Having spent more than two decades developing the Progressive Power Metal and conceptual universe of Ayreon, creator and visionary Arjen Lucassen recently celebrated the very best of his project by releasing a live album and DVD. The Dutch multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter spoke to Ghost Cult about the grandiose Ayreon Universe (Music Theories/Mascot Group).
First off, congratulations on the DVD, I hear it’s charting quite well. How does it feel to suddenly have a successful DVD on your hands?
Well, I was quite confident this time. You know, usually, I would be like “Oh I didn’t expect this,” but this time I’m more like “Yeah, of course, it charted!” We worked on this for two years and we left nothing to coincidence. We worked so hard and we got the best musicians in the world, best singers, best instrumentalists, and everything was planned to the detail. We had thirty-one cameras so we wouldn’t miss anything, and the sound was recorded really well.
So I was pretty sure about this one.
Usually, in interviews I’d say, “I’m not sure; I could do better; this is not really great.” My last DVD release, The Theatre Equation, came out two years ago. It was the theatre production based on the album The Human Equation (both InsideOut), and there was so much wrong with that it really made me afraid to release it. I couldn’t be excited about it. I didn’t even do interviews for it because I couldn’t be that positive. But this time I am.
It’s hard not to be positive about it, because the shows left no doubt the DVD would be a welcome addition to the Ayreon family. Selling out three consecutive shows in 013 (Tilburg, Netherlands), 3,000 fans a night…
That I did not expect, not at all. I think I said it in my speech as well. I went to the 013 and I stood in that hall; it has a capacity of 3,000 people, but it was all empty and I thought “How can we fill this?” I really didn’t expect to fill it twice, and then to fill it three times, and that fast as well. It really was a big surprise to me.
How were the shows, in your opinion, and did any of them really stand out to you?
I think the shows were pretty consistent. Maybe on the third show – the Sunday show – the band were a little more together, and the singers knew better what to do. In contrast, on the first show everything was spontaneous. Things could go wrong, but the energy was spontaneous. The good thing about only doing three shows is that you do not get a routine. I know what I’m talking about here; I toured for fifteen years and you play the same songs over and over again, you tell the same stupid jokes on stage, play the same chords etc. And that doesn’t happen when you play a show only three times. There’s no routine, and that spontaneity is what I love about it. Again, things can go wrong but it’s part of the charm.
It’s true, the musicians are only human. Though it would be fitting in the story if they were robots.
That’s right, though I guess we did have two robots there on the sides, Wilma and Betty.
That leads me to your upcoming appearance at Graspop festival in June. How will you make this happen? Will you import a whole bunch of singers or will they already be playing the festival? And will Wilma and Betty be there?
Ha, they won’t be there, I’m sorry to say. It’s not going to be the same cast of singers, unfortunately. No, not unfortunately as it will be nice to have different singers, because some bands like Nightwish are already playing – in Finland I think – so Floor [Jansen] and Marco [Hiëtela] couldn’t do it, and Hansi [Kürsh, Blind Guardian] couldn’t come. A couple of singers couldn’t do it so we’re going to work with some different people – which is nice too, keeps it fresh.
Basically it’s going to be the same setlist, there might be one or two different songs or parts. The show will be a bit different, regarding pyros and stuff like that, but broadly speaking it will be comparable to the Ayreon Universe.
Brilliant, something for the festival audience to anticipate! So how about more shows? Is this going to be a recurring thing, either on festivals or in venues?
Well, when we were planning this, it said in the promotional text that this was going to be a one-off thing. And I really thought it was going to be a one-off thing because I hate playing live so much. So really, for me, it was going to be just this one-off thing; but then you see so many happy people on stage, back-stage, and in the audience and you saw how many people we made happy. Immediately after the first show I went to Joost [van den Broek] and I said “Joost, I gotta know for my speech, are we gonna do this again?” and he said, “Of course we are!”
But I’m not going to tour, that’s totally out of the question. There’s will be no tours and I’m not going to do shows more than once a year, maybe even once every two years or something like that. Because it does take two years to set it up.
How do you think the potential for live renditions is going to change how you approach new material, if at all?
I don’t think it will. I never thought about performing it live with Ayreon, and I think that’s part of what made it special. It’s also one of the reasons why I didn’t play for so long, because it just was not possible to do that live. Nowadays, technology enables us to do this; computers can make a lot of things possible. But I don’t think that, with new material, I will think about the live aspects. I think I’m just going to approach it as a studio project and then, once that is done, I’m going to pick the tracks that would go down best in a live setting.
So, the other way around basically. Which is what I did now: I didn’t pick my favourite songs, or even the songs I thought the fans would like most; I picked the songs that I thought would fit best in a live setting. And that doesn’t just mean the big bombastic songs like ‘Dawn of a Million Souls’ and ‘Into the Black Hole’, but also the very small songs like ‘Comatose’ and ‘Valley of the Queens’. I wanted a lot of contrast and a lot of dynamics on stage.
So there’s no possibility we’re headed towards a full Heavy Metal, science fiction musical?
*chuckles* Well, everything is possible, really. Everything is possible.
Except for Eurovision? I believe you once said you’d never write the Dutch entry to the Eurovision Song Festival.
No. Well, maybe I could try to do it, but they’re going to hate it anyway. I actually did it once, I wrote a song for it but no one was interested. I’m talking twenty years ago now.
It’s probably for the best, it would be unfair to the other competitors! Bringing it back to the shows, are there musicians who are likely to be recurring actors in the live performances? Have any new singers or musicians weaselled their way into your heart when it comes to the albums?
It’s constantly changing. Of course I would love to work with my heroes, the people I grew up listening to in the Seventies. I’m talking about the Robert Plant’s, Ian Gillan’s, Kate Bush, David Gilmore’s; that’s my biggest dream, you know? To be able to work with these people. But new bands and new singers are surfacing all the time; I listen to new music every day as I’m jogging. I get a lot of magazines here with covermount CDs, so I listen to those and discover new talents. So really I have lists of a hundred to two hundred singers that I still want to work with.
Do you list them by vocal characteristics, so that if you write a part for a specific sound you have categories of vocalists that would fit?
Not quite, no. When I write, I basically start with the music. Then I let the music inspire me to come up with a story. Only when I have the music and the story I start to think about which singers would fit the music and the story both.
When I have the singers, then I start dividing them over the albums. So a singer proficient in low and soft vocals will get those parts, and a singer skilled in the heavy, high, and powerful will get the parts that get them. So really the vocal qualities come last.
It all starts with the music…
WORDS BY LORRAINE LYSEN