LordCast: 002 Lordidas (08-05-2020)
Lordidas
(Lord + Adidas)
Chris: Moin (hello) and heartily welcome to the 2nd LordCast, today it is four of us, which is: Class! Here he comes, here he comes…
Gared: let’s count through…
Pi: One.
Gared: One.
Class: One.
Chris: So we are here today, Class – hello, Class!
Class: Hi people and Chris!
Chris: And with Gared – hello Gared!
Gared: Moin!
Chris: And with Pi … hello Pi.
Pi: Hello.
Chris: We have thought about three topics for today and we are trying to process these all, as we have one hour for that, divided by three topics, that makes 20 minutes, divided by four people it makes five minutes that everyone gets to talk, and of course it should not be more or less. First topic for today: merch ideas. I’ll say more about that in a moment. Second topic: musical origin. Third topic for today: the coolest holidays. You already noticed, we are THAT sophisticated… of course we can also talk about politics, butt-plugs and Software development…
Gared: What in the world are politic butt-plugs?
Chris: I would like to get started, we often did surveys in the official Fan group on Facebook about what you people out there would like to get as merch, and what I’d like to do with you today, we haven’t done that for a long time, independent from how expensive the production would be, if it is feasible or not, let’s completely leave out on the financial aspect, what would be your coolest merch items, that you have always been dreaming of, that you would really love to have from Lord of the Lost? That’s what I want to talk about today.
(1:39)
Class: The first thing that comes to my mind now is the Lord of the Lost toaster. I’d find that pretty cool.
Pi: What does it toast onto it?
Chris: What does it do? Burn the Lord of the Lost logo on the toast?
Class: Yes exactly. Either Lord of the Lost as a name, which I actually find the coolest, so… probably just Lord of the Lost.
Chris: Do we have a song title that we could alter so it makes a word play, to put that on the other side then?
Class: Yeah, right, it works from both sides.
Chris: Lord of the Toast.
Class: Set it on fire, watch it burn, but that’s …
Pi: It would be cool if it had 5 slots and each slot burns a different image/face.
Gared: Wow, like that toast that allegedly shows Jesus’ face.
Pi: Exactly! That would be cool.
Gared: Not.
Chris: But still! But what do we have about toast…?
Pi: Toast…
Gared: Lord of the Toast would be possible, at least optically, it’s just pronounced differently.
Chris: Yeah, but on the other side we should put some funny lyrics quote, like Sex on Toast, no…
Pi: That sounds… to each their own … crunchy and juicy!
Chris: La Toasta – come with me I come with you La Toasta! Actually I find a Lord of the Lost toaster not that absurd after all.
Pi: It is not.
Chris: Like for example St. Pauli has a soccer team, meanwhile not that small anymore, they have a St. Pauli toaster.
Pi: Yeah, I know. Meanwhile HSV has become a pretty small club – and they still have a toaster!
Chris: But to get a HSV (Hamburg soccer club) toast, you only need to rotate your toast by 45°and stuff it in the toaster - done! That’s no big deal, right?
Pi: No.
(3:15)
Pi: You can also build it up, that toaster.
Chris: Toast the shitty Aral logos. What I’d still love to have are Lord of the Lost sex toys.
Gared: Ok, Till Lindemann.
Chris: No, not like that! Not such huge, fat cocks, but…
Gared: No, more realistic, like ours.
Pi: Why not?
Chris: No, rather these little buzzies, those mini-vibrators or something…
Pi: Ah yeah, that’s cool.
Chris: And you can plug them … there’s these thingies that you can plug to an iPod, switch them on and they will vibrate to the music …“To The End *bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz*”
Gared: You know more than us there.
Chris: And in the front there’d be Lord of the …
Pi: Like a face or something?
Chris: Lordgasm. Which was by the way a suggestion from Class to be our band name, in 2009 or 2008 or something, “Lordgasm” … I still have the list.
Pi: Really? Lordgasm?!
Gared: What about publishing that list at some point?
Chris: The “finding a name”- list.
Pi: There was a full list? I didn’t know that! I thought, it was clear from the beginning.
Chris: It was not clear at all. Listen: the problem was this: our name was Lord.
Pi: Yes.
Chris: And then we noticed, there’s an Australian band named Lord, then there’s Lordi, that could mean troubles, then there’s “The Lords”, a rockabilly band, which could also cause troubles, that’s all stupid, risk of confusion blah… and so we looked for a name. Class, me, and Sebi back then, it was mainly the three of us searching. And then, when I had already thought about “Lord of the Flies”, which also is a book title, but doesn’t make any sense as a band name, the magnificent Marty, who is still a friend of us, who used to work at Out of Line, asked “What about Lord of the Lost?” … and I was like “Cool!”
(5:08)
Gared: I think we have already read out parts of that list at the Rocktalk in the TheARTer Gallery.
Chris: Could be.
Gared: That was anyway…
*all of them start talking at the same time*
Gared: …if you would have let me finish speaking…
Pi: Yeah, no… *unintelligible mumbling*
Gared: Perhaps we should introduce a speaking bottle (meaning like in Kindergarten, where it is your turn to speak, only when you have the ball)
Pi: But that didn’t go public! That old thing is a relic.
Chris: But to get back to the merch products … I’d find such little sex toys funny, even if it’s not THAT important.
Gared: Applied to members, or?
Chris: We already wanted to get condoms with Lord of the Lost written on them, or just “L”, so, depending… but somehow that didn’t work out because there are very strict safety standards that are impossible to meet when it comes to condoms with prints on them.
Class: It gets difficult if you print on the condoms as such.
Gared: But at least in terms of packaging… why not? Let’s just do it - as a gimmick.
Chris: We could definitely do that again. Try again to do that, I mean. Even if it is a giveaway, that every customer in our shop gets.
Gared: In my opinion they HAVE TO be for free, I don’t get, why they are not for free here in general, but that’s a different topic.
Chris: But I have to admit, there’s countries, I think in Scandinavia, where you get condoms for free. Not just that, but also tampons, sanitary napkins and all that stuff.
Pi: Which country was it that just abolished the taxes on those products?
(6:25)
Chris: Several ones. And that’s a good thing. But seriously, in my opinion if condoms, tampons, sanitary napkins and all things related to that, which are in a way unpleasant for young people, even more in less educated countries, or which help to avoid unwanted pregnancies, would be for free, to be collected from the pharmacy, so… that it’s not given away somewhere outside or something…
Gared: This has to be done in a controlled manner.
Chris: In a controlled manner and that it doesn’t deserve an excessive production, but that they just can go and collect it there.
Pi: That would indeed be something.
Chris: And not just for young people. Just imagine how much money women have to spend just because they bleed once a month, unlike us… these tampons are really expensive, generally ladies’ products are more expensive, the exact same damn razor costs one Euro more, just because it is pink… ok, I buy these too, because they are pink, but still. Razors!
Class: Razors. Lotl-Razors?
Chris: Which shave “Lord” into your leg hairs.
Gared: If we think about a song title there …”shave…”
Pi: “Shave…”
Chris: Razorblade Romance was a different band.
Gared: Ah yes, damn.
Class: I just had another idea.
Gared: “keeps you shaved from Harms”
Class: I want to have action figures. I just saw, that some guy in England made an action figure for an artist that I follow on Instagram, I think it was a unique piece, nicely packed considering the packaging design.
Chris: You may not unbox them, then they are worth more.
Class: Exactly. His upper body is tattooed completely and I don’t know if he printed or drew it on that action figure, which already looked completely like that artist -that’s super cool!
Pi: That’s cool!
Chris: By the way, as you are listening to this podcast now, if you got here via Facebook or via Instagram, you followed that link to Spotify… please go back to that social network and post your crazy merch ideas in the comments section. With those action figures the thing is, they are super expensive and you need a particular amount of issues, but yes, I also think…
(8:42)
Gared: The nice thing about those would be, if we sell them separately and not all five in a set, we can get some kind of monitoring about who’s the most popular one. That does not at all stir up antipathies, which is totally awesome!
Chris: That’s totally cool, because if you go to Hamburg Records a year later, and there you see the plenty of Gared Dirge figures, you think “Oh how nice, you like the Gired Dirge figures so much, you put all 100 of them on the shelf, you just didn’t want to sell them!”
Gared: Hashtag non-seller.
Pi: Yeah, exactly. But you could also do special editions to those of the crew, “There’s only one Bengt available in the whole world.”
Chris: You don’t need much material for that one.
Pi: That makes it cheaper, but you can sell it more expensive, as there’s only one of it.
Gared: But it has such a giant penis.
Chris: Which deserves an action figure on its own.
Gared: Do we have to mark this as “explicit” here now?
Pi: No. - It’s a living thing on its own.
Gared: As we were talking about mini sex toys and alike already... I think, we should really go “boy group” here now and make bedclothes.
Pi: Safe!
Chris: Bedclothes are great, towels, bathrobes…
Pi: Bathrobes!
Chris: But they have to be in the style of Rocky Balboa, with a huge hood.
Pi: And on the back our faces… big.
Chris: Or these sauna towels. Swiss (German band) for example sell sauna towels in rainbow colours with the Swiss logo on them. But then again… their album is called “Sauna Club”, so...
Pi: Yeah, it has to.
Chris: But how cool. You’re there on your holidays in Mallorca in summer and there you throw your Lord of the Lost sauna towel from the window to your deck chair.
Pi: That’s so typically German to reserve your deck chair with our towel. But you also need Lord of the Lost adilettes (slang word for slippers by Adidas) to go with it.
Gared: And tennis socks.
Chris: Lordilettes.
Gared: With seven stripes. Lordidas.
Pi: That’s forbidden, but it would be cool.
Chris: But you could just call them like that, just for fun.
(10:39)
Chris: "See, "too low of a level", as if!" (assumably he means the alcohol level).
Gared: if you are also that funny… that’s horrible.
Pi: With the level the funniness rises.
Class: I don’t think it’s that difficult, there’s more bands who have that.
Chris: To get back to that – Swiss also have these adilettes.
Class: “Haftbefehl” have that too… theirs are called “Brudiletten”, it says “Brudi” on the front. ("Brudi" is a diminuitive of "Bruder", meaning "brother")
Chris: I think, “Lordiletten” would be no problem, “Lordidas” could be a problem….
Gared: Even if I think that with Lordiletten there could be a problem with Lordi blah blah…
Pi: I don’t think so.
Chris: Lordi are not from Latvia, they’re no Latvians, (“Latvians” is “Letten” in German)
Class: The name “Adiletten” is legally protected, but you definitely still can call them “Lordiletten”.
Chris: I think, if you just name the type “Lordidas” and not use it as a brand name… what should they do about it?
Pi: Sue us for a million.
Gared: Adidas urgently needs that money right now.
(11:41)
Pi: So they can pay their rent.
Class: Not more than everybody else.
Chris: Do you know, what the name “Adidas” means?
Pi: “Alle deutschen Idioten denken an Sex“ (all German idiots think of sex)
Chris: Do you know it?
Pi: Yes. But I don’t want to tell.
Class: Adi Dassler.
Chris: Exactly. Andreas Dassler.
Gared: Wrong! Adolf Dassler.
Chris: Was it Adolf? I thought it was Andreas. And his brother was...
Class: Adolf… thus Adi!
Gared: And his brother was the founder of Puma.
Class: And one of them also had that… swimming clobbers … those…
Chris: Arena.
Class: Right, Arena. That’s also one of those Dassler brothers.
Gared: That’s an actual dynasty.
Chris: And then there’s Aldi Dassler, that’s the Aldi brothers, their cousins.
Class: Is that so?
Gared: No.
Pi: Why isn’t there Aldi West and Aldi East? And no Aldi North?
Chris: There IS Aldi East, it’s called Billo or whatever.
Class: Netto.
Pi: But there’s Aldi and Aldi South. Probably…
Gared: Meanwhile they’re united.
Chris: That’s the real German unity.
Class: That’s probably because there’s Germans and Bavarians.
Chris: Aldi schönen Menschen... ("All die schönen Menschen" would be "all the beautiful humans")
Gared: So the Albrecht brothers reconciled posthumously, so to speak.
Chris: Fuck, I always have so many great merch ideas, and now…
Gared: Well then… tell us!
Chris: Of course now I can’t think of any!
Pi: What I could think of, which is probably not even that absurd, is coffee. Drinks in general, but coffee… Lord of the Roast, Roast of the Lost or whatever…
Chris: There you have the problem that, some already would have tried that with energy drinks and champagne and whatever, here you have the problem with food stuff, there’s plenty of…
Pi: Yes, strict conditions.
Chris: So far everybody said, that’s difficult, otherwise you could order bananas from amazon, but in principle, yes, it’s a cool idea.
Pi: A cool idea, as well as the beer, “LotAle” (LOTL + ale)…
Chris: We failed at one thing, we need to take that up again: with our last hoodie, the one with the grey print, we wanted to have a print on the edge of the hood, the way Behemoth had that with their hoodies. They have incredibly beautiful merch in general. We failed at that, because the hoods come in double layers, those are too thick to go under that machine; with Behemoth it is different, they have their own merch company, there the print is done first and then the hood with the print on it gets sewed afterwards, that’s probably how they do it.
Pi: Dude!
Chris: We cannot do that, Behemoth are floating in different spheres than we do.
Class: I thought you said, “Die Schweden” (the Swedes) - (Chris said, “Die schweben”…they’re floating) … they’re Polish.
Chris: That’s something I’d really like to do. And what would be really cool, is “understatement merch”, like a really cool jacket, and on the collar a very small print.
Pi: I’d find that totally cool.
Chris: Or the “Blacker than black” shirt… just a black shirt. That’s something I always wanted to get. And when you ask, “Where’s the Lord of the Lost print?” – Nowhere.
Gared: In this case, if we get accused for profiteering, I can understand that.
Pi: Maybe there’s a tiny flag in the back, the label, which says “Lord of the Lost”.
Chris: I’d just find that funny. Like an April Fool’s joke. Couldn’t we… now everyone’s listening… turn down the volume…
Pi: They have already turned off because it's so boring.
Chris: Shouldn’t we get the “Blacker than black” shirts next year… you can buy black shirts at H&M.
Pi: Ours are fair, ours are fair!
Gared: I recently saw about well-known brands – that I just can’t name right now – that they mirror their logo vertically – so that you see it like you’d see it in the mirror. Actually pretty stupid, but somehow with some brands this apparently sells really well.
Chris: Seemingly.
Gared: Seemingly, yes, sorry. You’re so right about that.
Chris: Actually… this could become the next flop.
Gared: Cool!
Chris: So far we had one merch flop – and I’m the one to blame there. The Cyrillic shirt.
Class: It wasn’t a total flop though.
Chris: No, but…
Pi: I thought you were talking about the tissues.
Gared: What was a real flop were the Swan Songs tissues. They had no great popularity.
(16:09)
Chris: But people at the M’Era Luna were happy to get like 2000 packages of Swan Songs tissues.
Pi: That was a cool project.
Chris: The Cyrillic shirt was not an actual flop but it also wasn’t … I thought, people would say, “This is so cool, a funny “Insider-style”, I for one find Cyrillic writing really cool.
Gared: I love it, too.
Pi: Really cool. I need to get one of those still.
Chris: But there’s tons of them left - so, if you’re listening to this right now and you want to support musicians in these Corona times – go sell out that Cyrillic shirt.
Pi: I can only afford to buy at Aldi now.
Gared: As you earlier corrected me about “Apparently” and “Seemingly” – it is pronounced “Cyrillic” - but that doesn’t matter.
Pi: *pronounces it in a weird way*
Chris: I don’t call it “Cyrillic”... with an R – that’s pure Denglish (German-English)
Gared: Ok, sorry, my bad.
(16:59)
Chris: Pi and I had a cool (???) earlier, but I can’t talk about it now … remind me about it later, because of Social Media here.
Pi: Aaaah yes.
Gared: That’s really mean now towards the people.
Class: They all notice it. You’ll see it without knowing it is us. By the way I got asked recently…
Gared: Do you play in Lord of the Lost?
Class: When we posted the photo where we were standing on stage with our pixelated cocks…
Pi: We were really showing it there, by the way.
Class: Someone said, “That original picture must be somewhere in the internet… where can I see it without pixels?”
Pi: I could upload it.
Gared: I’d be worried that it could really show up somewhere.
Pi: I think, Jan still has it.
Gared: Wasn’t it saved to someone’s cloud?
Pi: So if you offer enough money to Jan, he’ll be a very rich man, miserably corruptible though.
Gared: For him “enough money” is already like 20 Euros and maybe a beer.
Pi: Or a blowjob.
Gared: And a warm meal.
Pi: I read another comment where one girl wrote, she had a depixelation program.
Chris: But not for 9 pixels.
Pi: I don’t know, no idea. Maybe she knows our cocks now.
Class: Congratulations, you’re welcome.
Chris: I think this is called “de-censoring” or something, like in those Japanese porns where they try to de-pixelate the pussy …or something of that kind.
Pi: Or like in those hentai-comics, where there’s only a thin black line across it … as a friend told me.
Gared: Yeah sure.
Chris: I think we already spoke about this friend last time.
Pi: He is very close to me.
Chris: I need to re-tie my ponytail.
Class: What you cannot see now, which is pretty funny – is that we are all wearing colourful socks.
Gared: Right.
Pi: right. On mine there’s cats who say “Meow” … but actually they say “Mau”.
Class: MAV.
Chris: On your socks there’s also a cat!
Gared: Yes, I have piano keys and a cat…
Pi: Piano pussy.
Gared: Piano pussy, exactly. I really enjoy wearing all the fan-socks now.
Pi: Same here! I got them on the Renegades tour.
Gared: Me too! These are among the most useful gifts we ever got.
Pi: Socks are the best tour gifts.
Chris: I also wear fan socks, namely on the right foot I wear a yellow sock with black smileys.
Pi: Ah yes, you are wearing different ones!
Gared: Holy shit, you hipster! What’s wrong with you, did you lose control about your life?
Chris: The left one doesn’t exist anymore, I used it for wanking in the nightliner bus.
Gared: You mean, it doesn’t exist anymore, because you shot right through it? A full economic disaster?
Chris: No, the tour went on for four weeks, and when I wanted to take it out of the bed, it broke.
Gared: So you never emptied it in the meantime.
Pi: So that’s what was trickling down on me!
Class: It got ripped due to the sheer weight of it.
Chris: It just shattered, like in the Terminator movies, when he hits dry ice. On the left I wear an anthracite grey sock, totally plain, but … I wear it inside out. And Class?
Class: I simply have wine red socks, which are ending in black, because I like to wear colourful socks, but in sneakers I like to…
Chris: May I try to… finish your sentence first, then I’ll decrypt that picture.
Class: As in sneakers I like to wear these ankle socks in black… but once I take them off, my socks are colourful.
Chris: But Class…what you forgot to mention, is that your socks show nothing less than the New York Skyline with a blood red sky. A wine red sky.
Class: A bit blood moon style.
Pi: Wow. Sheesh!
Chris: “Biss dass der Tod uns scheidet” (talking about the Twilight movie series - they have word plays as their titles in German) - or what these horrible movies were called.
Gared: Back to topic – new merch idea: wanked-in Lord of the Lost tennis socks.
Chris: Ok, each of us gives one more merch idea? Directly shat from the pistol? (no typo!)
Pi: A yoyo.
Gared: A trill whistle. It will be as successful as the fidget spinner, for sure.
Pi: But that WAS successful!
Chris: Class, you?
Class: I can’t think of something right now.
Chris: Ok. A Lord of the Lost lego set.
Class: OH.
Pi: YES.
Chris: So we’re getting to the next topic…
Pi: With a full stage and all?
Chris: That would be really cool. People, if you or your children have lego, please build a Lord of the Lost stage scene for us and post it in the comments here, we will repost it…. PLEASE!
All together: PLEASE!
(21:21)
Chris: Ok, the next topic is…
Gared: *drum roll*
Class: I forgot it. Ah yes, holiday memories.
Chris: No, we wanted to talk about musical origins because we may have told each other at some point, but not that much in detail and we probably also forgot a lot in the meantime, because we are not interested in each other anyway.
Pi: And we don’t listen.
Gared: No.
Chris: And many new fans out there surely would like to know. Who do we start with? Let’s start with the shortest one, with the youngest one.
Class: Which one then, shortest or youngest?
Pi: I was going to say that same thing.
Gared: There’s a difference… by 40 degrees.
Pi: Well… I came to music…
Chris: Ok – Gerrit.
Class: Cool, me too! - Chris.
Chris: I didn't. Not yet.
Pi: I already often came to music (pun: to cum – to come) – Class!
Gared: Hold my beer. Okay, nicest holiday experience?
Pi: It was cool!
Gared: See you again next week in the Lord…Cost. Lord…Shop. Now, you tell!
Pi: I think I was about 13 or 14 when I noticed, that music is really really cool, as beforehand I was a bit lost, my first CD was “Mein Block” by Sido, a maxi CD that my sister gave me. She bought it and gave it to me. My mother didn’t check that at all … otherwise she would have said “No, not that kind!”
Gared: We seriously need to talk about your membership here.
Chris: My ruler, my pencil, my block.
Pi: Everything you need in primary school.
Chris: And a mask.
Pi: Right now, yes. So for a long time I liked rap music.
Chris: Which is totally ok.
Pi: I also had that Xzibit album – you look like it is NOT ok!
Chris: I like rap too, but not Sido. Xzibit is cool though.
Pi: It was the album “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, that’s really heavy. In “Pimp my ride” he is really soft, but that album…
Chris: Ah yes, that was Xzibit also. He also did a cool song with Marilyn Manson.
Pi: Really? Cool! That guy is a cool rapper.
Chris: Was it Xzibit… or was it Snake? Fuck! Could be I’m confusing them.
(23:30)
Gared: Post it in the comments!
Pi: Exactly. And a photo. And a video. And a song. And at some point my sister had that typical teenie-emo-pop-punk-whatever-phase, you know, with those loose checkered ties and gauntlets…
Chris: Avril Lavigne.
Pi: Avril Lavigne in “Sk8er Boi” or “Complicated” - she was like that, too, complicated.
Chris: Show us a picture.
Pi: Will do later. She listened a lot to Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Sum41 and Blink182 – and those were the bands, whose albums I “stole” from her – I still have those – exactly those – from then on I found guitar music cool.
Class: *sings* “all the small things” - really cool song.
Pi: Really cool video also… is that the one where they are running around naked?
Class: I think so.
Chris: Did you listen to Green Day also?
Pi: No. Not really.
Chris: To me they were kinda like forerunners to Blink182 in the 90s.
Pi: I found that out later on.
Class: Also too many others, because they just were there earlier.
Pi: I found them later, because I did not know they existed because my sister didn't listen to them, so I only found out about them at “American Idiot” and I found that really cool.
Chris: They have been around for a very long time already.
Pi: And at some point there was – on YouTube or on TV, I don’t know anymore… the video to “November Rain” by Guns’n’Roses, where Slash in the desert…
Chris: How old have you been by that time?
Pi: 13, maybe, I think.
Chris: Really, already…?
Pi: It was not new by that time, but I watched it. The video is really old.
Class: From 1992 or something.
Chris: By that time you were not even born yet. We spoke about that already – that’s what connects us. Back then there was this MTV show named “Dial” or “Dialed” – you could phone them, there on heavy rotation was “Civil War” for a few weeks, then it was “November Rain” and then “Estranged” for a few weeks. There I watched that video and it was so…
Pi: Three monster songs… and for me it was “November Rain”.
Chris: When did “Use Your Illusion” come out?
Class: 1992.
Chris: By that time MTV was still cool.
Pi: Only when MTV plays music again… from then on I wanted to play the guitar. So I took guitar lessons in my hometown Glücksburg near Flensburg for two years. And from then on I got self-taught.
Chris: What was the first Slash-solo that you played or tried to learn?
Pi: Solo…well… the first one actually was the intro to “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, which I played really badly for quite a while.
Chris: I never learned that one. I’m such a big Guns’n’Roses fan, but I never learned to play that one. Can you show me that one at some point?
Pi: I only learned very few songs also… that one, “Paradise City” and the main riff of “Rocket Queen”.
Chris: The first solo I tried to learn was from Slash also, still rather poor, but of a Michael Jackson song “Give In To Me”.
Pi: That was just so cool… and from then on I got into heavier music as a mate showed me “Bullet for my Valentine” and I was like “Wow, that screaming is really cool!” I never found Metallica interesting, but this… real Metal fans will think “Now what’s wrong with that guy?” but … Metallica was not happening in my time.
Chris: You are a kid. And that’s fine.
Pi: Yes. I have no wrinkles yet, except for…
Chris: On your crotch.
Pi: Yes. And on my butt. Two.
Chris: One. Crack.
Pi: You crack me up. Well, and that was the metalcore-style that I still enjoy to this day.
Chris: You said you started to study playing the guitar… why is this not noticeable at all?
Pi: I don’t know… you tell me? With you it’s similarly not noticeable.
Gared: “self-taught”, as we are talking about “studying”.
Chris: I cannot judge that, that’s the problem.
Pi: I thought, from your own experience.
Chris: No; I saw that you posted two videos where you…
Pi: I pressed “play”.
Chris: … from Trivium on your Epiphone Stratocaster played things… that was definitely cute.
Pi: Thank you. They turned out really great. Full playback, by the way.
Chris: Oh really?
Pi: Yes of course; I’m totally transparent there. That was it in a nutshell.
Chris: Can you still play some Sum41 songs? Or did you never play them but just listen to them?
Pi: I only listened to them, I never…
Chris: But that would be a fun thing to do at some point, a playthrough of your favourite Sum41 song, with a nice colourful cap, worn backwards.
Pi: Sail - Oh yeah, that would be so nice…just like I’m sitting here right now.
Chris: With your red cap, exactly. Very colourful. Dark-colourful. It’s colourful on the inside.
Pi: I can wear it backwards also.
Chris: Sexy.
Gared: You look sex.
Pi: More than sexy. Indeed, that would be cool, bring back the past, “polish” it, with a weekly new playthrough, that’s an idea. So, that was it about me.
(28:43)
Gared: Do I have to continue now?
Pi: You don’t have to.
Gared: Well… I’m originally coming from Jazz.
*All together making yawning sounds*
Chris: I need to go now…
Gared: I’m a 90s kid, meaning I grew up in the 90s, so… Eurodance. That’s what the whole crap started with. Concerning instruments it started with… why is everybody standing up now?
Class: I was about to leave.
Pi: I have something in the oven.
Gared: I forgot some sausage in my car.
Chris: I’m Chris Harms, when I’m sitting still for too long, my circulation goes down – I need to put on my jacket.
Gared: I was already wondering about you sitting here almost naked.
Chris: I ran up the stairs, so my circulation went up.
Gared: Hey, I got that same jacket.
Chris: Yeah, that’s nice, but on me it looks good. Now, keep on talking!
Gared: Ahem! And what about you? Concerning instruments, it started as early as possible, as I lived in a household where there was a piano…
Class: You got adopted there at 13.
Gared: I was adopted pre-birth. And aborted post-birth. And I put my fingers on said piano, as soon as I was aware that I had them. So I noticed, “Hey, if you hit that, sounds come out, I find that cool and somehow interesting!” - yes, the exact same thing counts for humans as well! And for cats. So this followed its natural course then with education and stuff, in the classical way.
Chris: May I shortly ask something serious?
Gared: No. Yes.
Chris: You have the perfect pitch. For you guys out there: this means, if you wake Gared at some point at night and play a note to him, he will tell you "this is a C#".
Gared: Without a reference pitch.
Chris: Without a reference pitch. He is kind of “calibrated” to this, it’s like someone asking you “What colour is this?” and you can tell “It’s red.” That’s how you can imagine it. Us others we have developed a pretty good relative pitch, so, when we play a note on our instrument, we can put that one in relation to another one and find the right pitch, but we need a reference pitch. Gerrit can do that without a reference pitch. It’s something innate. Just to explain this to those who didn’t know that before. Without knowing what it is… when did you notice that, maybe pretty early, that you have this? Or did someone point it out to you who noticed it?
Gared: I think, my parents noticed that when I suddenly started to play things impromptu, that I had heard before, which if I remember it right was before my education started. I saw a video where I was maybe four or five, and as good as I could do that with the small fingers I had, I was re-playing the “Turkish March” by Mozart, as I had just heard it from the radio, as I listened to a lot of classical music because of my father. Not correctly, but… something of that ass… of that kind, that was a Freudian slip. ("Arsch" means "ass", while "Art" is "kind") This must have been the kind of experiences, where my parents noticed “There’s something strange here.” And some other experiences. Then they did some research, or maybe they even knew what it was already, my parents are both active musicwise, not professionals, but still. Ironically they both play accordion, both educated and in the case of my father still played until the end, so they noticed “There’s something about your hearing that makes this easier for you.” That’s how this perfect pitch thing came to light and got supported.
Chris: Did they know about what it is or did some music teacher tell them?
Gared: I don’t know. But I think, they somehow knew, because as I said before, they are both active musicians.
Chris: That would be interesting, maybe you can ask your mother at some point. Would be interesting to know that.
Gared: I will ask her.
Chris: Or I can ask her. I talk to her on the phone every other evening anyway.
Gared: So you have a dedicated line to her, so to speak?
Pi: I’ll write her.
Gared: In any case… now I forgot what I was trying to say, wait…
Pi: How they found out…
Chris: Ah yes.
Gared: They supported it. What’s funny about it all, is that many more people than you would assume are born with a perfect pitch, people who don’t seem to have any musical talent might have been born with a perfect pitch, maybe all of you, too, but it went unnoticed, and if it doesn’t get supported, it gets lost over the first few years. Luckily it was noticed in my case, it got supported, developed fully; I think I was six when I started with piano lessons, shortly after that I started with percussion and vibraphone lessons. It went on and on until at the age of maybe fourteen or fifteen I asked for a cheap E-guitar for Christmas, as I wanted to teach myself how to play the E-guitar, just for fun. That’s why I maltreat you guys with it all the time now in the band. And about the listening habits… hmmm some kind of apathy comes to the fore here now…. As I already said, Eurodance, 90s kid, Blümchen – an eternal childhood crush – actually she still is.
Chris: You can text her later on.
Gared: Maybe I do.
Pi: Say hello from me. I haven’t hugged her in a long time.
Chris: How does it feel to be friends with your childhood idol, Gared Dirge?
Gared: I don’t know, I’m doing some understatement there, not sure if you can call it a friendship, but it’s …
Pi: You shared the stage with her. (34:38) There it goes from a master of understatement directly to a deep hit. (In German this makes a word play)
Gared: No, I just wouldn’t take up the cause to call myself her friend – Blümchen, you may teach me otherwise.
Chris: Heavens, if the BILD listens to this now… (german yellow press newspaper)
Gared: Say no more – I hope, they do. But it’s always difficult for me to admit this myself. Over-self-confidently. But it was really nice to be with her on …
Chris: Ok, so how is it to be in a loose acquaintanceship with your childhood …
Gared: Really nice, I was very pleased to share the stage with her – that was - hui. Anyway, after Eurodance …
Pi: How was that? Hui? However…
Gared: After Eurodance there came “Die Ärzte”, in 1998 I think, when their album “13” came out, I got into that typical rebellious puberty phase shortly after I was 10 years old.
Chris: “soll ich jetzt den Knaller zünden” (song quote)
Pi: “Zünd den Knaller” (reply to said song quote)
(35:35)
Gared: That went on for some years, some heavier stuff came up as well, like for example Metallica and also all that Nu Metal stuff which showed up by that time, I liked to listen to Limp Bizkit then…
*Pi mimicking some song*
Gared: Exactly! At that time my voice broke as well, so that fitted very well somehow.
Pi: You found yourself
again.
Gared *high pitched*: Yes! Yes!
Chris: What, your STEM
broke? I'm sorry to hear that. (German pun. "Stimmbruch" means "voice break", while "Stamm" meaning a stem; implying that his penis broke)
Gared: Hurts, can't recommend.
Pi: Ouch!
Gared: And from then on it just went on…
Chris: Downwards.
Gared: No, that did only happen in 2010 when you asked me if I wanted to join Lord of the Lost.
Chris: I never asked you. You just did it.
Pi: You stayed!
Gared: You ordered it to me. At some point I found Metallica not interesting anymore, I discovered Prog Rock for myself, and – no joke! I listened to Dream Theater exclusively for perceived eternities, analysed it to death, tried to play it, which boosted my techniques somehow, but I also felt somehow thwarted. I always stayed in that progressive area, and at some point ended in the more easily approachable area like Porcupine Tree.
Chris: I think Dream Theather is, just like jazz, a really good training. For myself, for entertainment, I cannot stand it, but when I can see it optically, a DVD for example, if you really watch, what they’re doing there, it’s extremely fascinating.
Gared: Incredibly impressing.
Chris: I find it horrible, but I have the highest respect to it.
Gared: From a technical and virtuoso point of view, yes, exactly. Besides that I also always listened to Metal, Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir were my “guilty pleasures” if you want to call it that way, actually this was what led me to the dark scene. And that’s why I could identify so well with the idea you showed me in 2010, or 2009 actually, when we got to know each other. You said, “I have this project – wouldn’t you want to play some piano parts for the second album?” Then I thought “Cool, to this kind of music I feel a real connection!”
Chris: Which was the first song that you played in the studio? I remember that originally we wanted you to play on only one song from “Antagony”, but you ended up playing all of them.
Gared: Exactly. I’m not sure though if it possibly has been “Seven Days of Anavrin”.
Chris: Or “Revelation 13:18”.
Gared: No, that was later. As we were working on the outro for so long. You said “Think about an outro, I don’t know, maybe in a different key, pick up the main theme a bit. I need to sleep a little.” You were lying there on the sofa in the studio, slept for half an hour, meanwhile I figured an outro …
Chris: That was the time when I never slept, so I just slept occasionally.
Gared: That was a cool studio experience. Never had that again since, unfortunately. Bullshit. I think it was “Anavrin”, but could as well have been something like “Prison” or alike. I’d have to lie there.
Chris: I don’t remember it either.
Gared: And occasionally I played a lot of jazz in my youth; never actively listened to it, but played it a lot nevertheless at the music school. Now I’ve surely overdrawn my time account by far.
Chris: I think I will shorten my story a lot, give only keywords, because I think, considering how many interviews I have given over the years and how often I have told that – almost everyone will know it already. I’ll do a fast run. Little Christian sits on his mother’s lap at a Christmas concert.
Gared: The End.
Chris: Shortly before his 3rd birthday, listening to a string quartet, sits right in front of the cellist, finds that cool, at age three keeps telling his Mum for ages that he’d like to have such a toy, big sister already plays the violin, at home there was a guitar standing around also, so I took those instruments and “played the cello” with those. I kept bothering them until they allowed me to play the cello, when I was five. At some point I took my parents’ acoustic guitar, I was like ten by that time, in the school’s music room there were drums, at home we also had a piano, so whenever I had the chance, I played around on these instruments, started to write songs at fourteen or fifteen – I tried to write songs, that is, the first real songs I wrote at about seventeen or eighteen. I got to play the E-guitar on one hand because of Slash from Guns’n’Roses, I also wanted to have such a Les Paul and Marshal Amp, but actually I had an experience with another band, that I hadn’t listened to – neither before nor after- and I only like that one song by them – “Creep” by Radiohead. By that time they had that video on MTV with that androgynous guitar player, this boring verse, the singer sort of whining around – and then there is this guitar song … and I was like …. Woah! So I said to my father “Papa, I want an E-guitar!” And after a few weeks of begging we went to Brinkmann’s in Spitaler Street.
Gared: Oh, by that time Brinkmann’s still existed!
Chris: We got a Fake-Telecaster with Fender 15-Watts-Amp for like 169 Marks… or something. Till my 18th birthday I saved up for my first Les Paul and Marshal full stack and so on – that’s the long story short.
Gared: Since then your parents are hard of hearing, but...
Chris: Yeah.
Gared: The nice thing about it is, that we are still living on the songs that you wrote at 17 or 18 years old.
Chris: Still, yes. Also on Swan Songs III, the original version of “Amber” is a song that I wrote at 17.
Gared: So Lord of the Lost is actually just a recycling product.
Pi: Sustainable!
Gared: I find that impressing.
Chris: I keep finding … I still have those Mini-Discs, I have like 100 songs lying around at home …I don’t know if I already told you but …out there nobody knows yet – many of these songs only make sense, as they are so desperate and broken partly, from when I was around twenty, and also in terms of song structure they’re hard to arrange nicely. I had the idea to add a Bonus CD to our next Rock album, which will be released next year, where I perform ten of those songs that I’ve written when I was 19 or 20, just my voice and an acoustic guitar, they won’t be Rock Versions or something, just an addition, only in this version, as that’s the only way they make sense. There’s songs, which are not worth to be real Lord of the Lost songs, they’re just not good enough. But that would be a nice addition, to just get to hear those, like a…
Gared: I'd find that cool.
Chris: …fragment from my youth, which may only be released this way. I even considered doing these with MD-recordings, but that sounds so crappy and broken that nobody wants to hear that – and I don’t want to show that to anyone either. But I think that’s a fun thing to do. It will take one or two days of work, will be something totally interesting for Hardcore-Fans, and I can finally show these songs without having to force them on us or forcing you to make something out of it. That’s not necessary. We have better songs for that.
Gared: I can imagine that. Great idea!
Chris: I’m eager to do that. I selected ten of those at home… we’ll see. Maybe I do that.
Class: Cool!
Gared: Well, Klaus!
Class: Yo, man! Meanwhile I got myself prepared, in order to do this properly.
Chris: He figured out something nice.
Gared: Did you think about it?
Pi: Class, tell us something, it doesn’t need to be true.
Class: No, no, no, no, no! I have to admit that I didn’t listen to music that much as a kid. When I did, it was just rather incidentally and not that often either. Queen for example, which is still cool, but a lot of German stuff like Torfrock, Frank Zander…
Chris: That’s cool, too. You can admit that.
Class: In a way it really is cool, but as I said, I experienced it as serious music, but…
Chris: Zander or Zappa?
Class: Zappa came later on.
Chris: I just wanted to be sure. One should not confuse them.
Pi: But they have a similar moustache, right?
Gared: Zander is also something from AC/DC, right?
Chris: Zander-struck.
Pi: Zander!
Class: Back then, when there still was the “Mini Playback Show”, we wanted to perform something by AC/DC, that’s how I came across them...
Chris: Did you perform that in the Mini Playback Show?
Class: No, but I wanted to
Gared *in Dutch accent, as the moderator of that program had*: “We’re sending Class into the magic ball” “We are all winners, even if just one can win!”
Class: We wanted to do that, but it just wasn’t good enough or something, don’t know, but there I was the lead singer, along with “Hand Brush”.
Chris: But… may I briefly interfere… what many people out there don’t know… the funny thing is, before we started with Lord of the Lost, you and me had our first stage performance together already - for just one night we founded an AC/DC cover band.
Class: In Glamrock style.
Chris: In Glamrock style. One evening in 2008 in Schwerin. In the Mau Club, I think.
Gared: That’s in Rostock.
Chris: Rostock it was, sorry.
Class: Yeah, right.
Chris: So our very first stage experience together was in 2008 - AC/DC Cover.
Class: In Glam.
Chris: Just on an additional note.
Class: Right! That was back in 2006.
Pi: He just said it was 2008!
Class: Ah really? I thought it was earlier.
Chris: Either 2007 or 2008.
Class: Well, because of that I got my first poster, which was the “Money Talks” poster from AC/DC with Angus Young, then I listened to AC/DC on cassettes and mixtapes. That was cool and still is to this day. When I was 11 or 12 I had piano lessons…
Gared: That’s not noticeable.
Class: No.
Gared: What am I here for?
Class: It didn’t work out that well.
Gared: Ah ok.
Class: It mainly didn’t work out because at that age I started suffering from Crohn’s disease and I often was too tired to go to the classes, that’s why it all went down the river. I know the basics, I can get a few sounds out of it, play some melodies; between 1996 and 1998 it went on, by that time I had become a skater, Inline skates, Skateboard, whatever, there a friend wanted to sell me a CD, so then I bought my first used CD, for 10 Marks or something, in Fredenbeck, in a driveway in that new development area.
Gared: Stolen goods?
(46:10)
Class: It was “All Boro Kings” by Dog Eat Dog. I still find that album so cool, those heavy grooves that are recorded oddly, and when that guy comes forth with his saxophone and plays those gang shouts etc.… listened to it while we went up and down the halfpipe. That was really cool. That somehow led me to punk, also because a classmate’s brother wanted to sell his punk CDs, so I thought, I’ll go listen to that, NOFX, also Green Day, I always confuse Dookie and Nookie, but it was Dookie, right?
Gared: Nookie is a song by the Bizkits.
Class: Dookie then, as Pi already said. So I started listening to all those punk bands, mainly NOFX, Bad Religion – and Bad Religion also was my very first rock show in 1998 in the “Große Freiheit”.
Chris: Was that the time when they had their huge hit?
Class: 21st Century Digital Boy?
Chris: No, the other one.
Pi: This Is Not A Punk Rock Song.
Gared: There’s also a crappy German version of it.
Chris: I don’t like that either.
Class: By that time they were pretty big, funny enough that I just listened through everything I have from Bad Religion recently, it’s really cool, also with that polyphonic singing, you wouldn’t believe that, but they have really cool harmonies hidden in there. Actually my very first rock show took place in 2001, illegally, in the “Stadeum” in Stade, with “Dosenbier macht schlau” etc. – but I have to admit…
Chris: *laughs* “Dosenbier macht Schlau”? (“Canned beer makes you smart”)
Class: I have to admit, I saw that band like four years ago on some field festival, where I worked, that’s why I was there in the first place, and that band wasn’t really that bad. They had really funny songs and such. Like, for one, "Dosenbier macht schlau" and stuff. So, a bit like “I'll quit drinking blah, but in the end…”
(48:00)
Chris: Is it in the style of “Kassierer”?
Class: It’s almost…kinda funky Rock, but at the end of the day it’s … antisocial Rock for high school graduates. I don’t know what to call that. Anyway, that was my first concert, I usually don’t admit that, because of course Bad Religion sounds much cooler.
Gared: We cut that part out.
Class: And I don’t know why, but there I immediately started to do crowdsurfing. Because everybody did, I found that so cool and I counted – I got caught 13 times, they kicked me out and I went back in and did it again. I also did it when Rancid were in Hamburg, which haven’t been for 20 years now.
Chris: Wearing a wetsuit already as you got in, and a snorkel.
(48:57)
Class: That was the first time that I made it all the way from the stage to the mixer and back; I’m a short, lightweight guy, so that was easy. That was my punk rock phase, where I mainly listened to all these American bands, except maybe for “Terrorgruppe” with their album (???) and then, out of the blue I found in a CD-shop in Stade in the “Birnbaum-Passage” (pear tree passage).
Pi: Fascinating that you remember that street name!
Class: I found “The Burning Red” by Machine Head. I already found the album cover so cool, as it was a red jewel case, and it was also red inside, making it even more red.
Chris: When was it released? 1995?
Class: Yeah…
Chris: I listened to it relatively lately, don’t remember where, but it was in 2000 or something.
Class: *makes music sounds*
Chris: By then they played rather crossover style.
Class: Then they went into Nu Metal once, Rob Flynn, who had said, he’d never cut his hair off – suddenly he had short hair!
Pi: Wow, he once had short hair?
Class: He once had short hair, just for “The Burning Red” – piercings and all… and suddenly he was some Nu Metal Dude like Static-X or something – and then never again. And I have to admit that “The More Things Change” …
Chris: Is “Bulldozer” on the “The Burning Red” album also or was that later? Or “Ten Ton Hammer”?
Class: “Ten Ton Hammer” was on “Burn My Eyes” I think.
Chris: But that also was a bit Nu Metal style or …?
Class: That was before… that was 1992 or 1993. They were totally soft concerning their sound.
Chris: I probably confuse that here, compared to Machine Head of today it’s all still pretty much crossover style, or maybe that’s the wrong word.
Class: It was no “dang-dangadi-dang”, but it was Groove Metal, but they were among the first ones who had this heavy, bass-dominated cool sound.
Chris: And also so massively reduced.
Class: And so super-aggressive. This album, which is still totally cool, even though it’s not even the best one, really dragged me in and suddenly I was in the world of Pantera and alike.
Chris: Pantera is so cool too.
Class: And at the end of the day I got stuck there. Needless to say that I listen to everything else also still, for example just today I listened to “The Getaway” from Red Hot Chili Peppers while I was tidying up… just relaxing music. I used to find that album stupid, but today I found the perfect predestination for this one.
Chris: It’s also cool to rethink some things, like we recently did when we were playing in Finland, as we were driving there on the highway and listened to everything by Pantera, even from back then when they were playing Glam Metal.
Class: The album, that doesn’t exist.
Chris: The first album … and I was like “Now what’s going on there?” … very interesting!
Class: And we had to search and find that on YouTube, because it has never been listed in Spotify as an official Pantera album.
Chris: So! We really need to stick to the one-hour-limit in our podcast-service, I think. Let’s try that… everyone has one and a half minutes left… let’s try that, really short.
Pi: We could also move one topic to the next podcast.
Gared: Now we’ve made people curious, that’s mean then.
Chris: Or do we even have to stick to less than one hour? Do you know that?
Pi: Yeah … 80 minutes.
Chris: 80? What?
Pi: I think it’s 80 minutes.
Chris: That’s no problem then.
Class: Many podcasts are longer than an hour.
Chris: I thought it’s 60 minutes. Well, then it’s ok now.
Pi: Shall I quickly google that?
Chris: Yeah, do that.
Gared: You get the last 7 minutes … are you finished? I didn’t want to interrupt you here.
Class: Am I finished… You never can say “I am finished.”
Gared: That would be great final words actually.
Pi: Now go on.
Class: For me it really was important to NOT stick to Machine Head and Pantera, but to also listen to other things. And I think, as a musician you are not limited to only listen to music that you like best but also listen to something like Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever, so, I think, even Hip Hop… there’s not much there for me, but I find one or two things quite ok. One of the strongest experiences I had was to go to The Prodigy in 1998 shortly after the Bad Religion concert. “The Fat of the Land”.
Chris: That was a cool album!
Class: Where I actually would not have been allowed to go, because they showed the uncensored version of “Smack My Bitch”; I was in first row and by that time they did not have screens everywhere, so I could not see the screen there on the edge.
Chris: Where did that concert take place?
Class: At “Alsterdorfer Sporthalle”.
Chris: Cool.
Class: I’d say, I was a little crazy back then. At my first concerts I just really wanted to do crowdsurfing. At The Prodigy I was in first row too, but I had to leave from there, on one hand because of the massive bass and also because of the solo guitarist, that guy with the blue punk hair with spikes and alike, he played a solo, which was mainly about him playing from really low sounds to the very highest note, I don't know if he also had a whammy. I thought I was going to die because that high note was so shrill – I could not stand it. But anyway… these basses, that getting fucked by the music, that was just … wow.
Chris: It’s funny how the way that you consume live music can be so totally different for everyone. You are still the kind of guy – looking at that picture here on your wall … here we have a picture of Class where he’s standing in first row, behind him a huge crowd, a fortune shot from the music press, by a photographer.
Class: By the guitarist. He always takes photos of the crowd.
Chris: Ah, by the guitarist. With me it is different. I usually place myself near the mixer, I just stand there, I only clap along, if people start giving me angry looks for not clapping, because that would totally get me out of concentration, as I am analysing there. I’m really having fun, I totally become absorbed in it, but I hardly move at all. It doesn’t do anything to me.
Gared: Same.
Chris: There were only two exceptional concerts for me: One was Roxette, when they were in Hamburg a few years ago, where I cried… first song “Sleeping in my Car”, the intro of that song is only short until she starts to sing, but when she started to sing the tears were already rolling down my face. And the second one was when my friend Leif, with whom I had that Glam Rock band “The Pleasures”, shortly before we founded The Pleasures, maybe in 2003, we saw The Darkness in the “Große Freiheit” – and he was like “Hey, come on, let’s go to the first row!” - “Nooo” “Well please, come on!” “Nooo” “Oh please!” – So we went to the first row. I found it cool, I joined the clapping and singing along – I really went nuts and I even threw one of my wristbands towards the stage, managed to hit him in the head with it. He picked it up after the song and said “Is that a sock?!” and threw it back into the audience. I yelled “Ehm – WRISTBAND!” – And that’s the reason we founded “The Pleasures”. I don’t think, we would have founded that band, if I had not stood in first row at “The Darkness”. I never felt the urge to do that again, even with bands like “Die Ärzte” I stand in the back. I don’t enjoy it any less though.
Pi: I think it depends. My absolute favourite bands, like for example “The Architects”, they played in the “Sporthalle” in 2018. I went totally nuts, I kept jumping into that moshpit, even though I… I like, that there is that “moshpit culture”, but I don’t like it anymore, when someone in any way might get hurt seriously. So, pushing is ok, but throwing around limbs in order to hit someone… come on, people! You can do that somewhere else. I also met your nephew there, Class. That was cool.
Chris: I just find that ugly, that’s why I never join. Before we continue… how long can we talk in our podcasts?
Pi: Four hours per month.
Chris: Four hours per month. But it doesn’t matter, how long a single episode is?
Pi: Apparently. It doesn’t say something about that.
Class: Ok.
Gared: That’s what comes of it! Keep it up like this.
Pi: With such bands, I’m always right within, but when we were watching Gojira … you stand there and all you want to do is admire their skills in playing, that tightness…
Class: And the songs.
Chris: At Gojira even I rocked a bit with my left foot.
Pi: My earlobe moved.
Gared: Did you take dancing lessons for that?
Chris: I remember Gojira when they were playing in the “Logo”.
Class: You have been there, too? I was supporting there.
Chris: Yes, with Liquid God. I think, you said “Come get there, I’ve seen Gojira at Wacken before, they’re cool!”
Class: Yes, 3 days before.
Chris: Then you showed me a song *mimicking the intro of the song “Psychosocial” by Slipknot* this strange one, from “The Way of All Flesh”, the 3rd one…
Class: What you just sang was Slipknot though.
Chris: Ah yes, right. But it was a similar riff to this one. Anyway. So I thought “I really need to see this!” I remember that behind the drummer there were those steel sheets, and he hammered around on them. And they only had construction site headlights there!
Class: And the beamer. They had one beamer.
Pi: Back then already.
Class: Yeah, they just had one regular beamer which projected the album cover onto stage.
Chris: I can only recall those steel sheets and that they only had construction site headlights. That was funny.
Pi: Minimalistic.
Class: That was one of my coolest support shows – I’m totally happy about it, as they are still one of my favourite bands. I mean, I found them really cool back then, but had they been back then already, what they mean to me now, I would have been much more frightened to support them.
Chris: But did Lord of the Lost exist back then already?
Class: No, that was about…
Chris: “The Way of All Flesh”- that was 2008, right?
Class: Was that at the same time?
Chris: I need to google that. I know that you played in Liquid God some longer …
Class: In the sense of…. Exactly, that went parallel. Back then I was with Nils Finkeisen in Liquid God…
Chris: In 2008!
Class: Yes, Liquid God existed for 1 or 2 more years then.
Chris: We were rehearsing as Lord of the Lost already, but we did not play live yet.
Class: Exactly.
(59:58)
Chris: So! We should get to the last topic, if you feel like it.
Pi: Ok.
Chris: That is… I’d find it interesting, and I probably don’t even know what you have to tell there: your… you don’t need to tell names, in case something needs to be censored there, or you just make up something funny, in case your life has been that boring… your coolest holidays or your coolest holiday experience, holidays that have shaped you forever.
Class: Should we take the same order again?
Chris: I don’t care.
Class: Yeah, let’s do it like that, after all Pi hasn’t spoken for a while already.
Pi: I have two holiday experiences to talk about. I always talk about both of them. The more important one, the longer one was 10 days, a road trip through Europe, mainly Eastern Europe, we started from Flensburg…
Gared: Flensburg…Eastern Europe…
Pi: We were going to Eastern Europe!
Gared: …to Kiel! Peine, Pattensen, Paris!
Pi: For 10 days. That was the most exciting. So, we went from Flensburg…
Chris: Around the block in 80 days. Sorry.
Pi: With a bobby car.…to Prague, from Prague to Bratislava, from Bratislava to Vienna or something, from Vienna to Budapest and so on, we only spent like one and a half days in each place, walked incredibly much, we almost frantically tried to get to see everything – I have never had so many various experiences in such a short amount of time before, so afterwards I was totally taken away and impressed by everything that we got to see there, particularly after our last stop in Budapest … we still had some days of the road trip left, but we hadn’t planned any further than Budapest. So we sat down in front of a tourist shop.... what is it called?
Class: Tourist info?
Chris: Souvenir shop?
Pi: Souvenir shop, thank you, souvenir shop that had free Wi-Fi, and googled, what we could do next, where to go next. We were travelling by car mainly. Then we spotted the Tatra Mountains.
Chris: Tantra Mountains?
Pi: No, there’s no indigenous group living there who do tantra techniques… which is a shame on one hand, but it was exciting nevertheless, we drove there, we entered the address of a camping site that we had found online and hoped that it really exists – which it did. So we camped there. On the next morning we got to know two German hikers, who explained to us where you could go hiking there, showed us some routes. We started off without proper hiking equipment and without a map. At some point we were standing in front of the summit pass, and we had the choice to either go back… or to try to get over it. We both found the idea of going back boring, as we thought, we already knew that area, so we went across the summit pass, which was pretty easy in the beginning, as you just had to go up a slope on all fours, on rubble, which partly slipped away a bit, but it got steeper and steeper until it ended in a rock wall. At that point we had gotten too high to just say “We quit, we just go back.” We were right in the middle of it and just couldn’t stop. There were some chains and small handles, only like 200 meters to go, and so we climbed up that shitty rock wall. When I was standing stably, I took a photo from the abyss and sent it to my family. My mother found that really shitty...
Class: Still 50 metres to go!
Pi: When we had finally made it, we sat down on that summit and it was really beautiful, you had an amazing 360° view around from there, we ate a banana, but of course we had to do the same shit over again to get back down.
Chris: So you had to get down again at such a thing.
Pi: We had to get down again and that was much worse, because of course you have those chains and handles, you take every step slowly and carefully, but inevitably you have to look downwards.
Chris: Do you climb down backwards or forwards? Considering the steepness of the wall?
Pi: You have your chest facing towards the wall. So, you go downwards and try your best to take safe steps.
Class: So, basically it was something where a standard climber would use a snap hook?
Pi: Exactly.
Chris: But you didn’t have that.
Pi: No. I wore Nike sneakers.
Gared: Glad to have you here. Nice to have you.
Pi: In total we had been going for 11 hours, I felt all sore afterwards, but -I’d do it again any time, although with proper safeguarding.
Gared: Definitely. (Probably meant as a pun; "mit Sicherheit" means "definitively", but could be read as "with safety")
Pi: It was so cool! I would definitely do it again. That was super super cool. And the second thing – there were only two important adventures in those holidays, it was a language trip, some kind of summer holidays exchange thing, France-Germany, I was in Vosges, in a mixed German-French group, and also in Hannover for a week.
Gared: Why are you looking at me like that, now? It’s nice. It does have nice places, too.
Pi: That was cool… I hardly spoke French by that time, I was 13 or 14, I had just started to have lessons at school.
Gared: But you forgot all of it again!
Pi: Why are we friends?
Gared: Are we?
Pi: I don't know, understatement.
Gared: Quite a stretch!
Pi: On one hand at that trip I got to know a guy with whom I shared my love…
Chris: “With whom I shared my love”?
Pi: …my first experiences? NO! …with whom I shared my love to Sum41. We listened to the same Sum41 song “Still Waiting” all day long on repeat, each of us using one earbud.
Chris: Bromance!
Pi: Totally. That was really cool. But I also had my first romantic experiences there, with a girl who was two years older, she was 16, I was 14.
Chris: So, French after all, it's okay.
Pi: Yes man. We’ll call her “Claire” here.
Chris: Oui.
Pi: Oui.
Chris: Na Claire (German pun; "Na klar" means "sure thing").
Pi: Na Claire, she had really big “jugs”.
Chris: How many?
Pi: All. There was enough of them for everyone, I was the happiest 14 year-old for two weeks.
Gared: You wouldn't hear the alarm clock when you have your head between them.
Pi: We had our first kiss while “Still Loving You” by the Scorpions was playing, just the two of us on the dance floor.
Chris: That was it.
Pi: No, that definitely was it not, but ok, that’s your interpretation.
Chris: Claire. A sweet guy.
Gared: Eclairs.
Chris: De Clercq.
Gared: Ah, de Clercq!
Pi: De Clercq from the band Unsucked. As a 16 year-old French girl. That was cool.
Chris: Now I fancy…
Gared: Kleine Geile Nonne. (A song from Unzucht, meaning "Little Horny Nun")
Pi: Yeah. But, yes, yes, yes, that was it. Yes, that exact gesture is what I...
Gared: Yes, maine coon…
Pi: Well. What about you, Gerrit?
Gared: I haven’t been on holidays. I don’t have money for that. My parents sold my perfect pitch, I had to guess the frequency of the neighbour’s lawn mower but he never gave me the money. We didn’t have it easy.
Pi: YOU didn’t have it easy.
Gared: I didn’t have it easy anyway. That’s a logical consequence there.
Chris: Now tell us… has there been something interesting? Otherwise just make something up.
Gared: Of course there have been various holiday trips that I spent with the family in my childhood, which include some nice memories for the biggest part…
Pi: *laughing* But no highlights…
Chris: But there has to be some beach fuck that you can tell about!
Gared: Bitch fuck or beach fuck?
Pi: Both!
Gared: Life's a beach?
Pi: One thing does not rule out the other.
Gared: It’s not that cool on the beach, there you get spanner in your works (in German we literally say: you get sand in the transmission… that’s what he says here) …no, I can’t imagine that to be nice.
Pi: Put a blanket underneath then!
Gared: Do you always have a blanket with you? Anywho! Well, they always were pretty nice, but the highlight that I can remember is from the recent past - to start from the beginning, for a few years already our family traditionally spends the New-Years vacation together, so far it has been “partly traditional” to go to Denmark. That already counts as a highlight, as I didn’t go on holidays for the last maybe 10 or 12 years at all. On one hand as it was just not possible financially during the career of self-employed would-be musician, or it was not possible temporally, I also didn’t really feel the need. But at some point this New-Year’s tradition came to life, which is a great highlight as such already, and as both my brother and me had independently from each other re-discovered our love for biking tours – last year – so from last year to this year – we got the idea to go to Denmark from Hamburg, our aim was only like 20 km from the German/Danish border– that in the ice cold winter at temperatures between -5 and +5 degrees.
Pi: THIS is your highlight? Man, you’re so tough!
Chris: This is really tough. It would be the absolute horror for me.
(70:42)
Gared: I found it cool. It was very catharsic somehow. Or cathartic? Cathartic, I think, that’s it.
Pi: “cathetic” (that word doesn’t really exist)
Gared: It was very liberating, I think it was a little more than 200 km…
Chris: That takes a lot of effort… how long did it take you?
Gared: Two days, 110 kilometers on one day, about 80 on the other day… it was either a little more or a little less than 200 km. We divided it into stages, did a stop shortly after Rensburg, where the North-East-Sea Canal goes, picked a cool hotel with sauna and all that stuff, which at the end of the day only made it possible for us to go on the next morning.
Chris: Now comes the hot experience… in the sauna!
Gared: Now the hot experience comes, so far it has only been the build-up … and then… Sauna toilet.
Pi: Sauna toilet?
Gared: My brother is one and a half years older than me, by the way.
Chris: Does your brother have perfect pitch, too?
Gared: Could be that he had it, but it definitely has not been noticed and supported; he does have a good musical pitch, he’s active musically himself – but no. The following day at 7am we went on in the bone-chilling cold, then at some point we arrived at the house in Denmark, before the rest of the family.
Pi: Nice.
Gared: Yes. It was a bit chilly here and there, but it was really cool, just to take this challenge and to really do it then, also the planning, to take enough breaks etc.… I found that… that was definitely my highlight of late. I’d like to keep doing it, those biking-holidays. The next goal is the Elbe- Biking- trip from Hamburg to Dresden, about 600-700 km within 10 days – I’d like to try to do this. But I’m making a digression here.
Chris: Well my coolest holidays somehow also have got to do with extreme sports.
Gared: Masturbation is not considered “extreme sports”!
Chris: Right after graduation I was in Malta for 4 weeks with my by that time best friend, in summer. We had saved up a lot of money, also some money that we had got for our 18th birthdays, we were 19, we went there, we thought we’d do a typical beach holiday with partying, we both didn’t drink alcohol by that time – so it would be party the way we would party, without drinking. And on our first day there we came across a diving school, and he said “For all my life I have wanted to dive!” I was like “Well ok, if you always wanted that, I’ll join”. I always liked to swim, but I never found it that interesting underwater, I found snorkelling stupid since I had got some water in my nose as a child. But I just did it, as he was so crazy for it, and I found it totally fascinating from the beginning. In the end we had been on Malta for 4 weeks in summer, and after those 4 weeks we returned home totally pale, as we had never been outside in daytime. Every night we went diving in the evening, and we went diving every morning, right at or right after sunrise, I got 3 diving licenses by that time, I even asked my parents to send/ lend me some more money so I could get that third license, as it’s really expensive. Luckily they lent me that money. And what did we do in between? Diving, getting into dry clothes…
Gared: …into dry Martinis.
Chris: Then partying – find something to love – we really managed to find someone each night…
Gared: A cat to pet…
Chris: A cat to pet, sort of, yes.
Pi: Maine coon cat.
Chris: Then diving again in the morning, then sleeping all day. That’s what we did for 4 weeks. This may sound chauvinistic to some listeners now, which is totally ok, but for a 19-year-old who just graduated it’s the greatest thing to do… to go to paradise, do sports, hump anyone, diving, sleeping, diving, hump someone else, diving, sleeping, diving, hump another “someone else” …for 4 weeks in a row. We did two dives every day, sometimes also two humps a day, a night is pretty long, at some point you go back to the disco and find someone else maybe.
Gared: All cats are grey at night.
Chris: This was really extremely…
Pi: …hot. That’s what it sounds like.
Chris: I will never forget that.
Pi: This …and you… were extremely hot.
Gared: There you can catch everything except for a cough.
Class: Maybe while swimming.
Chris: No, we stayed perfectly healthy luckily. And with three of my children from back then, they are 21 by now, I still have contact. No, just kidding.
Gared: Me too, by the way. We get married soon. All three of us.
Pi: You and Kevin.
Chris: I see… aaah, LOL…so, that was my highlight… I think.
Gared: But that was not that one with the somewhat more difficult return flight, was it?
Chris: It was, but there we’re talking about what happens to you when you … it didn’t happen to me but to my friend… if you do a dive too shortly before your flight back, then the nitrogen in your blood … how do I explain that now? When the pressure goes down, the nitrogen at some point becomes gaseous … and that causes a problem.
Gared: That is dangerous.
Chris: And that caused a problem on our flight back. That somehow kills the nice story now. He survived, all good, but it was not that cool. I didn’t do that last dive, because I had a headache or something, don’t remember anymore, but he did that one last dive…
Gared: Danger seeker.
Class: The funny thing is, that my adventure isn’t that far from the ones of today because within the band, in Germany too, of course, but for us it is a bit more exotic if we’re going to China, Mexico, Russia or somewhere, even if we are playing there, we still have the coolest travelling adventures as well. But I may reduce it to one adventure, which is independent from the band, as it was in 2007 already. By that time I had never flown on an airplane or alike before; we were four boys and the father of one of us had been living on the Philippines for ages already, on Cebu island, so we found it a great idea to go there, as in that case we’d know a “local” already, so we decided to go to Philippines with four of us, for a three and a half weeks holiday. As I said before, this was my first flight ever, then it was some flights in a row, from Hamburg to London, that was already cool to be able to fly, and it also was cool to experience that starting and landing over and over again. We flew from London to Hong Kong first, and for someone who can name Hamburg as the biggest city he knows, the one or one and a half day we had in Hong Kong were just… fascinating. As I said, I had never flown before, and the first place I fly to is the city of Hong Kong, where already the landing is super exciting,
Chris: Hong Kong is still one of the most fascinating places in the world.
Class: Exactly! And then we were there, walked there for a bit, I think we needed to sleep for a bit in the hotel, as it didn’t work any other way. But later on we walked on that “entertainment mile”, I think it’s called “Lan Kwai Fong”.
Gared: Bless you.
Class: … which is kinda like the Reeperbahn of Hong Kong somehow, where everybody from all around the world is having a party there, like on the Reeperbahn, you also can go to a German bar there, “The golden moustache”, and you can get “Holsten Edel” (German beer) on tap.
Pi: Really, Holsten Edel?
Gared: “Holsten Edel heißt mein Mädel” ("Holsten Edel is my girl’s name")
Class: For like 5 Euros or something. When all those bands play in Hong Kong, they will have their parties there then. Really cool, huge parties. The only problem we had, that we thought, after the party we will just walk back to the hotel.
Chris: But it was a bit far, right?
Class: It was a bit far indeed, and also there was that one river getting in our way, at some point in the morning we ended standing at some basketball square, where we called a taxi then; even the taxi took more than half an hour to get us back to the hotel. But anyway, that was cool. Then we went to the Philippines with a small airline, there it was fascinating to me, that it was a small island with a lot of jungle on it, I tried snorkelling for the first time there, in some kind of coral reef, where you also get to see those fire…whatever they are called fish. Those, of which you know that you may not touch them, because they have those stings. If you touched them, you wouldn’t manage to get back up, because you suffocate. Luckily it was like 5-6 meters away from me, so … that was fine.
Gared: Oh, that is…
Pi: Safety distance.
Gared: Social Distancing.
Class: We also found a hermit crab which was as big as a fist, we took it with us to our “hotel room” which actually was a cabin on the beach, and we watched it as it moved back into that shell that didn’t really belong to it, that it had just found… we had many exciting experiences, also culinary speaking.
Pi: The hermit crab!
Gared: God bless it.
Class: We also got tattooed there on the beach in a wooden cabin…
Gared: The lizard that you got on your leg, right?
Class: Yeah right. The guy also had two cats, one of which he painted like “tiger”, in henna colours. I can’t remember if he just coloured the tail, but it had that ring pattern then; they were running around there also, it didn’t really matter, it was clean and hygienic and he was wearing a mouth mask, but when I said, I needed to use a toilet, he said “There’s various bowls, you best pee into the bigger bowl, because I don’t have tap water here!” That was weird somehow. That was cool, the tattoo only cost like 50 Euros, I traded that down a bit.
Gared: Shmock!
Class: That was really cool, we also rented motorbikes without having driver’s licenses for that, we went along those rice fields to some waterfalls and stuff. On our way back we stayed in Hong Kong for one more day, just to enjoy that again. So we sat there at the harbour at 2:00 am on a weekday… and it felt like “lockdown” as we currently know it, as the city was like dead. If you consider, that in daytime there’s nothing more busy than a city like Hong Kong, and then even the big advertisements are switched off at night, from 2 am or 3 am on -it was fascinating to sit there at the harbour and to enjoy the complete silence -in a town like Hong Kong, which is also very fascinating nature-wise… you go a few stations and find yourself in the middle of a forest. So this was my most fascinating adventure so far, also because it was my first flight ever. To also mention something negative: my friend wanted to jump down a waterfall, and as he did, he broke his spine… he went to hospital, and it was funny to see how the nurses loved him and took a lot of care for him, just because he was European.
Chris: But did it all end well?
Class: Yeah.
Chris: But didn’t he have to stay there for weeks then?
Class: No, he flew back. They didn’t diagnose it properly. But he had to stay in bed later on. But the worst thing was … they have those tricycles… what are they called?? He was taken to hospital in one of those, along with some strangers who were transporting aluminium tubes with those…
Chris: But how and when did he get proper treatment in the end?
Class: Back in Germany, they said “You’re lucky you can still walk, you have two partially broken vertebras.” So, you should not jump from any waterfalls, just because it’s cool.
Pi: Conclusion: don’t jump from waterfalls and don’t climb damn rock walls.
Class: Definitely. Don’t take risks, even if it’s thrilling.
Chris: In this sense… stay healthy.
Gared: Don’t jump from waterfalls.
Chris: Write topic suggestions for the next podcasts in the comments.
Gared: And merch ideas, in case you forgot about that already during the last one and a half hours.
All together: So we’re saying goodbye, good night, good morning, au revoir …… etc.
Translation & Proofreading: Margit Güttersberger, Jari Winter