30 days of night

I just came back from the cinema where I watched the premiere of 30 days of night, one of my fave graphic novels, but unfortunately the movie is disappointing. Obviously Hollywood discovered that a lot of money can be made with movies based on graphic novels, but why the hell are they not able to stay loyal to the original stories, why do they always have to change things in the movies? Since Steve Niles was involved in the making of the movie and also Sam Raimi already proved that he knows what he is doing, I had really high expectations, but well, now I will do what you should do too, I will re-read the graphic novel and forget about the movie.

Almost done...

After having a great time in South Afrika and Japan (and after being fed up with intercontinental flights) we returned to Germany and played the Nuclear Blast aniversary Festival last weekend. I enjoyed it a lot, but for me the highlight of the day was the "Nuclear Blast All Star Jam" which I took part in. The idea was to have musicians from different bands jamming on some cover songs and I was supposed to play the Trooper, together with members of Rage, Edguy and Subway to Sally. The funny part of this whole thing was that we never rehearsed this song a single time, we didn't even do a real soundcheck, and on top of all this I was not able to use my in ear monitoring system for this session, but in the end it was a lot of fun, slightly chaotic, but definitely fun. Now there is only one more show to go, the "End of Tour" show here in Krefeld in about 10 days, and even though in my opinion playing live is the best thing about being a musician, I have to say I am looking forward to getting a break, after almost 18 months on the road it will be very nice to stay home for a while. But before this break starts it will be very special for us to play the last show of this world tour here in our hometown, so see you guys there next week.

Concert season continues

After having some more fun at gigs that I went to as a fan (Orphaned Land at the Prog Power festival and Iced Earth at Cologne) the time has come to play some shows again. Yesterday we arrived at Pretoria/South Africa, we already did soundcheck last night and now we can't wait to play the show today, it is the very first time for BG to play a show here in South Africa and we are so curious to see how it will be, we only expect the best. See you at the show tonight.

What is your price?

Something I never really understood is this reunion-mania that is going on since some years. A million bands reunite, play at Wacken to record a live cd or dvd, only to break up again 2 months later, does this really make sense? Kiss are on a reunion tour since the middle of the 90's, even though Ace and Peter already left the band again years ago and, while Black Sabbath finally are touring in their best lineup ever as Heaven & Hell, Sharon anounces that next year there will be another reunion album with Ozzy on vocals... Another nice example is Immortal, they are on their big reunion tour after not having released an album for 4 years... lol, 4 years? Reminds me a lot of Blind Guardian, are we constantly doing one reunion after the other without knowing it? But all this is not limited to metal bands of course, Genesis went on tour again with Phil Collins, The Police are on the road and plan a new album and even the Spice Girls plan their come back (lol) and the big driving force behind all of this is money of course. But it seems that not everybody is for sale in this business, a few weeks ago David Gilmour was asked to launch a Pink Floyd reunion and, to make this a bit more tasty for him, he was offered 125 million (!!!) pounds... and now guess what happened... While most people would even join the Spice Girls for this amount of money, he refused, saying he already has enough money and prefers his life without Pink Floyd. I really respect this guy for his decision, even though I hope he will change his mind one day since Pink Floyd is one of my very fave bands and I never had the chance to see them live, but well...we will see.