MAGNUM – No Visitation For North America
By Martin Popoff
Yes, ‘tis true, shockingly. UK melodic hard rock mavens MAGNUM
haven’t played these shores since they backed up OZZY OSBOURNE in 1982!
Crazy, but alas, not about to change any time soon.
Still, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the band’s unique brand
of “pomp rock,” an elegant, highly hooky form of mild metal that leans
prog, leans HEEP, leans eminently memorable with almost every track.
“Difficult to say, because Tony writes the songs,” begins
keyboardist Mark Stanway, asked what the band was trying differently on
The Visitation versus ‘09’s Into The Valley Of The Moonking. “But
certain things you can get a hold of better. I don’t know, this album,
when Tony presented the songs to the band, it just felt like more of a
vibrant album. To say the songs are better wouldn’t be fair on the last
album. Tony maintains a great quality of songwriting. But sometimes
things work better live, and having play five or six of these live on
tour, it’s just like we’ve been playing them for years. They just sound
so good. So I think it’s went down well live. We still do the Moonking
as well, but we’re doing five or six of the new songs now and they just
feel great.”
Fact is, there’s a definite Magnum sound, and it’s not changed much
over the last, say, three albums certainly. Fortunately it’s a baffling
mix of the above attempted… labels? “It’s difficult with labels,” laughs
Stanway in agreement. “Because we appear in heavy metal magazines
which, to this day, bemuses me (laughs). I can’t think of too many heavy
metal bands with keyboards, for a start. If I had to choose one genre, I
would say classic rock. It sounds British, which is good, I guess
(laughs). We just approach a song in our own way. We’ve been doing it
for so long now. So I guess classic rock would be the genre.
Progressive, I think of bands like EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER as being
progressive, with lots of time changes and stuff. We don’t tend to be
progressive for the sake of it. The format of the songs remain pretty
much a formula. You get a song, you get a verse, you get of chorus, you
get a middle eight, you get a solo. There’s nothing very progressive
about that from an arrangement point of view. We do concentrate very
strongly on melody though. It’s nice to know that people are always
singing our songs in their heads. So melodies are of prime importance,
which is great from a keyboard point of view, which allows me to put
flourishes and colours which perhaps I couldn’t do in a heavier
situation.”
Magnum music also arises from an odd situation where guitarist Tony
Clarkin writes all the songs, lyrics included, despite the band having a
hugely regarded singer in Bob Catley.
“Yeah, it’s one of those things,” explains Stanway. “We still have a
lot of input. Tony’s songs would stand up if he just played them with
an acoustic guitar, which to me is the ultimate test of a song. If you
can sit down with an acoustic guitar and perform that song, then it
stands up as a song on its own right. That opens the doors for us to go,
‘How about this, about that, should we put this in here or should we
put this in there?’ But Tony has a particular style that suits Magnum.
He writes with Bob’s voice in mind the whole time. Whereas if I wrote a
song, it might be much more suitable for Paul Rodgers or Coverdale - it
would be different. Tony has been writing for so long for Magnum. I
mean, over 230-odd songs he’s written for Magnum, which is a stunning
repertoire. One could argue financially, oh, he’s making more money than
me or than anyone else. But he’s better at it for Magnum than anybody
else. So rather put into it four different songwriters, etc., we’ll
leave the formula as it is because it works. We’re all happy with it.”
Going down the NWOBHM road with Mark, given that the band actually
was making records as far back as ’78, Stanway figures that, “Yes, I
remember that when I joined the band in 1980. Okay, the birth of punk
happened at the same time as this New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. But
it’s like the Reading Festival really launched us on a major scale in
Britain. That really helped. So being able to play to 50,000 fans that
might be coming to see
Ozzy or the likes, suddenly they got to hear
Magnum on a grand scale. And that album, in 1980, Chase The Dragon,
although it didn’t get released until ‘82, that was our first Top 20
entry in the charts. So that new wave did help, in spite of the punks
and the arrival of punk.”
Most definitely, the NWOBHM was the start of Magnum getting lumped
in – fortuitously mostly – with metal. But one supposes they also
gathered a little tailwind from the neo-prog movement, the NWOBProg, as
it were.
“Yeah, more mid-‘80s for that, I think. But of course you got a lot
of bad glam stuff coming out at the same time, so we invested in some
rather loud stage clothes and things and sort of joined the trend
visually as well. The music remained the same. We did go a tiny bit
commercial with the likes of Vigilante, bringing in Roger Taylor from
QUEEN to help produce that – we got the commercialism of Queen
production on that. Which I thought, still to this day, sounds great.
And that was followed by our biggest albums to date which was Wings Of
Heaven, which was 1988, which had the might of the record industry
behind it. I mean, let’s face it, if you got the machine working for
you, you can make just about anything a hit. And of course that was the
introduction of Fairlights and computers and things like that, which
helped us to compete with some of those sounds, some of those techniques
that were coming out, with the likes of
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and
stuff like that. Suddenly that technology was available to us, and we
used that on Wings Of Heaven, which was a long-winded way of recording
things but you know, it comes out the speakers great. So we sort of
progressed as technology progressed (laughs).”
But back to the current day, and the realities of the music in 2011,
Stanway figures, “We’re still very fortunate to have a record deal in
this day and age, where these things seem to be disappearing. But when
we finish this tour, we’ve got hopefully a few festivals in the summer, a
few select dates before Christmas, and then Tony has already started
writing the next album, so we’ll be back in the studio in the new year
making another album.”
For more info visit
Magnumonline.co.uk.
Lun 11 Avr - 18:21
