By Jim Barber
As the great musical philosopher Bon Scott once intoned, “it’s a long way to the top, if you wanna rock and roll.” And while the definition of ‘the top’ is in the eye of the beholder, the sentiment is as valid today as it was in 1977 when it was first blasted through our airwaves by AC/DC … and as valid as it was for the first generation of rock and rollers in 1957 and still a lesson being imparted to the rockers of today.
To get to a plateau of success in the dog-eat-dog world of the music industry, where an artist or band is able to sustain a good, comfortable standard of living, has built a solid and memorable repertoire of recorded work, who can routinely bask in the adoration of thousands or even tens of thousands of ardent admirers at ever show, and still hold the creative flame aloft it takes a healthy heaping of perseverance, sacrifice and strength of conviction.
Most of all, according to long-tenured, well-respected and dynamically energizing veteran European vocalist/songwriter Michael Kiske, for a band, it takes a group of people with the same goals, the same drive and the same commitment to excellence. It also helps a whole lot if you happen to like one another and play well with others, and be amongst colleagues who aren’t afraid to be real, be themselves and be forward thinking.
Kiske is currently the co-lead vocalist for legendary and highly influential German metal band Helloween, who recently released their 27th album, Giants and Monsters on the Reigning Phoenix Music label. It is their first in four years, since 2021’s self-titled release, and is Kiske’s second after returning to the band in 2016. His first tenure was from 1984 to 1993, after which he boasted an impressive array of live and recorded works as a solo artist, as part of Avantasia, Place Vendome, Unisonic and the Kiske/Somerville project alongside American-born former Avantasia Vocalist Amanda Somerville.
So he knows a little bit about what it takes to be a success in most aspects of the music business, and speaks with both authority and enthusiasm about how Helloween, his primary project, has been able to stand the test of time for more than 40 years, while still maintaining their relevance, their audience and their passion for making, recording and playing their particular brand of intensely melodic, instrumentally proficient, and emotionally uplifting classic metal music.
“The bands of the 1980s defined the modern hard rock and metal style, and most of them are still around. Some of them have stopped now because they get too old, but they never got out of fashion. And I think it’s because when you do something that is not just a reflection of the fashion or trying to fall in line with the fashion, when you do something that creates it’s own kind of voice, it’s possible to have a very long career because while fashion goes away and changes, you never have to. I always find it interesting when you look at the Van Halen history for instance. When you look at the records with David Lee Roth, I think they’re even more timeless than the records they did with Sammy Hagar. And that’s simply was because Eddie [Van Halen] wanted to prove a point. He was hungry and had something to say on those first records. He wanted to be successful, but he wanted to be successful doing it his way,” Kiske said.
“I think they’re [the ones with Hagar] still great sounding records and you’re still able to listen to all those records even today, but to me they sound a little more dated, they sound a little more like the time they were in [mid to late 1980s] than the records with David, because the early Van Halen didn’t care about anything. They just did their own thing. And those songs are timeless. That’s one of the reasons why bands like Helloween can still be out there and still doing new music, and still being passionate about it, because they write songs that are timeless. I don’t really see any band being around for a long time unless they have great songs and are able to continue to have great songs. And you need to be able to still play those songs well and put on a good show.
“Everybody in Helloween wants to stay fresh. Everybody wants to stay relevant. And it’s not something you can fake or pretend. It is there, or it’s not. It’s very simple. You either have a spirit going on between the musicians and you kind of excite each other, or you don’t and it’s okay even if you piss each other off sometimes. It means you care. There’s some kind of dynamics going on in this band. We are very, very different people. We’re seven individuals and are completely different. That alone creates an interesting atmosphere. And I’m glad it’s like that. And another key thing is you always have to stay true to who you are as an individual and as a band. Don’t sell your soul because it ends up killing your soul. You have to stay true to yourself, and I know it’s an overused idea. It’s cheesy, but it’s true. You have to do what your heart wants to do. And if you do something else, or do something for the wrong reasons, it’s going to kill you. There are a lot of musicians who lost their mojo, who lost their fire, their spirit because they lost track of why they were doing it in the first place. They ended up just doing it for the money, for instance, and they’re not writing for the sake of the music, but to be popular or sell more units or whatever, or to get laid. I never understood that. I started making music plainly out of my passion for the music. Of course you want to have a career, but I wasn’t sitting there planning out my career at the time. I was just sure if I was passionate and dedicated and worked on my craft, it’s going to happen. I didn’t doubt it. I had that drive when I was young. I had absolutely no doubt about it. But it was purely out of the passion for doing it and that’s a good reason. And it’s worked. Listen, it’s great to make money, I’m not saying anything against making a living from music, but it should never be the main reason why you’re writing a song.”
As well as having timeless, impactful original music, the folks who create and play that music need to have the right personalities for their jobs, and those personalities need to mesh well together, or at least not consistently be at one another’s throats. And even if those personalities come and go from the lineup, they have to either blend in, or blend back in if they’re a returning member. Thankfully, Helloween has been anchored by guitarist Michael Weikath and bassist Markus Grosskopf since its inception in 1984, with the two steadfast in their commitment to the band from the outset, never once leaving.
“I think the magic of any band, including Helloween, is the personalities. And you have to just be yourself and just let it out when you’re onstage. People know when you’re not being yourself. And that’s also in life too. I think you can hear the unique personalities working together on this album. You can feel it, from a songwriting point of view. For example [co-lead vocalist] Andy Deris has his own style of writing songs. You can tell right away that it’s an Andy Deris song, and the same for Kai [Hansen, one of the band’s co-founders in 1984, who also returned in 2016 after a 27-year absence]. He always sounds like him. I can always pretty much tell what song is his. I think guys like that have a fingerprint even in the songwriting. And I think every band that is successful has at least one, two or three strong personalities in the band. Without that, it doesn’t work, and it’s also pretty boring. You want musicians and singers who are excited about their own music, and excited to perform it. When you’re in the audience, what is it that makes you get excited about a performance? Why is a singer or guitar player moving you? Because it has soul. There’s something in there that the singer, for instance, put in there; he put his heart in there and it reaches you and you can feel something. There are other singers who do sing technically maybe 10 times better, but they don’t have ‘it,’ that connection, that feeling. It just doesn’t move you the same,” he said, citing the example of the recently departed Ozzy Osbourne.
“The first guy when you think about someone who is very much real, and very much themselves is Ozzy. And he wasn’t even the classic rock star in terms of look. He didn’t look like Bon Jovi and at times he was even a but clumsy onstage. But the soul was there. The heart was there, you knew he meant every word he sang, and that’s what we all feed from. And it’s not even a problem if you have demons. It’s kind of the opposite. We all have them, so if an artist is not afraid to put those demons out there, the battles they are fighting, and is able to story their story, or the story of other people, this moves you because those are real heartfelt stories in that song. Stevie Ray Vaughan was another guy like that. He once said in an interview that he plays the guitar as if he was trying to break out of jail. He said, I think that he was an alcoholic already at 14 or something like that, so he was definitely on the edge, and definitely fighting something, but that gave him the blues for real. And that’s why he played so well. He was just f***ing playing the blues with all his heart and all his soul, and he made it cool again in the 1980s. At the time nobody cared about the blues any more and then he showed up and blues becomes cool again because he does it in a way that moves you, that makes you believe.”
Which leads us to the subject of Artificial Intelligence and the insidious way it is already infiltrating art and music. Kiske, as one can imagine based on his previous comments about authenticity, individuality and personality, is not a fan of AI.
“Even without AI with a lot of popular music on the radio, everything is calculated. Everything is as stupid as possible so that the simplest mind can follow it. It almost kind of makes you fall asleep. It’s like the people who make it don’t want to scare people. It doesn’t scare anyone, it’s also doesn’t want to excite you. It doesn’t want to wake you up, it just wants to please you, and hopefully make you buy or stream the song, but that’s it. This is the most wrong morality for culture that you could ever have because it’s the opposite of the point of music or art in general that comes from your heart. We’re living in a time of everything being fake. But just imagine a time where people start only talking the truth – no lying whatsoever. That would be revolutionary. But we’re all so used to lies because we get lied to everywhere. And AI is nothing but a lie, it is fake. It’s fake reality. It’s a great tool for some things, like making movies, or even for music videos, but it’s horrible when it becomes more than just a tool, when it takes over your creativity, when it takes over your own mind. It’s like we all read articles now that are not even written by humans any more [writer’s note, this one only used spell-check, everything else was written by a 100 per cent, Grade A, carb-overfed human being]. I don’t want to read articles written by computers. And I sure as hell don’t want to listen to music made by computers. I want to hear opinions, I want to hear an experience of a person, I want to hear their emotions, their personality,” he said.
“There’s always been issues with music being mass produced and assisted by technology. But true art is in danger now. So many things have disappeared. Over here in Europe, you don’t even have any platforms anymore where young musicians can be heard. They try to get heard over YouTube and stuff, but that’s hardly going to work because it’s flooded. For any young artist in the 1980s or 1990s, a person could be successful in Spain, or in England or in Holland, be the number one there. In the 1980s, they would very quickly end up on MTV Europe and get into the rotation because the people behind it were looking for things like that. So all of Europe was now able to see this artist. That sort of thing doesn’t exist anymore. Back in the day, even if you were just getting airplay in your home country, if the song was good, people would buy it if they liked it, and you’d be fine. Nowadays, you can have a great song, an amazing song, but there’s a huge possibility that no one’s going to hear it. And it also means that people are afraid to be different. We were never afraid of trying new things. That was the whole reason why Helloween got successful in the first place. When you listen to the Keeper records in the 1980s [Keeper of the Seven Keys: Part 1 (1987) and Part 2 (1988)] we did something nobody else in metal did. We allowed a sense of humour. ‘Rise and Fall,’ ‘Dr. Stein,’ I mean we had comedy sounds in there and stuff like that because we were fearless. We were just having some fun with it, and I think we never really lost that, because we succeeded with it. I mean, I was out of the band for over 20 years, so I can’t speak for the whole time, but the time I was in this band, before and today, we were always honest. Even the records that were not received by the audience that good because of too many changes, like Pink Bubbles Go Ape [1991] or Chameleon [1993], they were still honest. It reflected who and what the band was. And it was brave because they sounded completely different. We were never trying to copy any of our previous records. I think when you go that way as a band or an artist, even if you fail with a record, but it’s honest and you do what you want to do, in the longer term this pays off because you’ve proved to yourself and to the world that you have your own voice, your own approach. You do you own thing, you build your unique trademark. You build it based on honesty, instead of just reflecting what is hip. And when you do that long enough and honest enough, like Helloween has, in the end, the chance to succeed in the longer term is much bigger than when you allow fashions to influence you. So many bands sound dated because they did that. But look at all the other bands that were there before: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and even us, they’re all still there because they did their own thing and they were not jumping on any fashion train. They created their own niche, their own sound.
“And of course part of that is growing. People need to grow, you can’t stay the same. You can have the same passion and the same personality, but you have to grow, especially if you’re doing something creative. You grow as individuals and become even more individual and more creative and unique. It’s the meaning of life, but it’s not something you can fake. It works sometimes, but usually doesn’t last. Again, Ozzy is a good example. He only lasted that long and got even more successful over the years because he wasn’t faking anything. Everything with the types of music where you treat it just like a product, which is only created with the head, trying to figure out what might work, or trying to jump on a particular trend of the year, they’re usually gone by the next year. And it has nothing to do with the style of music. In the end, personality, individuality and authenticity winds.”
With seven members in Helloween, and pretty much all of them capable songwriters in their own right, Kiske said he actually stepped back from writing for Giants and Monsters, although as has been discussed so much above, everyone still participated in the process to make sure the songs could be the best they possibly could be.
“We have Kai, we have Mikey [Weikath], we have Sascha [Gerstner, guitarist, in the band since 2002] we have Andy [Deris] and even Markus [Grosskopf] is contributing. And they usually have enough great songs. I sometimes thought maybe I should write something, but I just didn’t, and as you see from the album, we had so many songs, so it was not necessary. But they all trust me to know how to sing what they write. And it’s been that way since I was in the band before. They didn’t write songs to necessarily fit my voice, so it was up to me to learn how to sing the songs the way they wrote them, but that’s how you grow and get better as a vocalist. Even today, they don’t necessarily have to write anything that I can sing, because they know I will figure it out. But they still do have my voice in their head. And they do that with the songs Andy is going to sing too. We all just work it out. And that’s a great thing. I’m sure as a songwriter it’s better to have these different flavours of singers that you can work with. And usually the songwriter knows pretty early what song is for me, or maybe Andy should sing that one, and others are for Kai who does some lead vocals. But they’re all still open to our ideas. If Kai, for instance, comes up with a completely different middle part or much better chorus and the songwriter agrees that it’s better, it’s going to be used. But after all these years, the guy writing the song usually tries to bring it to us fully finished, but it’s not written in stone. It doesn’t go unchanged, but usually they’re so good that the changes are minimal.”
While there is no overriding theme or concept to Giants and Monsters, Kiske said that through the recording process, and especially in conversations with fans and press leading up to its release at the end of August, the band realized there was some connective tissue linking the songs together.
“It’s all kind of spiritual. It asks specific questions about life and stuff. And we were surprised ourselves that it almost seems like there’s a theme. It almost seems like we had this plan, but it just shows you that we’re all kind of in the same boat right now. We’re kind of in the same vein in terms of our thinking, and I think that’s part of why the album sounds so organic. But it wasn’t intentional. The songwriters write their songs and write whatever lyrics they have on their mind, but it just happens. You know an album is always a reflection of where a band is at that time, and it really can’t be any other way,” he said, as he talked about the song ‘Universe’ which is a beautifully, powerfully epic, classic metal opus.
“It’s about universal love. And I am sure that was the intention of Sascha, who really wanted the song to represent the classic elements of the band in terms of our style and sound. And it’s good, because everybody else was more wild, more open. I mean, you’ll always have the Helloween sound. We cannot avoid it. So it doesn’t really matter what we do, it’s always going to sound like us. But he was really using the classical sounds. And obviously he succeeded with it because I hear quite often that people really love that song. And the lyrics, as far as I understand, are about universal love, which we need.”
Another song that has garnered a lot of interest and attention is the band’s sentimental and nostalgic ode to one of their favourite cities in which to play, Tokyo, and features a lovely, panoramic, well produced and evocative accompanying video for ‘This is Tokyo.’
“It’s interesting because we hadn’t played there for a long time. There was a phase in the 1990s when they kind of turned their back on music coming from the west. They built their own rock bands, the own pop bands and it was really kind of funny at first, but after a while, the scene got really good. They developed their own style, so now I think they’re happy to open up again. For us, we have a special relationship with them, because when we did Keeper Part 1, it was a huge success in Japan. I remember when we played there, we toured for maybe three or four weeks through the various cities, and we were doing everything by train. And when we got to the next city, it seemed like the whole train station was full of fans. It was like Beatlemania. Police had to guide us to the cars. It was amazing. Helloween was really successful there early on, and that automatically connects you with the country when you receive so much love as a band,” Kiske explained.
“Shows were kind of funny back in those days because fans had to sit down. And there were police or security people surrounding them, and when someone stood up they were told to sit down and stuff like that. So it wasn’t really a rock show in the 1980s. You played a song, then they would clap, and when you talked to them, it would be dead silence. That’s not how it is anymore. Now we have real rock shows and they really go wild. It’s like how it should be. But there is a specific spirit about Japan that is very unique, that is only something you find in Japan, and I think that’s part of the mystery for people of other countries. You can ask anyone who has been there, and we’ve been there many times, they are completely trustworthy. When you’re working over there, when you’re on tour and you depend on people in the country where you’re going to make sure that the proper type of equipment is there and things like that. I mean, Japan is like heaven for anyone who has to tour there, because when you tell you they will do this and that, and that what you need with be there by a certain time, it will be there, ready to go. They want to deliver. They have a work ethos that is kind of brutal to themselves, which makes the culture very hard to a certain extent, but we don’t notice that. We just experience the benefits of their ethos. I mean, I don’t want to glorify them. They have their problems too, they have their dark sides, but it is a special place. And if you’ve never been there, you should go. It’s a great experience. I love Japan, and we have always had a special relationship with Tokyo anyways.”
Helloween is embarking on a 40th anniversary tour in Europe, starting Oct. 17 in Luxembourg, before shows in The Netherlands, France, the U.K., Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Switzerland. In December, the band travels to southeast Asia for shows in Indonesia, Malaysia and Taiwan.
Kiske said preliminary plans are being undertaken to cross the Atlantic for shows in the United States and Canada, as well as for dates in South American in the spring of 2026.
“We were in North America in 2023, and that was great fun. It was just for three weeks, but we had some great shows. And I know there was at least one show in Canada, but I can’t remember where. We did pretty good, to be honest with you, because we were never big in North America. We’re big in South America, but not in North America. But still, we were able to have three and a half thousand people at a show we did in Los Angeles two years ago, which is not bad,” Kiske said.
For more information on Helloween, Giants and Monsters and any other touring plans, visit https://www.helloween.org.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
