Mob Rules – interview met Sven Lüdke
Sven Lüdke: “There is good and evil, but there is not an absolute good or an absolute evil, everything can move into either direction”
Sinds ‘Ethnolution A.D.’ uit 2006 zijn we al gewonnen voor de uitstekende heavy/power metal van Mob Rules, een band uit het noorden van Duitsland die al heel wat watertjes doorzwommen heeft en nu – na een pauze van zeven jaar – weer helemaal terug is met een tiende (als we de compilatiebox niet meetellen) studioalbum ‘Rise Of The Ruler’. Toeval of niet, we krijgen gitarist Sven Lüdke aan de lijn wiens vuurdoop bij Mob Rules ook ten tijde van ‘Ethnolution A.D.’ was. Met hem een gesprek voeren over ‘Rise Of The Ruler’ werd dan ook een bijzonder gezellig onderonsje.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 27 augustus 2025
The former album ‘Beast Reborn’ came out in 2018. What happened with the band after that, because I see there are two new members again…?
Yeah that’s right. It was a quite difficult time for us as a band. ‘Beast Reborn’ was a big success for us, but – as it always is – big success comes with a lot of work. Let me say that the chemistry in the band was damaged, because some people in the band they thought they were exhausted, they were tired and it was too much work for them. We did not find the right solution to have everybody on the same level so that people did not have the feeling they were exhausted and had to work too much for it. We kept on talking for months and months. We talked about how we see Mob Rules in the future, how we want to work in the future. It was good talking, but in the end – it was one or two years that we took for this because the band is very important for us. We didn’t want to get rid of somebody. We are all friends and we always try to keep the band together as it is. In the end our drummer Nikolas Fritz – he was also our graphic designer for covers and photo shootings and layout – decided to leave the band. There was a huge setback and we had to recover from that. At that point we lost our drummer who was a great drummer and a really nice guy and a very creative guy, especially in graphics and layout. So we had to reconsider the band and think about how we were going to start from there. A friend of mine, Sebastian (Schmidt – Vera), who is also a drummer, I asked him if he would like to join the band. We tried it and had some rehearsals together to see if he fits and if he and we felt okay with this configuration and so we had him in the band, did some shows and song-writing sessions started for the next album. We changed the record label as well. In 2024 we put out a 30th anniversary album and some singles, some cover versions and then we could change over to the new record label, which is RPM/ROAR! We started talking with them about how could we – we as a band and them as a label – work together to make everything better, we started working on songs, and so on. So it was a difficult time for the band.
A lot of things going on thus and that on top of the corona years…
When corona started, my first thought was – I am mostly the main song-writer in the band – when corona began, my first reaction was: ‘okay I am going to use this time for writing songs’. But after some weeks I felt like: ‘I don’t know why. Do we ever going to play concerts again?’ It was all about this disease and this pandemic. It doesn’t fell right to write songs and if you don’t know if it is going to be okay some day, and put out songs again, there was no motivation in me to be productive and creative.
I can understand, because you don’t have a future at that moment and that is very precious….
Exactly. If somebody would have told me at that moment: ‘listen Sven, this is going to last for exactly three years’, it starts now, in three years it is over, maybe then I had the courage to use this time, but it was so open. We did not know what comes next. I was blocked, there was no room for creativity anymore in me.
Then you took the decision to write a sequel to the story on your first two albums ‘Savage Land’ (1999) and ‘Temple Of Two Suns’ (2000). That was a big step, because not so many musicians from that time are in the band now… how did you manage to do that?
We wrote so many songs about anything. History and political stuff, whatever… after thirty years – the band was formed in 1994 – it was 2024 the idea came out – let us think about if it is possible to take the story from 30 years ago and transfer it into now and give it a new spin. We all thought it was a good idea. Jan-Christian was excited about it and he is pretty good in research things and being creative concerning lyrics and stuff and the idea was: we as a band, we are 30 years ago from where it all began, let us see what the story is. A time lapse about 30 years and that was the main idea. So Jan Christian came up with a story in which the ruler is old and fell into madness.
Indeed things haven’t become any better, because the story is depicted in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere…
That is right.
Who did the narration?
Timo Südhoff, he is a friend of ours. He was a singer in a North German metal band called Regicide and we knew he had a very good voice, a good talking voice. We asked him if he would like to do the narration and he said yes. It worked out pretty well.
Did you go back to the roots musically as well or only for the story?
Yes. We often meet friends from the beginning and friends that grew old with us and often they are talking about the first two albums like ‘x years ago I discovered the first and second album and I love these’. It is something we really hear every now and then. That’s why we thought: ‘okay, we take the story 30 years ahead, let us go musically to the past as well. The last albums what I did with the song-writing was most of the time all the songs were with long intros, very viby atmospheric and long instrumental parts with a lot of guitar solos and stuff and this time I thought ‘okay, let’s bring it all together, the songs are shorter than on the former albums, the guitar solos are quite shorter than before.’ That was an idea to try it out and let us see if we could manage to do that. So we always try to challenge ourselves. Little things listeners or fans don’t recognize, but we recognize. We always have an idea when we start to work on a new album. There is always some sort of main idea behind what we do. Maybe the listeners do not recognize the idea, but we do and that is important for us. So we have a red line where we can work on and move along.
The balance between what you are as Mob Rules and a kind of musical evolution must be smooth, it is an art an sich. Is there still something you want to add about the concept story? Is there a kind of protagonist or is it very general?
It is a fictional story of course. Some people in the story evolve into different directions, that is a main idea behind the story, put into this fictional scenario. It is about balance. There is good and evil, but there is not an absolute good or an absolute evil, everything can move into either direction. We think in the world there is something like a clock, like a pendulum. If it is going to be disturbed, it is always going to find its balance back. That is the main idea behind this. The balance between good and evil and things can change but the balance always tries to find its balance back. It is called equilibrium, that concept, this idea of something that is always like a law of nature.
It also is in conjunction with the fact that you are called Mob Rules, these Black Sabbath influences are still a bit in the music I think…
The grandness, the epic feel, indeed. That is the kind of music I grew up with. Dio especially, Iron Maiden, but also bands like Savatage and Queensrÿche. These are very important and besides the metal world, there is one band which is quite important for me. The older I got, the more I discovered how important this band is for me and that is Marillion, even the newer Marillion. That is a band that has companied me since I was 7 or 8 years old. I am listening to Marillion even nowadays and I enjoy it very much. The musicality, the melodic colours in the music, that is something that fascinates me.
They are still very good. About two years ago I decided to go to a concert of them again after many years and I enjoyed every second as well… It was different from Fish of course, but also nice…
Absolutely! I needed some time to get along with the new Marillion, but nowadays I enjoy it very much and for me there are two kinds of Marillion and both are pretty good.
What is Dendayar?
Dendayar is the god in the temple, that is the main character. In the beginning of the story he is just a guardian in the temple of the ruler. He does not agree with how the ruler rules the green land. He tries to get rid of the ruler and he got banned, his people are banned from the green valley. They had to leave the green valley and almost died. They connect with different people in the savage land and return into the green land. When the ruler died, he takes the place of the ruler. He puts himself on the throne and becomes the new ruler, but in the time all these things happen, he also changed from the good guy who tries to free the people banned from the green valley, with all the things happening he changed into a bad direction. So in the end it is not quite sure. Is he good, is he bad? He wears the mask of the ruler and we are not quite sure if he is a good guy or did he move into the direction of the old ruler. That is the part when things are not only good or only evil, it changes with what happens.
That is a link with real life, when politicians have power, they change…
Yeah we can watch it every day.
There is a woman who returned for the second time doing guest vocals, called Ulli Perhonen…
That was one of the ideas that evolved when we were working on the songs. Every now and then we have a song where we can imagine that it can be some sort of duet and the song could use a female voice. Ulli is a friend of ours and she did a very good job on the ‘Beast Reborn’ album, in the song ‘My Sobriety Mind’. The voices of Klaus (Dirks – singer – Vera) and Ulli fit very well together and so we asked once again if she liked to sing and do us a favour.
With Klaus you have a very good singer…
Yes, that is what I always tell him (chuckles). Now I like his voice very much. When I was asked to join the band, in 2004, I got all their former CD’s and to be honest, I did not like Klaus’ voice so much at that time. For my feeling it was too thin, not manly enough I would say… On the ‘Radical Peace’ album, as he went to the studio to record the vocals, I asked him to ‘maybe be brave and try something out. Don’t hide your voice, don’t keep it inside, try to bring out what you want to transport to what you sing and how you sing, even with a little rasp. Make it dark when you want it sometimes.’ He was like a dog on a row and then the first vocal recordings came back from the studio and I loved it! He was sounding free and with power. I remember Matthias, former rhythm guitar player and in the band from the beginning, he hated it. He was like ‘no, we cannot publish this album like this’ and I was like ‘no, that is like Klaus should sound’. Now you hear him as a personality, not just a voice singing notes. Now you had the feeling of hearing Klaus’ personality in his voice. Luckily we could persuade Matthias to keep it like it is and from this point on, 2009 I think it was, Klaus evolved like this. The older he gets the better he is.
You just did a most extended video concept directed by Rainer Fränzen. That must have been an adventure. Can you tell something about it?
We worked with Rainer Fränzen on the ‘Ghost Of A Chance’ and the ‘My Sobriety Mind’ videos from ‘Beast Reborn’ and he is a very creative, crazy director video guy. He is so cool! We love to work with him. When we have ideas, he has thousand times more ideas than we have. When you talk to him, and you just have a little spark of an idea, he explodes. So he had the location and we had the idea of this post-apocalyptic look, the clothes and the surrounding and he managed to get the Dustriders, it is a group of people in Germany with these post-apocalyptic vehicles and cars. So we had the video shoot and we shot two video clips for ‘Back To Savage Land’ and ‘Dawn Of Second Sun’ which we will release in July, this month. And from the rest of the material that was recorded, we did two lyric videos. For ‘Future Loom’ and ‘Trial And Trail Of Fear’. So we have four videos and that is great and even there Klaus has evolved into such a good actor! In the beginning he was shy, but nowadays during video shoots he is so sure and that is great and awesome to watch him perform in front of a camera. I think he is great in what he does, singing and even in the acting. That was fun!
‘Dawn Of Second Sun’ is one of my favourites…
Nice, I like it very much as well. That was one of the songs, when we were writing the songs, we had the feeling the song writes itself. Sometimes you write a song and it is hard, it is difficult and you don’t find the right solutions and things do not work like you want them to work. It does not sound like you want it to sound, but when I had the idea for ‘Dawn Of Second Sun’ and the main melody, the chorus, the verses, everything came together from itself. I just had to gather the ideas and put it on place and it felt like the song wrote itself. Sometimes I have the feeling that you can hear it on songs, when they are written easily. When a song is difficult to write, maybe it is too difficult to hear. When you have the feeling that the song was very easy to write, it is easy while you are hearing it. It is like a flowing river. Even if we decide to write more compact songs, and make the songs a little bit easier, without too much thinking about the songs and not let the songs have too much turns and key changes and tempo changes, even then there is always minimum one song on the album that has twists and turns like this and this is ‘Nomadic Oasis’. On every album there is always minimum one song that has longer intro, I like that too. Maybe that is the influence of bands like Marillion, Queensrÿche, Savatage… but nowadays I also enjoy songs when they are compact and on point, that is great too. I think that is why there is so much variety on Mob Rules’ albums, not having a feeling that you are listening to ten songs and they all are the same. The next song is always a bit different from the song before.
We should mention the limited earbook, because you put a lot of work in it…
Yeah. That was an idea by Klaus, our singer. His head is always full of ideas. I had some song ideas left, while for us, the album was done. It was like ‘okay, we have these eleven songs, the album is done, and mentally I was like ‘check, okay, ready’. But Klaus came with the idea ‘what about a bonus EP?’ with a very big booklet and stuff. I was like ‘okay… what are you thinking about?’ and he said ‘maybe three songs, a very small bonus CD telling a small part of the story a little bit more in detail’. I was like ‘okay, three songs, I can do that’. But after three songs it was four, it was five, I wrote half an album for the EP after the album was done. So you have this very exclusive package with the regular CD and the bonus EP. We took one of the songs from the first album, and used a piece, just the intro for the people who know the first albums, so they can recognize it and then there are five new songs, telling parts of the story and then there is the whole narration. There is a whole narration of 11 minutes of the album, not the lyrics are read, but the whole story is told. That is quite nice. ‘Dawn Of Second Sun’ is also on the EP in video version with an intro which is cut out and the two main videos from the CD as well. So it is a very nice package, 48 pages booklet, with a lot of pictures and stuff behind the scenes about the band. Very nice and worthy.
What are the plans for playing live?
We have a new booking agency. Most of the gigs are done by ourselves. We had a very small booking agency, it is a friend of ours who has a small business. He booked a lot of shows for us too. Now we work together with Dragon Productions, a big booking agency. With the new album in hands, they are going to try to book us on many tours and festivals. I don’t think that there will be too much shows in this year, because we are pretty late with the contract with this Dragon Productions, but we have several release shows that we booked by ourselves in Germany. Some possibilities are coming in right now. They speak of Italy and France and the Netherlands. So something is cooking in the back. We have some release shows here in the north of Germany. Unfortunately I think there will be no tours this year, but we hope the best for next year. I think we will be on tour in 2026.
