sounds like Fifth Angel’ and so they signed us for a new record contract and then of course… do you know what happened with Kendall? I can cover that too (laughs).

Yes indeed, one of my questions or topics was the mysterious departure of Kendall…
Yes, the mysterious departure of Kendall was very unfortunate for the timing. He called us, it was 2018 when he told us that he didn’t want to tour. We had festivals booked, Rock Hard and some other festivals… and he was just saying: ‘I am quitting, I don’t want to play these shows’. We were thinking he was joking. We didn’t expect he was serious. We thought: ‘Well, give him a month. He’ll calm down and he’ll say yes and get back in.’ So we waited for about a month and a half, as long as we could, but he didn’t talk to anybody, he was not returning calls or returned emails. He was serious, you know. He did not want to travel anymore. For us it was very unfortunate, it would have been better if we had known that before we made the record. Steve Carlson was there and the idea was he was going to sing Ted’s songs, from the first two albums and then Kendall would sing two or three songs from ‘The Third Secret’. I think it would have been better to find that out earlier. It was a very unfortunate situation, but Steve Carlson is an amazing vocalist.

Yes, it is an amazing record and it is like a movie!
That is really kind of what it is. It is a movie. That was the idea. You close your eyes, you listen to the record and you can see the movie in your head. That was really what this was all about. But getting back to the singer situation, I think Steve Carlson did an incredible job on the record and we are very happy with what we have put together for this album.

How did you meet and finally recruit him?
He lives in Phoenix. There is a friend of ours, Mike Gaube, he is a radio DJ and he is friends with me for years and years and he is also friends with Steve Carlson and he told me we should work with Steve. So we did and Steve appeared to be a very amazing person and amazing singer. So it was very natural transition. We did not miss a beat, everything went very smooth on this record and it is a long record. It is almost seventy minutes long. So it is a lot of material and a lot of music. But everything went very smoothly.

And it is like heaven sent that he moved to Phoenix, because originally he was also from the Seattle area, just like you guys…
Also from Seattle, which is really weird and I know John, the bass player, he knew him a little bit and had seen him play and everything. We all kind of come from the same club. Everybody is from the Seattle area and for whatever reason, it seems like the chemistry is really good, it is almost like a family. You have to work with each other and be around each other, travel with each other and interact with each other a lot, like a family does. If you get along well and people are nice, it makes things much easier.

That is true. Please tell me about that double concept album ‘When Angels Kill’ is. It should be linked to the previous albums, some titles, some things that happened before on your albums. You selected a kind of story about that. Do I see that right?
Yes. We took a lot of the concept and even song titles, little bits and pieces out of lyrics. We didn’t reuse the song titles or any thing, but we did take lyrics and things and weave them back into this album to create a whole story, based upon the previous recordings. If you go back and listen to the first album, there are stories about betrayal, like ‘Cry Out The Fools’, it is about a relationship and betrayal. And you have ‘The Night’ which is about deception in the media and you have ‘In The Fall Out’ which is about a nuclear attack of a city. All those different things; we started to notice around ‘The Third Secret’ that we could make a story out of all these happenings. We said: ‘maybe on the next one we’ll do a concept record’. I think it was me who had the idea of the story and then weaving it into one story. But this is probably the last album we will do with this kind of subject matter, because we have four albums and there is a lot of continuing of what’s been said. I think maybe the next time we will move on to a different subject matter, but it has been very consistent over the years and what’s interesting to me is that the first album is almost forty years old now. If you listen to what we were writing about and singing about, it is still totally applicable today. That is pretty amazing, we are talking about ‘Wings Of Destiny’, war, all these different concepts are still super applicable today. I think it just comes from the fact that Fifth Angel has always written about the state of mankind and the challenges and what mankind faces as a species. We have always been talking about that and it is funny, because the challenges have not changed.

You promise a surprising end and I can only reflect my own thoughts after listening to it. I think the only salvation comes from praying and believing and in the end comes the final judgement from other species in space or god, whatever you want to call it…
I think it helps mankind to know that there is a reckoning. There is a cause when you do things. There is a cause when you oppress people, there is a cause when you create war. There is a prize that will be paid, but that was not really the point of the record. The point of the record was more to create a feeling of: ‘If all these things were happening now, how would you feel when you are right in the middle of it?’ The concept was trying to put the listener in these events. One interviewer said: ‘Don’t you think people are going to be depressed?’ and I said: ‘Well, that is one way to look at it, but you can look at it like: ‘hey, it is a wonderful day today, it is not happening today, there is not an asteroid’ and maybe you need to go out and live and enjoy your life today and not depend on tomorrow haha. That was one way to look at it.

Ed Archer, John Macko and you are the original members in the band. Does it mean that you are the main writers or did the other guys also contribute?
On this record we used… I call it ‘the Fifth Angel family’, because during the making of this record, there were a lot of challenges that happened. We had some scheduling issues, Ed had to take care of his mom. His mother has been ill and had some medical issues. We had another guitar player working, he had issues with his mother as well, we had covid-19,… so it really turned into a situation where we use – what I call – the fifth angel family (chuckles). We had Jim Dofka playing on the record, we had Ethan who helped writing some songs, we had Ed writing some songs, we had Steve Conley, my friend from Flotsam & Jetsam, doing some work. We just used everyone. We had Ethan Bross, a big friend of mine who is another fabulous guitar player. He played the KIT festival with us live, so we have like a little family that we can work with and I guess that is almost like how we have the Pumpkins United kind of thing. It is almost like that, angels united (laughs)…  There’s a lot of different people we can rely on and we did on this record, because I think it was such a big challenge to do 70 minutes material. That is almost twice as long as a regular record, so to do that type of thing, and dealing with covid-19 and all the different things that are happening in people’s families, that was a challenge.

And will that whole family go on tour in this constellation or a studio line-up?
We will see. We are going to try and support the record. In August we are going to play at Alcatraz in Belgium. We just did the KIT festival which was very successful, fans were singing along with the songs, even the new songs. We played a song they had never heard before, the singer taught them how it went before the song and everybody sang along. It was really a great crowd and great seeing the fans again, because we haven’t been there for a few years now and it was an incredible gathering of fans, signing autographs and all that stuff… just get back to me then and hanging out with them. It was a great experience, we like to do that as much as we can.

Are there plans to play in Europe?
We don’t know right now, but hopefully… I think it depends on if the album does well, the band is there. It is a little bit tougher for American bands – I am not sure if people understand, but I have seen bands like Anthrax that cancel their trip and they are a pretty big band. For a number of bands it isn’t working, because it is too expensive. The cost of touring has gone up twice, double and the payment is about the same. We certainly would love to do as much as we can, it just depends on economically things. We cannot afford losing a lot of money on touring. Sometimes that is what’s happening with American bands, because the flights are so expensive. We have to be careful obviously, but at the same time we want to meet as many fans as we can.

Why did you move from Seattle to Phoenix?
(laughs) That is a good question. Well… I was on tour with Alice Cooper and House Of Lords and whenever we were in Phoenix, I don’t know why, but it was always springtime, it was always like March or April and I was in a nice resort hotel with a nice drink by the pool and constantly sun and I was thinking to myself: ‘This is just like Hawaii’ and I was actually living in LA at that time – because I moved when I started touring with Alice Cooper – but I noticed that Phoenix was very nice and it was beautiful. We were in that resort hotel, so we had grass and trees everywhere, flowers and everything. Then when I moved to Phoenix, I moved in September, it was like 110 degrees or something. I was like ‘wait a second, I don’t remember anything like this’. So I had a very different image of Phoenix in my mind. The desert you know… if you look outside my house, you see cactuses, it is all desert and some mountains. It is beautiful, but it is not like when you go to a resort hotel.