HELLOWEEN**********

HELLOWEEN's Michael Weikath On Being Unplugged - "I Suck Big Time On The Acoustic Guitar And I Don’t Enjoy Playing It"




Although the German power metal legends HELLOWEEN released news today (here) that they've begun work on their next full length studio album at vocalist Andi Deris' Mi Sueno Studios on the island of Tenerife, guitarist Michael Weikath caught up with BraveWords.com about their recently-released Unarmed - Best Of 25th Anniversary. The album is a thank-you to millions of fans old and new and will prove their exceptional position on the international metal scene. Instead of putting together a regular greatest hits compilation featuring their most successful tracks to celebrate this anniversary, the five band members completely rearranged the greatest melodies they had written in the course of their career to date.

When asked what makes Helloween’s songs appropriate for making an album like this new 25 Year Anniversary record, Weikath responded:

"Well, we just ended the huge tour we had done and the majority of band members, we hardly had any time since ten, 15 years. And that would have been the point where we thought of having some time off. And our manager came up and said, ‘Look, when we looked into business with Helloween five years ago we couldn’t possibly do much because we needed to get into the groove with you, but now it’s 25 years and we ought to do something.’ And I said, ‘Something along the line of what?’ And he said, ‘Like some compilation album, your best tracks or whatever, I don’t know - unplugged or something.’

And I said no. And Markus (Grosskopf - bass) as well… we both don’t like unplugged things. When QUEENSRŸCHE and TESLA are doing something like that, it’s great, but it’s not for us. I suck big time on the acoustic guitar and I don’t enjoy playing it and it shows (laughs). I’m really not good at playing acoustic guitar.

And so we had to find different ways. So we said okay, we’ll look for outside arrangers for people who do this the right way, every day, people who do pop productions. And not us. We wouldn’t have tried to fiddle about with those things. It would have sounded like a metal musician that would have tried to get pop somehow. So if you listen to the album, it’s actually pretty genuine from, well, what the people are who did the arrangements. That’s what they do; they really know their stuff. We could have only approximated and it wouldn’t have been the same by any means. You always have a different approach to those things because you’re in the center of Helloween with those songs, and you can’t possibly approach the thing, and you go, ‘Yeah, now I play these blues chords here and now I do this rhythm and blues thing.’ You wouldn’t do it. You would refuse doing this because it would go against your own nature.

I surely have enough experience being a pop musician, which I was before I ever did metal or heavy rock or something, right? But I'm probably a bit rusty because that’s long gone and then you never know how you approach things. We were not fit to say, ‘Yeah, okay, we'll just rearrange everything the way we think.’ That’s absolutely what we didn’t want to do, so someone else had to take care of it and that’s been done in a great manner."

Unarmed - Best Of 25th Anniversary tracklisting:

'Dr. Stein'
'Future World'
'If I Could Fly'
'Where The Rain Grows'
'The Keeper's Trilogy'
'Eagle Fly Free'
'Perfect Gentleman'
'Forever & One'
'I Want Out'
'Falling To Pieces'
'A Tale That Wasn't Right'