Everybody knows you as front man of Lord Of The Lost, but in this interview we will focus on your brand new solo career and the debut album ‘1980’. You already have a very busy life with your band, how and why did you feel the need to make a solo album?
Well… I am a person who loves many different genres. I think that is obvious, in Lord Of The Lost already we do many different things, but sometimes it feels like when you try to push your personal taste too much into one project. You kind of poison your own project. So my need to do something electronic, which was a pure electronic something, I cannot do with Lord Of The Lost, because we are a rock band, we are a metal band, we want to stay that and I had electronic projects in the past, but I didn’t really have time. For ten years I wanted to do this record and I always said: ‘yeah I am going to do it soon’, but there was always something and then I realized that it is a little bit like getting parents. Some people wait their whole life for the perfect moment, but there is never the perfect moment. Either you want it or you don’t want it. So you just do it. So I said to myself ‘hey come on’. It was this Summer. I was on holidays and I said like ‘I either do it now or never’, because we have so many plans with Lord Of The Lost for the next years, that I realized I probably never going to do it, if I am not going to do it just right now. So after ten years I finally said: ‘let’s do it now’. So I started writing songs and said ‘I want to finish this within just a couple of weeks’. So I started writing the songs in Summer, producing them and finished them in Fall and it was done. And that’s the new album.

Did you do it all by yourself or did you engage different musicians around you than usual?
I never really do anything just all by myself, because I am always a team player. Also in a solo project I am a team player, because I am capable of doing many things alone, but first of all it is more fun doing it and there is always someone who’s better in certain special things and when you realize that, it is so much more powerful, when you give certain things to people that are just better than you. So I produced the record together with a friend and we did all the music together. Electronic music isn’t really about playing instruments, it is more like pushing buttons and be able to use a computer and synthesizers and keyboarding the mouse. So we did that all together. It is basically the production team, it is basically the people I always work with for Lord Of The Lost, same as the record label, Napalm Records, because I do this because I wanted to do music as a hobby again. Lord Of The Lost became my job and I love my job, but I don’t really have a hobby anymore and when you do a hobby, you want things easygoing. I don’t want to create my own competition, with a totally new team, new label, whatever and then suddenly you end up being in competition with yourself. I did not want that, so it is basically the Lord Of The Lost group of people in the background of the whole production crew, putting this together.

The title of your solo album is ‘1980’. That is the year when you were born, but it also marks the style of music that was popular at that era…
First of all, it is my birth year and it always seems to me, when I look at my birth year, I always felt it like a strong number to me. It is just a number, it is just letters, those things don’t really mean something, but the eighties were a decade when so many things changed, in terms of technology and especially in sound engineering and drum machines came. The electronic world was like taking it over. It already existed in the sixties and seventies, but in the eighties it grew really strong. I think it was just a nice coincidence that I was born in the eighties. I love eighties synth pop a lot and when you read the title ‘1980’ and you see the artwork and the colours, I think instantly it is obvious what the album is about, feeling wise and sound wise, so it was more like a nice coincidence.

Production wise it is also very eighties, and what about the lyrics?
The topics in the songs and lyrics are not really eighties, this is something I can’t get out of my skin. When I write songs, I always feel the need to transport deeper feelings and most of these things are very melancholic and sad, because it is something I like. I like a certain kind of darkness and melancholy. It is not something negative for me. Melancholic feelings are something very warm and nice to me. I really lke the mixture. If you just listen to the first song ‘I Love You’, the lyrics are so sad, but the music at the same time is so uplifting and the contrast that you have there I really like. It is a little bit like when you think of a TV show like ‘Stranger Things’. It is a horror show, but the neon lights and all the eighties flair create a different feeling. It is a bit what I am doing with my albums sound-wise, it is a bit like what you have in ‘Stranger Things’ when you watch it. You get this weird combination of eighties and neon lights and still a very dark and sinister background. I love contrasts.

That also shines through in the video clip for ‘I Love You’…
What we did with the video clip, we filmed 90% of the stuff on VHS, another eighties or early nineties video technology. So the reason why it looks so bad is because we actually filmed it on cassette. It is not filtered, it is real and the same goes for the album. There was one rule for the album: I said ‘I only want to use synthesizers and samples or digital simulations of these synthesizers which were made between 1980 and 1989.’ So most of what we used for creating the record, was actually stuff that existed in this particular decade. This is why it sounds so much like then.

You recognize the sound of these equipments, like David Bowie at that time or Kraftwerk, they were the pioneers I think…
Yeah the thing is, if you go for original eighties synthesizers, most of them are very expensive. It is like going to a museum, but nowadays you can find like real emulations, which is like synbulations and add  plug-ins for a computer, you can find nearly every eighties synthesizer or you can get all these sample things with all the drums and sound of that time, so you can get all the stuff. It is actually possible to recreate that without spending millions and millions of euros (chuckles), because I could not afford that of course, but it was beautiful, to limit yourself and say okay, let’s create an album, but we are only allowed to use this kind of technology. It was very interesting, because when you limit yourself to certain things, it also makes you creative. Let us say you want to cook a meal and you are only allowed to use five ingredients, but you have to create something magical with these five ingredients. Suddenly you have to get creative to make something nice, because you cannot just go to the store and buy everything you want. Limitation can actually give you creativity and that was a lot of fun.

Coming back on that melancholic touch. There are also two songs which are slower – one might call them ballads – and the last one ‘May This Be Tour Last Battlefield’ struck me deeply. Can you go a bit deeper into that lyric if is not too painful…
No, it is not too painful at all, this last song ‘May This Be Your Last Battlefield’ is actually not autobiographic. It is not a real story behind it, but I felt like – even for this kind of music where it is mostly uplifting, the music –  I really wanted to end the album on an a-typical track without drums, something that reminds me of ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ by Queen. Doing a symphonic track without being actually symphonic, we only used synthesizers and the funny thing is that this whole song title is actually a ‘Star Trek’ episode. I watched this episode many years ago and I always thought: ‘this would be such a nice song title for a final track on an album’. I actually wrote lyrics about that. It sounds so sad, it sounds autobiographical, but it is not. I just wanted to write a farewell song inspired by Star Trek (chuckles). So creativity can also work this way, you know. Everything that a musician or a song-writer does must not be a real story, sometimes you just want to paint a picture. Sometimes you just want to create a story, like in horror movies. Not every horror movie you see is the biography of the director. This would be horrible! (laughs).

In the nineties you were a teenager. How did you ever get into music?
In the eighties I listened to the music of my parents, which was mostly sixties and seventies music on vinyl records and then in the nineties I kind of started finding my first own band that I really liked and the first one was Michael Jackson, late eighties. Then there was Roxette in the early nineties and then came Nirvana and Guns ‘N Roses and later I went into metal and gothic, industrial music in the late nineties. For me it really started with Roxette actually. My love for the eighties came much later, maybe when I was in my late twenties. I started to relive the eighties music and I realized all these nice tracks from Bronski Beat to Eraser, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode… all these nice things I did not realize before… so I had to turn thirty or something to actually find out how beautiful the eighties were, because before that, in my twenties, I was mainly interested in guitar music. And then I started like ‘oh wow that is interesting!’ And the older I got, the bigger my connection with eighties music actually got.