Uber Rock at Steelhouse Festival 2015 – Doro Pesch – Interview Exclusive
Written by Gaz Tidey
Sunday, 09 August 2015 04:00
Doro’s set at last month’s Steelhouse Festival was a triumph, of that there is little doubt. The diminutive German legend is dubbed the Queen of Metal for a reason, and, as grown men turned and fled from the mountain, fearing for their lives as inclement weather took hold, she braved the elements and stood on the stage walkway as the scourge of British Summertime lashed down, and barely retreated. As classic songs like ‘Burning The Witches’ and ‘Für Immer’ caught the hearts of those fans for whom the conditions mattered little in the face of such rock royalty, Doro and band turned in a performance worthy of headline status.
Hearing that she had needed to be carried to the stage as conditions underfoot were decidedly treacherous behind the stage, and witnessing her getting a serious soaking on it, I had accepted that my interview planned for an hour after the band’s set would probably not happen. If locals were turning on their heels to get off the mountain, surely a band with hundreds of miles to travel would be looking to do the same. But no, some ninety minutes after the last note of ‘Metal Tango’ had rung out of the festival’s PA I found myself alone in a room with Doro Pesch. Up a mountain. Looking like a drowned rat, and possibly smelling like a wet dog.
I’d met Ms. Pesch a couple of times previously and had always been suitably impressed by just how nice she was – not just fake smile for the fans nice, but genuinely nice. She seemed really thrilled when I spoke of Warlock being one of the first ‘proper’ bands that I had ever seen as a teenager, and of meeting her at a signing session in seminal South Wales music emporium Roxcene Records when the band supported Dio on the ‘Dream Evil’ tour in 1987. As we spoke of Bad News, of her former Warlock bandmate, current Alice Cooper guitarist Tommy Henriksen, it felt as if I was talking about music with an old friend, so at ease was I… in a room alone with Doro Pesch…..
I have to start by asking about the mountaintop location and the weather – did you wonder what in the hell you were getting into on the drive up?!
It’s very nice, I love it and we’ve been treated so nice. We were in such a nice hotel and last night we had some fun with the Y&T guys, and Nazareth, and we had such a great time – there was such a cool vibe – and I could tell that today the festival would be totally cool. They mentioned that the weather was going to suck big time today, so I knew, but it doesn’t matter. The time I was on stage, I didn’t feel any rain – it was a little bit cold but I thought “fuck it” and I had so much fun.
You mentioned the grey skies and how awesome they looked from the stage…
Yeah, it was totally metal! Perfect for a photo session, those grey skies! I like that vibey stuff, and sometimes the sun takes away some of the mystique. Of course, for the fans standing there for ten hours it’s rough, but I like the Welsh thing, it’s beautiful here.
For the first bands of the day a lot of fans watched from undercover of the beer tent, but you got them all out in the rain, which was actually worse when you came on!
Yeah, that was good, and I just thought I gotta go on the catwalk not just try and stay dry.
Between you and me, last year at the festival Sebastian Bach got the photographers thrown out of the photo pit during his first song as he wasn’t happy with how his hair was looking, and that’s all I could think about when you stood there in the rain for almost all of your set!
What?! Haha! That’s not metal! I thought “Fuck it!” You gotta rock out and it doesn’t matter if you sweat like hell or it rains like crazy.
…and the fans won’t forget a thing like that…..
Definitely, with songs like ‘All We Are’ it’s important to get close and I like to have people singing in my microphone but I didn’t know how to get off the catwalk, or back on, it was that slippery! Y’know, headbanging and slipping about! But it’s a great festival and it’s been great being here.
When you approach a festival set do you try to just stick to the ‘hits’ or do you try to integrate some new material into the setlist?
I always try to pick maybe one song from each record that hopefully the fans will like. Obviously there’s ‘All We Are’ and ‘Für Immer’ – we weren’t sure if people would like it but thought “let’s do it” – and ‘Metal Tango’, there was this one guy who had come from Spain shouting for it, and, of course people always like to sing along to ‘Burning The Witches’. ‘Metal Racer’ is always cool to play, and ‘Touch Of Evil’ is always a cool opener – maybe not as well known as ‘All We Are’ but, yeah, it’s powerful and heavy. And, of course, ‘Raise Your Fist’ and ‘Revenge’ from the last record.
…and ‘Breaking The Law’ as well. You mentioned Judas Priest from the stage – were the British bands a real big influence?
Yes, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was so influential to me. My favourite bands were Priest and Saxon and Maiden, Motörhead, Rock Goddess! Oh, I loved Rock Goddess! But, yeah, many bands. And we got our first big tour with Judas Priest, then Dio.
You’re doing another festival with Judas Priest in Austria…
Yeah, Priest, Korn, Accept, us, loads of other bands – Judas Priest and Accept, wow!
When you’re a fan of a band and you’re on the same festival bill as them do you try to make the time to watch them?
It depends. A couple of years ago in Wacken I wanted to see W.A.S.P. again but seeing them from the side of the stage is different to seeing them with the crowd so I went out with a little hoodie on and sat on somebody’s shoulders. But the wind blew the hood down so everyone saw me and were wanting autographs and I was like “can we do it after the show?!” but it was great. Y’know, when I started listening to metal I was always in the front row and I’m still a big metal fan.
So what bands inspire you now? Who do you hear now who makes you want to get straight back into the rehearsal room?
One of the bands I liked so much was our support band Sister Sin. I think Liv [Jagrell] has great attitude, I love that – great performance, great guys. We actually toured together on the same tour bus so, yeah, I like Sister Sin. Arch Enemy I like. Of course, I liked Angela [Gossow] but I like Alyssa [White-Gluz] too – they opened up for us in Canada way back when. Children Of Bodom, and Amon Amarth I like. I saw them last year in Wacken and it was great, it was fucking great!
Speaking of frontwomen like Liv Jagrell and Alyssa White-Gluz, I was going to ask who, down the line, do you think would be the natural successors to your Queen of Metal title, singers who you could pass the torch to?
We toured with Veronica Freeman and Benedictum and that was great, she has awesome pipes – she’s a powerful singer. And Lzzy Hale from Halestorm, I think she’s great – great voice, great aura, great personality, I think she’s awesome, awesome! My guitar player Bas [Maas] played with Floor Jansen in After Forever and I think she has an awesome voice, she’s powerful. But there are great women, and I don’t want to leave out so many great women, I would say the torch will be passed on to at least twenty or thirty great, great singers and musicians. There is great potential. In the Eighties when we were growing up there was a lot of women showing a lot of skin and it was more about the looks, but now it’s more about the talent and that’s great.
It says a lot, though, that many of the girl bands that would have been viewed more as sex objects three decades ago are now back, or never went away in the first place, outliving the male bands. Yourself, the aforementioned Rock Goddess, Girlschool….
Girlschool, we became friends in the early Eighties. I will go and see them when they’re on tour with Motörhead and Saxon. We start our tour a couple of days later but I want to go and see them. And Rock Goddess, I really gotta check them out again, that was my favourite band… but it didn’t really matter if they were men or women, it’s just music.
You mentioned your upcoming tour: you’ll be hitting Wales again as one of three dates on the UK leg of the tour. You’ve been doing one-off UK shows in recent times, so three means it’s getting bigger!
I said I would even do more, but we had other dates already confirmed for the European leg. But there were even more dates in the making – Dublin and a couple of others, but we will add them on next year. And I’ll tell you, it means a lot to tour the UK. It’s where we started, and we were influenced by all the great, great bands. Somehow it means so much here – they know so much about rock ‘n’ roll, about metal. It’s different here, you feel it.
I have to ask you about Gene Simmons, who produced your second solo album, the self-titled record released in 1990. How do you feel about his comments last year claiming that rock is dead?
I’ve been through the really big metal times in the Eighties when we thought it couldn’t get bigger but, unfortunately, I had to hang in there for many years waiting for metal to get back when grunge was so big. Sometimes they wouldn’t put out the records, and I did four or five and delivered them to the record companies saying “yeah, I think we have great songs,” and I’d suggest what I thought were singles, but they’d ask “is it grunge?” When I said no they’d be asking what I meant, so I told them that it might be a little more industrial, more experimental, but they said that if it wasn’t grunge then they couldn’t release it. For four records they told me this – it was heartbreaking, it was un-fucking-believable.
Then, in 1999, I rang Ronnie James Dio in New York to congratulate him on his new record and he told me that he loved my version of ‘Egypt (The Chains Are On)’ [from the ‘Holy Dio’ tribute album released in January 2000] and I felt so great! So, we were talking and listening to the ‘Magica’ record, then, a few months later I did an interview with KNAC and they asked about my new album, ‘Calling The Wild’, which I said was coming out soon. They asked if I had any touring plans when the record was released and I said we were looking to either do a small club tour or hop on tour with someone as a support band – they asked who would be my dream band to support and I said, of course, Dio. The interviewer said Ronnie was calling the station two hours later to do an interview himself and she suggested that she ask him… which she did! So, a couple of months later in 2000 we were on tour together.
I gave my life insurance for that because, you know, touring is hard – tour bus, road crew, musicians, it was such a big thing. And everybody said I was so stupid, so crazy, because grunge was big and metal was nowhere, but I told them that I didn’t believe that and that I thought the tour would be great. We did the tour and it was completely sold out and completely packed, and that was the first time that a record was released again in the States – in Europe they released some of the records, but in the States, no way – and I could feel it was coming back.
You know, it always goes through cycles and sometimes you just have to hold on, you just have to concentrate on the die-hard fans, which are always there. Maybe not the masses, and maybe not the media or the industry will support, but I think it will always come back. Sometimes it’s maybe not as huge, as big, but you have to wait it out.
And I know what Gene means – the scene is totally different from when we did all the albums in the Eighties or Nineties. MTV was playing all the videos but now it’s only soap operas, so a lot of things changed. Then, of course, with the internet you can get all of the music for free – some of the record companies that I was with didn’t make it because of that. So many record companies closed their doors so, I think, the industry definitely changed. On one hand I think it totally sucks, but on the other I think it’s great that the artists now have the freedom to do whatever they want.
In the Eighties when I was with the big major labels everybody always wanted to have the say-so: which direction to go in; which hit single; the look – oh, it was so much pressure. We had many fights, discussions, so there’s always good and bad in everything. Okay, the industry is now smaller, but freedom is the most precious thing. Of course, the record sales are not so big…
But that’s Gene’s angle, isn’t it? Surely it just makes touring more important?
Yeah, now touring is non-stop! Before it was two years making a record, maybe three, then tour the record, now it’s the other way around. We do a record but it’s not a priority anymore, which is okay because we have, like, seventeen records to choose a setlist from!
So how does that affect the future and the planning of a new record?
I’m ready to record a new record, and I wanna put out a new single this year – and I wanna do a mini-movie as a video for that single. Maybe we’ll have to do it with crowdfunding because, you know, the record company don’t care if we do a video. Maybe fans will support it and they’d get extra stuff like a DVD or a private concert or stage clothes, something cool, or maybe they can have their name as an executive producer or something, or their name in the credits.
I definitely wanna do a big-time video like we did in the Eighties, not cheap shit. And I like the song too – it’s a strong song, mid-tempo but I love it, it has beautiful melodies, and I don’t want to have to wait one or two years to put it out, I wanna put it out this year. Then next year, in March, the DVD will come out for the 30th anniversary with many, many guests. It’ll be a live CD, three DVDs, two Blu-rays, so it’s a lot of work – we’ve already worked on it for one and a half years.
Then the new record in maybe one year – we are already working on the songs and have some great demos so it’s in the making, but I always have to be in the right mindframe, not being on tour. When I’m on tour, festivals or whatever, I have to make sure that the body is in great shape so I constantly work out, and I do martial arts – I’m a big martial arts fan. When I’m in the studio it’s more about thinking and more from the heart.
Times are so rough worldwide, I feel, so we need more positive things – it’s tough enough. I used to be so destructive, but now there’s so much killing and so much terror that all the good ones must stick together and fight. Before we had no problems – in the Eighties a problem was when the hair wasn’t in good shape! Before it was only about metal, and so innocent – now we tour somewhere and there’s a bomb attack. Before it was about the hair, the studded vest, the best jacket or how to get the record you love, how to find the greatest bootleg.
Now, you wanna write something that will hopefully mean something to people, that empowers them.
DORO will three UK shows this November:
20 Nov – Norwich, Waterfront
21 Nov – Buckley, Tivoli
22 Nov – London, Garage
Get more info at: https://www.facebook.com/DoroOfficial