Speaking to Arjen Lucassen is just a pleasure. He’s one of those artists who is so immersed in his art, that every conversation feels like it’s the first time he’s ever had to answer a series of questions which, in point of fact, he’s probably been fending off for days. Ask him about Star Trek and he lights up, ready to talk for hours; talk about the joy of the musicians with whom he works, and he practically explodes at the memory of it.
It’s that rampant enthusiasm that lies at the core of everything that he does that makes his musical spectaculars such a refreshing and engaging experience. How can you not thrill to the sight of a group of world class musicians so clearly having the time of their lives on stage? And to find that the man at the heart of it all is every bit as electrifying as the music he produces is just wonderful.
Here, we have a chat recorded with Arjen just prior to the release of the epic Electric Castle Live And Other tales, talking about the epic preparations that went into the show, the spectacular DVD the band have produced and, of course, working with Star Trek legend John De Lancie…
Congratulations on the new release – it’s epic in every sense of the word!
It’s a lot of hours. Six hours in total, but I think only the real fans will get through interviews that last four and a half hours.
It’s always the way – it’s nice to have those things and break them up into chunks, I guess, and come back to them time and again.
That’s the only way!
For me, I’m sat in my room at the moment surrounded by a stack of Star Trek DVDs, not least because of the lock down, and I know you’ve spoken about this elsewhere, but right from the start there’s that feeling the plot is very reminiscent of early Star trek – I think the Squire Of Gothos – where a group of Enterprise characters are drawn into a castle to fulfil the whims of an alien being… and I know you’re a huge fan of the show, so how much of it was in your mind when you wrote the original album?
Oh man! So much. Start Trek is always on my mind. That’s where it started, you know? I was a little kid, I was maybe about ten, and I saw the old series on TV on a Sunday afternoon, I still remember, and I was sold man – those weird suits and weird colours and green women and purple planets and I was, like, totally sold on that. So, I guess, everything I do can be traced back to Star trek. I mean, I think, like my album 01011001, I know one of the Star Trek episodes is also about binary code – The Next Generation – and, of course, The Human Equation is a quote from Data in one of the episodes. So, yeah, it’s all in there and, I’m not sure, but the character of Forever in the story could very well be based on Q, you know, because it’s about an omnipotent being who’s experimenting with human kind. So, yeah, that’s Q and that’s Forever and that’s why I instant thought of contacting John De Lancie for this, of course.
He’s such a perfect choice, as you say, Q is the obvious parallel from The Next Generation Series. What I really liked about the character that you wrote, and about John De Lancie when he’s playing Q is, that although he can be sinister, he’s always got that twinkle in his eye and I think that’s essential in getting the story to fall in between slightly camp and yet still exciting and engaging.
Absolutely. Absolutely, I’ve always wanted that feeling to be there and it was the same with Q, you know. He was pretty mean, but in the end he always meant well. Or at least, you would think that he always meant well. So, yeah, of course I’d been skyping with John a lot, talking about his part in this and that’s scary man, if you grew up watching The Next Generation, and suddenly you’re Skyping with the man, it’s scary! I was so nervous, but you know, within five minutes, he’s such a nice guy and he was so excited to do this. He was really, really excited about it and he wanted to write all his own texts and, of course he wanted to get it right and he wanted to know what each song was about and I think it took him like half a year or so to write all his narration.
Wow!
Yeah, it’s amazing. And his wife, Marnie, she was in one of the Star Trek episodes as well, she’s an actress. She helped him a lot. She’s a musician as well, so yeah, the two of them are amazing.
I think you recently shared a video clip of you talking about John and then he gives an interview as well and it was so cool to see how excited he was to be involved in a rock opera and to be doing something like this.
He’s still mailing me! “When are we going to do it again?” “How are you?” “Did you already send me the DVD?” and then he said “I had this Star Trek convention somewhere on a cruise ship and I was talking about this to everyone…” he’s so excited about it and yeah, like he said in the interview, his agent, in the first instance, she said “no!”. “No way, you’re not going to do a rock opera!” And he said “This is my rock opera! I’m seventy now and this is the last chance I’ll get to do this!” and he watched a lot of stuff with me on YouTube and he loved it, and you could see it in the video as he’s swinging along to the music. This could not have been more perfect.
You don’t tour, so I guess not going out on a regular basis gives you he opportunity and the time to create these grand spectacles that you did with Universe, and now with Electric Castle, how long did it take to…. Because it’s one hell of set you’ve got and, to me, it looks like an old Star trek set with the castle walls and the smoke… how long did it take get all that conceptualised and put together?
Well, thank you! Um, we started two years in advance. That sounds a bit weird – why would you start two years in advance – but we, Joost and me (I do it all with the keyboard player, Joost van den Broeg) we want to have this done a year in advance, we want to be ready. Because you know how it goes, there’s always problems and this has to be changed, and this has to be changed and this isn’t good and so, we said, OK, we want to be ready a year in advance. So, we started two years in advance and you have to, also, you have to get all these musicians, you know, and a lot of these musicians plan ahead for years, you have to be early and then, a year in advance, we were ready. But then, of course, you get all the extra shit – the things that aren’t possible or the person who’s not available, or things that you have to move. So, then, you have plenty of time to fix everything. If you only start a few months before, you get a good show; but we didn’t want a good show, we wanted a perfect show. We wanted everything to be perfect, so it means a lot of preparations and especially phone calls between me and Joost. We spent, like, an hour a day talking about everything. Like you said, it’s like a Star Trek set and we talked about that for… it looks amazing when you see it on stage, but we talked about that for months and months and we had all these ideas, like what do we have? A cardboard castle? Everything! We tried everything, you know, and in the end you come up with the idea and then, of course, you talk about it with technical people who have their ideas too… so that’s the way it goes, just a lot of talking.
In terms of getting the music ready, obviously you’ve got the score and original album that people can work from; but it must be a challenge to bring all those musicians together, so how much physical rehearsal time did you have, because the music is so tight… that’s got to be a challenge.
Well, the good thing is that all the musicians are Dutch. So, we rehearsed like once a month, and I think we started half a year in advance, so we had about six rehearsals before the show with just the band, and then, after those six rehearsals, we had rehearsals with the classical musicians, and then we had a few rehearsals with a few singers, but only the Dutch singers. So, it sounds kinda scary, but with all the singers, we only had one rehearsal, and that was the day before the shows. So, basically, we went for the whole week, because we had to build the castle, you know, that took about four days to build… so, from the Monday we were setting up, and then from the Thursday we had a rehearsal with everyone. But, you know, you work with professionals, and if everyone learns their parts at home, then nothing can go wrong. And that’s the way I like it. I want things to be spontaneous. I don’t want things to be routine. It’s also why I stopped playing live. I still remember, I’d play the same show for like two years, and three times a week, and it was just so…. I felt like a clown, almost, on stage. When you only do it four times, the risk is that you’ll make mistakes, because it’s not routine, but the upside is that everything is so spontaneous and everyone is having fun and you’re not sure what to expect next and you’re not sure what will happen. So, it’s all in the preparations, that’s extremely important.
That spontaneity, there must be a lot of feeding off the audience as well – the reactions are huge! Every song people are singing and chanting, it’s so cool to hear, because you don’t necessarily get that when a band is on the road all the time unless they’re super, super huge…
It’s a very, very loyal audience and I keep saying it, and I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s the best audience ever. They are really part of the story, they know all the lyrics, you feed off that. Saying to John, because he’s used to a theatre audience who are seated, and they don’t react… he did not expect this. When he says “and the hippy, he’s outta sight” and put his fingers up and the whole venue went crazy and I could see that the first time he did that and the audience went wild, I could see him, like, “what’s happening here?! I’m not used to this!” But, also, the other musicians say the same. With their own bands, they don’t have such an excitable and positive audience. They’re so polite and… I don’t know if you got that from the behind the scenes, but we basically turned this event into an Ayreon Weekend across the city. So, the whole weekend was Ayreon – restaurants were doing Ayreon burgers, and all the bars had specially brewed Ayreon beer and there was an exhibition of paintings, there was Ayreon camping etc. etc. Everything you can think of… there were Ayreon flags everywhere and, in the municipality of Tilburg, we arranged all that. That also takes a year, to get things like that done, especially with the bureaucracy of a municipality with all these people… and they say they’ll do something and then it doesn’t happen, you know… but at some point, even they got excited and now they want to do it again! The mayor, she handed me some kind of award, because I got 12,000 visitors from 64 countries in one weekend in Tilburg, and people in shops were, at first, a bit worried about a rock concert with all these hard rock, leather boys and they didn’t know what to expect, but they never saw something like this – people were standing in line, they were all so polite and nice… it was great!
When we spoke last time, we spoke about music as an immersive experience and taking people out of the real world, which you could argue right now is more important than ever… this is that idea writ large, taking over a whole town… that’s amazing!
I keep saying it, my music is pure escapism. I don’t want to teach people anything, I don’t want people to read between the lines or get it to convey a message or anything. That’s not my task, and I’m not good at that, but I am good at offering people escapism. Especially, you know, when people come from all over the place. They come from Australia, from Argentina and from Russia, from all over the place and we were thinking that, if they come, they may go to more than one show and what are they going to do all day? We thought if we offered them a whole weekend, a whole experience, an Ayreon holiday or whatever, and that was particularly important for us.
It sounds so cool, and it looks amazing and that idea of escapism, obviously different bands take different approaches, but that whole framework of having a narrative and having the stage show, it really creates something special for people.
Thanks man, thank you. And, like you said, I’m not saying people shouldn’t have messages in their shows, not at all. Bands should, you know. It’s a good thing. I’m just saying, I don’t have that, let that be clear.
I’ve always felt that each band should take approaches that work for them and, for an audience as well, you need to have diversity. You can’t listen to heavy-duty, socio-political messages in every album – you’d go nuts!
Absolutely!
But one of the great things about this concert is that, alongside the Electric Castle, you’ve got the second half of the show where you dig deep and pull out other material – how did you approach that side of things and get the live flow that you wanted?
Well, of course, we wanted to do the whole album, but it’s not enough. Like I said, people came from 64 countries, so you can’t give them a one-and-a-half-hour show – it has to be at least two and half hours, so you have to give them something else. So, yeah, we have to give them encores, but like we talked about in 2017, we’d already done Ayreon universe, and the subtitle of that was the best of Ayreon, so we’d already played the best Ayreon songs. So, if you play encores, you’re just going to play the same songs again and I don’t like that, you know.
I’ve already said, that’s getting like when I toured for fifteen years, playing the same songs repeatedly. We didn’t want to do that, we had to come up with a concept where we could do new stuff. So, then I thought about some Star One, and then maybe something from my solo album; and then, at some point, we came to the idea to pick songs from each of my side projects. And then, of course, it’s like what would fit into the concept, so I didn’t pick my favourite songs, I picked songs that I thought would go down well with the audience, with the live show, and have a little bit of difference – some serious songs, like The Guilt Machine song, Twisted Coil, which is a very serious, heavy, slow-burning, atmospheric track. And then you have the total silliness of Pink Beatles in a Purple Zeppelin, with me giving out balloons… I like the extremes. I like at one point being serious and then at the next point being totally cheesy. That’s what I like about artists like Devin Townsend – we do the same thing, basically.
It’s really cool seeing the way the band can shift from the heavy riffing to the ethereal, almost Floydian playfulness…
Almost… Very Floydesque!
On top of that, you get the opportunity to do the Marillion cover, which is something special as well.
Well, we had Fish, you know. When I did the original album back in 98, or I recorded it in 97, it was extremely hard to get Fish, because he was at his peak back then. I think it took me half a year to convince him to do that and he finally said “OK, I’ve got one evening for you” and I had to go to Scotland. So, I was in Scotland in his studio, we still had to write lyrics, even, that same day, so we put it all together that same day, but it meant he had a small part. He’s just in three songs and I had to kill him off fast in the story, so he’s already gone after six songs and CD 2 has no Islander, it has no Fish. And we were like “goddam, we have Fish, but he has so little to do…” So, we had to do something with Fish, and we figured a Marillion song… but then we had to decide whether to do a favourite Marillion song or a well-known Marillion song. So, we thought that Kayleigh was such a huge hit in Holland and, as soon as the riff starts people know the song, so we thought we’d do that… and Fish didn’t like that at all. He said “oh no, man, you should do incommunicado… you should do any song or a song off my solo album…” or whatever, so we really had to convince him to do it, and he hadn’t done it for like twenty or thirty years, and neither had Marillion. So, we figured that was a good reason to do it, because it hadn’t been done for such a long time.
So, yeah, for me it had to be Kayleigh, even though it’s definitely not my favourite song by Marillion. Looking back, I shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if it was the right choice. I don’t know that it fits with the other songs. You first have Guilt Machine, this heavy, dark, dark, long song and then suddenly you’ve got this “ding, ding, ding…” Also, when we were rehearsing, we were not really sure we should be doing it. I think, on the one side, people love it because they heard it on the radio and they grew up on it and you hear the riff coming and you get Fish singing it after thirty years, and that’s all great and all fantastic. In the end, did it really fit the concept and the other songs… I think that’s open to interpretation, I think everyone will have their own ideas about this, and it’s basically… the reviews I’m reading are all good, and people are very positive, but if they have something negative to say, it’s always about Kayleigh and we shouldn’t have done Kayleigh. So, maybe they have a point…
But then, as you say, it hadn’t been done for a long time, so maybe it’s a treat for those who had known the song for so long and never heard it live…
I think so. I think so, but then, I think there were people who didn’t even know the song, because my brother was in the audience and he heard people asking what side project of mine the song was from! They didn’t know it, so yeah, there were people… Of course, how old is saying. It’s from the eighties, so younger people might not know it, that’s true.
The last question that I have returns to something John said in his interview, and it touches on something we spoke about last time – he was talking about the real joy and love between the musicians…
I Know, those were his words and he kept saying “joy”, you’re right…
That’s so important for this sort of music – it’s about escapism, and communication and community and it’s so important to have the right musicians to create that feeling.
Absolutely, and I’m sure we must have talked about that last time, but that’s really a big… it plays a big part in my deciding who the musicians will be and who the singers will be. If I can get an amazing singer but I feel that they don’t fit with the other singers, or they don’t fit into the concept, I feel like they could never be part of this family… because that’s what it is, as cheesy as it sounds… I just won’t ask them. As soon as I get that feeling, or people get the feeling they’ll only do it for the money, or whatever. I just cancel it. It happened, you know; it didn’t happen with the Castle show, of course, because we used the same singers as the albums, we didn’t have a choice, but it happened with Universe, where I just felt that something wasn’t right, and we got someone else. Because, like you said, that translates on the stage. You can see people having fun and it’s weird, you play this really serious songs, like Castle Hall, with people dying and heads being chopped off and everyone’s on stage with big smiles, it’s kind of weird, actually, when you think about it.
It’s that kind of Grand Concept and gran pantomime… it’s like with Star Trek and, looking back at, say Q, some of the things he did, it was really dark stuff, but there was always a twinkle in his eye and a moment at the end where the humanity crept back in…
Oh yes, yes. I talked with John a lot about that and he said yeah, at some point he felt that the humour was getting too much in certain episodes. He said that danger always has to be there. The danger must be there, then you put in the humour and it works. But if it’s just silliness… I think he may have been referring to the Mexican dance… I remember liking it as a kid, but maybe they went a bit overboard there with the cigars, and the Mexican shit….
Funnily enough I watched that episode a couple of days ago, and it still cracks me up…
I know, it’s fun, but the danger is gone there. You’re not going to expect this guy to wipe out humanity… you have to have that feeling… the way he was in this show, he was still killing off people, you know… but humour has always been important and that’s one of the main reasons I like Star Trek. One of the funniest scenes must be where Data and Picard are in the same room and they have to spend the night and, of course, Data doesn’t sleep, so he’s just standing there and Picard tries to sleep and he sees Data just standing there and there’s no way he can sleep and he’s ordering Data to turn around. It’s so funny and that’s humour for me. All that sci-fi stuff now, where it’s all action and special FX and stuff, it’s just not for me. I need that humour, always, to be present.
I know, I agree, it’s become a bit too self-important and the early sci fi, they weren’t afraid to let a bit of vulnerability and humanity show…
And the chemistry between Bones and Spock, it was perfect. That’s what it’s about for me. Not the aliens, or the spaceships or the space battles – it’s those little things, chemistry between actors, between parts, and between characters. I guess that’s why I’m attracted. I also get that family feeling with Start Trek. Also, if you see Star Trek conventions, also it’s one big family, even if there are all these people on stage… I feel that and I really like that.
… and that’s the appeal, I think, of the Ayreon shows. You can feel that relationship between the musicians and audience, even at the remove of watching on screen, it comes across really well.
Great, well I’m glad to hear that.
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