Interview с Kee Marcello : DARKSIDE.ru

When we communicated via e-mail to arrange this interview, you told me that you are currently very busy in the studio. What are you working on? Is it some production work, or the next K2 album?

A little bit of both, actually. I’m working on some projects that include K2 to some degree. We’re gonna do a new album, but I’m not sure right now if it’s gonna be a K2 album or just a solo album. It depends on which way the writing goes. But it’s gonna be a hard rock album again for sure anyway. I’m also a producer, I have my own studio, so I’m producing some other performers as well. I’m working with a band called B.I.G. right now, which includes the bass player from Easy Action, the band I was in before Europe. I’m quite busy. (laughs)

Over the years you have recorded many albums both as a musician and as a producer. Which of them do you regard as something special? Which one was the most fun to record?

I would guess that the second Easy Action album, which is called “That Makes One” (1986), is the one I’m most proud of. I really put my efforts into it. It was the first time I managed to do something in the studio by myself when I really had free hands. I could do anything I wanted basically, and that turned out really good. It was a lot of fun recording Europe’s “Out Of This World” (1988) as well. That was the first time I had a chance to work with an established American producer in a really great studio in London.

At the moment do you consider K2 your main priority, or do the studio and management duties occupy most of your time, and K2 is just a hobby?

Well, I consider my playing to be priority number one. If it’s gonna be a new K2 album or just a Kee Marcello album, it depends. I don’t know quite yet. My playing and my performing are the main things. But I also have to say that my production duties and the other stuff that I’m doing are paying the rent. That’s very important too.

By the way, why did it take you so long to return to solo activity after the first solo album “Shine On” (1995)? I know that you started working with keyboardist Mats Olausson (ex-Yngwie Malmsteen) back in 1998, but why did this not go right?

We had some really good stuff going there, me and Mats Olausson. We recorded four or five songs, I guess, but the reason why I didn’t finish that off is that it didn’t go in the direction that I wanted it to go. I guess we could have just mixed it and released it, but I would never go that way, I have to be 100 percent pleased with what I’m doing before I can let go of it. We started doing the recordings, it was actually in my old guitar technician’s studio, Patrick Fosh is the name of the guy, we did all the basics, but I never got the energy to finish it off. And if something doesn’t get finished off, it’s not possible to release it. That’s been a problem for me – not finishing off stuff. I’ve been starting on albums many times before this, even before the one with Mats Olausson, and no

t finishing it off destroys you, it brings the product to a halt.

Then how was K2 born? How did you meet drummer Snowy Shaw (Dream Evil, Notre Dame, ex-King Diamond), and what is his role in the band?

When I met Snowy, I had some demos, but it is his drum playing that is tying the album together. He’s got a very free style of drumming that I’ve been looking for for many years. A common friend of ours, Charlie Storm, recommended Snowy to me, he said, “You have to try this guy, he’s totally fucking crazy, you’re gonna love him!” And it turned out that he is totally fucking crazy. (everybody laughs) And I loved him. Pretty much the songwriting and all that was already done when we went into the studio, but after the drums were put down, I got a lot of inspiration from the way he was playing, and it definitely made the album much freer than it was from the start. Since he’s playing so freely, so to speak, I felt the liberty to do the same thing on the guitar.

On the “Melon Demon Divine” album your bass player is listed as Klatuu, but on the website the bass player is referred to as Ken Sandin. Is it the same person, or have you changed the bass player after the studio work?

(laughs) When we did the album, me and Snowy, we wanted to be a trio, but we were only two people. So we created Klatuu, it was actually me who played bass on the album.

Is that why you named the band K2?

Yeah, you just got it! (everybody laughs) That’s why we did it – I’m actually playing the bass because we couldn’t find a bass player until later. And then we found Ken Sandin, which is a great choice, but we got a hold on him after the album was finished.

What surprised me about the album is that it was released on Frontiers Records, which usually don’t release such modern-sounding records. How did you get this record deal, and are you satisfied with it?

Yeah, it’s kind of surprising actually, but I think that Serafino and Mario, the bosses of Frontiers, like the modern stuff as well. I guess they were interested in me since I’m from the 1980s era, and that’s the kind of music they normally work with. But also they thought it was a fine album, and that’s how it came out. I wasn’t really expecting them to like it that way.

Did the album live up to your expectations as far as sales figures and success are concerned?

No, not at all. I never expected it to sell 100,000 units or anything like that, but we had some problems with it. It was amazing – the major problem for the album in Europe has been that it’s catalogued under “K2” or under “Kee Marcello’s K2”, and if you look after “K2”, you will find the music from the motion picture about the mountains. And if you search for “Marcello”, as most people do, you’ll find nothing. It has been a problem, and it’s been more or less impossible to correct, so it’s still that way. A lot of record stores in big cities c

hange it, so you can actually find the album both on “M” and “K”, so you can find it pretty much everywhere. It sounds like nothing, but it has been a big problem for people to know that it’s out. What I’m doing is not very commercial, there’s not a lot of hit songs on the album, it’s more like an experimental thing, and people need to know that it’s out. And it has been a problem. That’s why we’ve actually broke up with Frontiers, I’m no longer with them. The next album is not coming out on Frontiers, I’m negotiating with labels as we speak.

The album starts with a very dark song – “Everything Must Die”. What inspired you to write it, and why did you choose to open the record with such a heavy song?

(pause) Well, it’s more like a psychological truth than anything else that everything must die. It’s the cycle of life. But in the end it’s kind of hopeful anyway, because the last verse is going, “In the end life ain’t fair / The reaper loses never / But don’t despair / Your souls will live forever.” In a sense, there’s a positive message anyway. I just got that vibe from the music of the song, it was very dark, and it seems like an up-tempo song is a good kick-off for the album.

The next track, “Enemies”, is also surprising. I know that you listen to a lot of modern music, but on this song you’re even rapping. Are you interested in rap music?

Not really in rap music, but what I’m trying to do there is more like toasting, like they do in Jamaica. (laughs) We lived in the West Indies for some years when I was in the band Europe, and it got me interested in toasting. We were living on a small island in the British West Indies, and they had toaster guys there, like rastafari guys. I thought it was really cool, I always liked that, and now I’m trying to do my own version of it. Obviously it wouldn’t work if I did it in Jamaican English, since I’m from Sweden, from Go-fucking-thenburg. (laughs) So I do my own version of it, and it probably sounds like rap. It was fun doing it, it’s very effective. It’s actually an old British tradition to kind of sing or almost mess out the words rapidly, it has been existing in music for the longest time.

There is another version of this track as a bonus, but it’s with different lyrics, and it’s called “Can I B The 1”. What is the story behind this track?

I got to know some of the Swedish tennis players in the 1980s, Peter Lungren and Niclas Kroon. They were very successful tennis players, touring all over the world, so I bumped into them on a couple of occasions, and we became friends, and we still are. About 1.5 years ago Niclas Kroon called me and had an idea about new lyrics for the song. I gave him the album when we met one summer at Peter Lungren’s summerhouse. I think that Peter Lungren is actually coaching a Russian tennis player right now (the name of the Russian player is Marat Safin – ed.). Anyway, Niclas suggested that he should re-write the lyrics, so they would be about the Mast

er’s Tennis Cup in America. I said, “That sounds like a crazy fucking idea, let’s go for it!” I like to try new crazy stuff. He wrote the lyrics, they turned out great, and I spoke to the Master’s people, and they loved it. They flew me over there to do some radio and TV promotion, and as I like tennis, it was kind of fun to be in the games there. It’s like an anthem for the Master’s Cup.

Another interesting track on the record is “Tattoo For Patto”, which is a tribute to guitarist Ollie Halsall and his band Patto. Did these people and their music have an influence on you?

Oh, totally. That’s totally my favorite band and my favorite guitar player. I’ve got everything to thank him for. I felt I wanted to pay them back by doing a tribute to Patto. They meant a lot in my musical development. It’s such a shame they never made it big.

By the way, it seems to me that the lyrics to this song can also be referred to yourself and your time with Europe (“The music business is a cynical show / They suck out all your blood / And then off you go / A&R assholes standing in a row”). Is it correct?

Yeah, that’s true. There’s actually double meaning there. Obviously I’m kind of skeptical with the music business and A&R people in there. And that’s what this song is about – it’s pretty hard for a real talent and real stuff to get big. Patto didn’t make it big although I think they really deserved it.

I cannot but ask you a couple of questions about Europe. When the band first got back together a few years ago, you said you were not interested in the studio work, but would like to join them on the tour. It didn’t happen, and later you said in an interview, that you don’t have any contact anymore. Does it mean that there’s no chance to see you back in Europe?

I’m finished actually, I’m finished with Europe. I guess the version of Europe right now is the existing one, and it’s not gonna change. I should never say never, but I’m quite sure that it’s not gonna happen. I feel like I’ve moved on to a different place, and I don’t really belong there. It’s been a lot of years since we played together, and it feels like we totally went into different directions. It might not sound like this to people from the outside, but it seems that we’re not into the same kind of stuff.

The next question has interested me for a long time. It is now common knowledge that Europe’s “Prisoners In Paradise” album (1991) turned out very different from what you wanted because of the record company’s pressure. But I still don’t understand why a record company would put pressure on a band that’s already highly successful and selling a lot of records. What were they unhappy with? And what did they want from you?

We wanted to get harder, because the times were definitely talking about harder music. You have to remember that when we did “Prisoners In Paradise” it was right when grunge came along. The record companies got shit-scared, because

they knew that things were gonna change, and they didn’t want to take a chance that we would record a much heavier album and still sell records. The first version of “Prisoners In Paradise” that we recorded had a lot more guitar-based heavier tracks on it, and they refused it, so we had to go in and record some new songs before they finally accepted it. It was probably a pretty bad thing for the album, but I don’t know if it would have been a success anyway because of grunge, because right after that hard rock died for a while. Melodic heavy metal became a thing of the past, all of a sudden all the long-haired dudes in LA changed to turtlenecks and posh hairstyles. It was really strange, they changed almost overnight.

How many songs were scrapped from the original versions of “Prisoners In Paradise”?

I can’t really remember. There was “Mr. Government Man”, “Rainbow Warrior”, “Break Free”… I can’t remember more, but there were probably like five songs that never turned up on the album and they would have made it much heavier. It’s now definitely a different album than it would have been.

Now let’s go back to the present time and discuss your participation in pre-selections for the Eurovision Song Contest. First of all, how did you get together with Canadian singer Alannah Myles for that contest? Who came up with an idea to perform together?

That’s kind of a freaky story. The guy who is in charge of the Eurovision Song Contest here in Sweden called me and asked me if I wanted to be a special guest, so to speak. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, but I said, “I’ll do that on one condition: if I can have K2 there.” He said, “Oh, you can do that, but I want you to do that with a woman.” He suggested Cathrina from Cathrina And The Waves, and I said that it sounds fun to be. I started to work on a song (it was eventually titled “We Got It All” – ed.) with her in mind, but it turned out that she already has a song in the competition, so she couldn’t do it. Then we started to contact a lot of singers that we thought could be appropriate for this song, there were a lot of people like Joan Jett, Kim Wilde, Belinda Carlisle, Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles… We called a lot of people, and a lot of people were interested, but this was pretty close to the competition, so the only one that had a possibility in her schedule to get here was Alannah. She recorded her part of the song in Canada with Rush producer Terry Brown, and then we mixed it here, so I didn’t actually meet her until the first rehearsals. It was fun!

Unfortunately your song didn’t make it to the European finals, but you did score a victory in another contest – at the U.S. Film and Video contest you were awarded for “creative excellence” of your soundtrack for the commercial film for Swedish fighter jet Jas Gripen 39C. How did it happen that you wrote music for a promo film for the Swedish fighter jet? Are you a fan of aircraft and military?

The reason I got involved in there is that the director of that film, Patrick Ullaeus, does a lot of rock videos. He has a company called Revolver Films and he makes a lot of rock videos here in Sweden and all over the world. I think he has made about 200 rock videos, he’s one of the most successful rock video makers in Sweden. He had an order to do this, and he called me and asked me if I wanted to do music for it. It was very natural, he’s a friend of mine and that’s why we did it.

Roman Patrashov
June 20, 2005
13 июл 2005 the End

Kee Marcello

Demon Or Divine