Arjen Anthony Lucassen is in an ebullient mood. Just six months ago, we spoke about his remarkable Into The Electric Castle Live set, a powerhouse live album narrated by John De Lancie (Of Q fame) and performed by an all-star cast of remarkable musicians. Little did either of us know at that time that we’d be meeting again so soon. But, as with so many people, the pandemic has altered plans and Arjen, who had aimed to make a movie, was forced to adapt his project. What has emerged, is a remarkable album. A double set, now narrated by Tom Baker (a last minute addition without whom it is hard to imagine the record), and with a comic book that details the labyrinthine plot, it is typically Ayreon in the sense that it is a hugely ambitious, meticulously developed body of work and yet there are differences. Eschewing sci fi for Poe-esque Gothic, it is a sumptuous tale that hooks the listener from the outset and provides Arjen and his cohorts with whole new musical realms to explore.
I was looking back at my notes and the last time we spoke was only a few months ago in May, for the Electric Castle Live Show…
I know! I Know…
…And here we are again!
Yes, yes – I’m very prolific!
So, yeah, I’m absolutely delighted to be speaking to you again. The first thing that I wanted to ask about is the story – you’ve stepped outside of the traditional Ayreon mould – what were the initial steps that led to you taking a path towards this wonderful, Poe-esque narrative?
Thank You! Well, I wanted to fulfil one of my dreams, which was making a movie. You know, I’ve done everything by now and I’ve worked with the whole world [laughs] and this time, I was like: “OK, I’m a big movie freak, a big TV series freak, let’s see if I can do that!” So, this whole thing was set up as a movie. The whole story: I picked all the singers, not just on their voices, but also what do they look like. Are they charismatic? Do they look the part? Can they act? It wasn’t set up as an Ayreon album. But, then of course this whole Corona thing happened and it’s really hard to get funding, because making a movie costs millions and, if you’re talking about millions, you’re talking about low budget, you know, so… So, it’s very tricky and, at this time, no one wanted to invest in this and, secondly, no one at this time really wants to shoot a movie, I think.
So, yeah, I went to the record company. I worked on this for three years, I started three years ago, and I think it’s the biggest production I’ve ever done – the biggest work I’ve ever put in and I went to the record company with the music and I’d already recorded a few clips and I said “well, what do you guys think? Shall we just release it as an album? What do you guys think?” And they said: “well, to us, it sounds enough like Ayreon…” OK, it’s very different from the previous releases. It’s not a big science fiction thing. It’s not a big metal / prog thing. It’s more, basically, a musical than a rock opera… So, they said that it’s cool to do something new. Progressive means to do something new, so in that vein, they were happy to release this as Ayreon.
So, then I had to get used to the fact. I played it to a few friends, and they all said: “Yeah, of course you can release this as an Ayreon album. It has all the ingredients – the different singers, the different styles of music; it has a storyline, a concept etc. So, yeah, we took the big step and we thought we would release it as an album and comic book, as Ayreon.
I’m really interested in the art of creating concept records or rock operas and I remember reading an interview with Axis of Perdition, who had crafted this musical story (“Urfe”) and they said that one of the things they needed to do was to map out the physical world that the characters inhabited, so that the story would make sense. When you came to create Transitus, obviously the characters are moving through this huge realm – did you have a similar process of mapping out the physical environment for your characters?
I did this time. Yeah. It’s the first time I’ve done that, basically. In the past, I always started with the music and then I let the music inspire me for the concept. Then I’d write the story, then I’d have the music and the story, then I’d pick the singers. Then, you know, once the singers had agreed, I’d divide them over the album. I often based the characters on the singers. But this time it was very different. This time, I just started with the story, which is a first for me. And yes, I wanted to be very visual, so I thought that, if this movie was not going to happen, we’d do the comic book. It’s another thing – I was a total comic book nerd as a kid – I ran to the shop to get Spider Man. Ever day, while the other kids were playing outside, I was there, with my curtains closed, in my room reading Spider Man and Batman and whatever.
So, yeah, I wanted the best… You know me, a total perfectionist. I want the best singers in the world, the best guitar players, the best musicians etc. So, I wanted the best comic book guy I could find. I’d really been searching all over the world and finally I got in touch with a publishing agency in Chile, and they had ten artists and they showed them to me, and number three was Felix and I was like: “Oh my god! That’s the guy! And they said: “You’re in luck, because he likes this kind of music.” Which is very important to me, you know, I wouldn’t want to work with a guy who hates the music, it wouldn’t be nice to work together. I send him music and I want him to be inspired by that. So, yeah, we worked on it for a year, actually. We worked about two weeks on one page – me sending him all the ideas and him sending me sketches, and then me complaining that it’s not good enough [laughs] and that way, like you said, you get a whole picture. You map it out. What does this look like? What does that look like? It’s a whole different way of working, yeah.
I’ve seen a couple of the comic book panels, and I love the fact that Felix has captured the likeness of the singers, so there’s that continuity!
Yeah! That was kind of a risk, because you never know when a singer is going to drop out at the last moment. You have to redo shit! [Laughs] It happens. It always happens and it happened this time, too. One of the furies was someone else, so he had to change those panels.
But, yeah, I thought it was very important. These singers are also going to be in the movie and also in the comic book – this is really cool. So, I gave them a call to ask if they minded being in a comic book and then Felix made sketches of all the artists and I sent it to them to see if they agreed with it or thought it was terrible [laughs]. And they all agreed. Some asked for some small changes, but yeah, I want everyone to be happy. That’s very important.
Well, it looks great. I used to love the DC Star Trek comics and they were usually great, but every so often, they’d have this perfect cover and you’d open it up and, inside, none of the drawings looked like the actors and it was always so disappointing!
Right! Yeah!
I’m a huge literature fan and I’ve always liked the way that gothic literature is timeless – it reflects the society that it’s in, you can translate the themes forward and back and, because there’s no technology there, it creates something that doesn’t date, and I think that’s a very important component of what you’ve made with Transitus.
It is! I don’t want people with mobile phones running around in my story! [Laughs] I finally got my first mobile phone a couple of weeks ago to do these interviews, but I was totally against it, so… I thought it was very important for the story to be in the nineteenth century. Also, because you’ve got this romance between a rich man’s son and a servant, you know, and even a black servant, so it’s very cool when it’s set in that age and you’ve got that whole gothic feel – those old Hammer Horror movies and TV series and that’s what I tried to capture. And that’s also… I’ve been stealing a lot and normally I don’t do this. I don’t listen to other music when I work on an album, I don’t want to be influenced, but this time I was totally watching a lot of those movies, listening to a lot of soundtracks, the ole soundtracks – Halloween – but also Westerns, like Ennio Morricone. Not just being inspired by it, but totally stealing it. So, “let’s see if this works” – let’s take a theme [breaks off to play the theme to Halloween on a nearby synth] you know? {[laughs]. So, yeah, to see if I could make it my own and change little bits so that people wouldn’t say I’d stolen it and I wouldn’t’ get into trouble with John Carpenter! So, yeah, if you listen, I totally hear all these influences and I’m like “my god, this is too much!” But so far, you know, people haven’t really picked up on it.
Of course, people hear the influence – the War of The Worlds stuff and Jesus Christ Superstar but, yeah, again – it’s a different way of working.
One of my favourite composers was James Horner, who did the music for Star Trek II and III, and he always had that huge, bombastic orchestration – similar to Holst, I guess – and when I was listening to the end of Fatum and the beginning of Daniel’s Descent, I got that vibe, which is so cool.
It’s funny – like the most comparisons I had was Holst and Mars and that’s the only album that I didn’t steal from. I totally based that on the Bolero [sings a few notes of the Bolero] – that’s where that came from. But yeah, I listened to it and it’s very cool, especially the track – Hopelessly Slipping Away, which is the first clip we put out. It has that feel, and then you see this red planet and the Holst theme is complete, of course.
It’s funny you should mention Bolero, it’s such a dynamic piece of music and I remember Steve Hackett talking about what an influential piece it is and how it drove the dynamic in a lot of sweeping prog.
Ah, of course. And Yes, on their album Time and A Word also had this classical piece [sings] It’s beautiful, you know. It’s funny – as a kid I oved all those classical parts, but I didn’t like the originals. I didn’t like the classical orchestra, I always liked what prog bands did with it. What Emmerson, Lake and Palmer did with these things. It’s basically the sounds I think, I love the sounds of these old synthesisers and old Hammonds and stuff like that and they were used a lot in the early seventies.
The last time we spoke, we were kind of geeking out that you had John De Lancie working with you and now you’ve done it again with Tom Baker, which is so amazing. He’s got the perfect voice for this, so I guess you had a very strong idea of who you wanted for the part?
Yes… well, not from the start. That’s the weird thing, the narration was the last addition…
Really?
Oh yeah, everything was ready and finished and I played it to people and a lot of people were like “woah, those first ten minutes man! God, it’s hard to get into and you’re thrown from one emotion to another – what’s happening?” And I thought “yeah – it’s true, maybe it needs narration”, which I thought would be a shame because it goes over the music and you wouldn’t be able to hear it anymore. But I thought that if I was going to get narration, I’d need a voice so truly amazing that you’d wait for it all the time. I really needed one of the best, so I made a little list of actors that I wanted to work with.
But the whole movie business is a different world, mostly financially it’s… oh my god, you know, the prices that you pay in that world are just awful. I was also negotiating with Gillian Anderson of X Files and Whoopie Goldberg, and the prices they asked…. Gillian Anderson was like £100,000 a day! It’s really “woah!” So, yeah, there’s a lot of negotiating and, eventually, I got through to the voice agency of Tom Baker and after a lot of negotiating we agreed on a price. But then, of course, they have to pitch it to Tom, and he has to like it. So, we totally wrote the narration for his style. I mean, I grew up with the guy. I grew up in the seventies – I loved Dr Who and his Dr, mostly. He’s intelligent and has humour and sarcasm and that’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted a mature voice – a storyteller telling the story to a kid and, of course, with Tom Baker you have the perfect guy and the perfect voice.
So, he agreed to do it. He loved it and we went to England and it was one of the best days of my life. Because, meeting your heroes is always scary – “is he going to be an asshole?” “Is he going to be uninterested?” Or whatever, and he was totally into the story and he really put himself in it. He wasn’t just reading the lines, he was adding stuff and changing stuff and putting humour in it, which is very important for me. So, it couldn’t have been better.
It really sounds like he was having a lot of fun, and when he gives that little warning at the beginning about the story not being for the faint of heart, I couldn’t help but think of John De Lancie on the Electric Castle saying “I warned you, didn’t I?” – it’s just brilliant.
[Laughs] Yeah! John was amazing too. Oh my god! He wrote all the stuff himself of course. It’s so, so great to meet your heroes and, you know, they turn out to be great people. It’s kind of proved… it’s like, “OK, I’ve always seen this person…” every time Q came on, it was just cool. He was such a cool guy and Laurie and me often say to each other that we can’t imagine this guy being an asshole in real life. But, you know, it happens. I’m sure you do interview with guys you really admire and like and you talk to them and it’s like “oh my god! What a disappointment!” And, I’ve had it too with certain people, where you meet a hero and you’re disappointed and that’s awful, because you can’t listen to their music anymore like that, with that in mind. It’s one of the reasons why I never wanted to meet Alice Cooper. I could have met him a million times and he’s my hero. I grew up on him and he has humour and I was just… he’s a totally nice guy, you know. But I Was afraid that if I met him and he was in a bad mood or something… and what would I say? [Adopts slightly cringing voice] “I’m your biggest fan – I have all your albums!” [Laughs] I have not idea.
But these two cases… you work with someone, you can be creative, you can be productive – it’s a great experience.
Again, I know we’ve talked about this in both of the previous interviews, but I think that for the listener, being able to hear when someone is relishing every aspect of the role, it makes it so much more of an experience.
It’s true and on the DVD, there’s a behind the scenes on the DVD, where you see everything. You see us coming into the studio, you see us talking to Tom, you see him doing his narration in the booth and you can see him enjoying himself. So, yeah, it’s great.
With regard musical composition, the album expands on what’s gone before and, as you said, there’s a lot of pulling in ideas from soundtracks and I think that, for a musician, one of the most exciting things is when you have an idea in your head, but you don’t really know how to achieve it – do you find that your ideas take time to develop and then, in unexpected ways?
The weird thing is that it changes constantly. I have this idea in my head. I start with an idea, but it really works out completely different. I just let it happen and I had to learn that. When I started with Ayreon, I had this idea in my head and that’s what I wanted, and I didn’t want any change. So, in came the singer, and they tried to change something, or a musician, and I was like: “NO! This is what I wrote…” And then you start to work with people like Fish, and Bruce Dickinson, and Devin Townsend and Akerfeldt, or whoever, and these guys do their thing, you know, you’re not going to tell them to do something a certain way – they’re going to do it the way that they want to do it [laughs]. And I noticed that it was getting better – it was better than I had in mind originally.
So, I really learned to adapt, and I really learned to constantly change. A good example from Transitus – the first two actors I had in mind were Tommy Karevik Paige and Simone Simons. Simone was going to be the poor servant girl and Tommy was going to be the rich man’s son. So, I started writing the story like that, but then on a compilation album I heard the voice of Cammie, of Oceans of Slumber. I think she was doing Whiter Shade of Pale, or something, and I was going “oh my god! What a voice, what a voice!!” And then I looked her up on YouTube and saw that she was a black girl, and then I thought that it would be even cooler if the servant would be a black girl in the story, especially as it’s set in the nineteenth century. So, I contacted Cammie and I thought that she would never have heard of me, but quite the opposite was true, because both her and her husband were big fans of my music! They knew all of it. Then I explained to Cammie, like, about the story and asked whether she’d mind, and she said that she totally understood and that it would make the story so much more interesting. So, they both came over all the way from Texas to my studio. It was luckily before all the Corona shit happened. So, yeah. My stories are constantly changing and constantly in motion and I think the result, eventually, is a lot better if you allow yourself to do that.
