R/ Oh really?

J/ Yes, Duende is a flamenco word which means when the music and performance takes you over totally. You know when the hairs on the back your neck stand up and you’re moved to tears when you watch or hear something?

R/ Yeah, shit, yeah! That’s a great thing. I’ll have to remember that..Have you heard the Bulgarian Voices?

J/ Yeah. That’s it. La Voix Bulgares? That’s the type of thing I’m talking about..

R/ Wow! Shit, those people blew me away! I saw them live a few years back and they were just out of this world!! There’s something gritty and real about folk music. It brings out something in you. They are often songs about freedom or about loss, that’s what calls to you, that’s what grabs you. People write great music when they’ve just been dumped by their girlfriend or whatever, hardship is always going to be the best stimulus for GREAT music. I was going through heavy emotional stuff when I was doing "Praise the Fallen", and for me it helped me to create some of my best work.. So I can understand and absorb lots of different influences, and I hope that these influences in whatever way or spirit come through in the music I do..

J/ So tell me a little about why you left Dependent?

R/ Well it wasn’t necessarily that we left Dependent. Let’s just say that there was a very big difference in opinion, between ourselves and the label management and also our manager was the label manager and we split. I don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye on that, but I don’t think that’s important anymore.. They were very good years for us. It was a great grounding it was a great base.. Dependent’s success came from the demise of OFF-BEAT and Stefan the head of Dependent took the four best selling bands, or the four bands with the best interest, and took them off to start his own label. It’s an instant formula for success. So he concentrated his efforts and made those four bands into industry leaders.. (For those of you that don’t know, those bands were – VNV, Covenant, Suicide Commando and Velvet Acid Christ) It was a great success. But I’m not soo sure how that’s worked with the follow up bands since Covenant and ourselves left… We knew even a long time ago that at some point we’d be leaving and we’d even discussed this with Dependent. Our aim was always to reach people, in our own way. Not by compromising or selling out, becoming some cheap, two centimetre deep version of ourselves in order to reach people. I don’t believe in that kind of selling out.

J/ So what about once you’d left Dependent surely you must have had a lot of major label interest? How did you deal with that and how come you ended up setting up your own label?

R/ As far as major interest, strange you say that.. I’m laughing because I’ve watched so many of the major players in the industry fall apart in the last few years. In Germany they’re talking about it as though it’s the end of the world. It’s like, financial realism. At the end of the 80’s everyone in the financial arena had speculated in the stock markets trying to make a quick buck and the fact was that the market couldn’t hold that. The money was paper money, it didn’t exist it was just a balloon, and that balloon had to pop. The same thing happened with the record industry. They were stuck on formulas, making vast amounts of money. They weren’t investing anything in any new talent, new talent to them was made up bands that would fit into the formula, and then the whole thing fell apart because people stopped buying CDs. Those that did buy CD’s found that when they got them home there were just one or two tracks on the album that were any good..so they rightfully felt cheated. There was a time when every major label in Germany was looking to sign every major successful band in our scene. Covenant did it, Pitchfork did it, De/Vision did it and they all failed. And we knew that they would fail. So let me go back to us… Major labels don’t interest me. I couldn’t see that we would ever succeed with them, I didn’t see that any other band would because the way in which our music is presented that people choose to buy it, any bands in our scene. They choose to like them or they don’t. If they choose to, it’s because they feel that the music/band speaks to them individually and personally. They choose it to be away from the mainstream, away from the charts and the main German radio. I mean German radio is dros! It’s the same 50 old songs on rotation...(continues)