The Valensian Message Board -

The Valensian Message Board Forum Index
 FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   RegisterRegister 
 ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 

Important Notice: We regret to inform you that our free phpBB forum hosting service will be discontinued by the end of June 30, 2024. If you wish to migrate to our paid hosting service, please contact billing@hostonnet.com.
Valensia interviews - Queen Interview 1

 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    The Valensian Message Board Forum Index :: Valensia
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Ancalagon
Ready To Roar


Joined: 18 May 2007
Posts: 46
Location: Utrecht

PostPosted: Fri May 18, 2007 11:43 am    Post subject: Valensia interviews - Queen Interview 1 Reply with quote

What made you decide to do a Queen Tribute?
- The idea emerged when I was doing a Q&A on the internet for Japanese Valensia fans. Somebody asked me something like: "How about you making a cover-album?".
I don't remember if it was just a cover album or a Queen-cover album, but over the years people have been asking me to do a Queen-cover.
As a matter of fact, when Universal wanted to release a Valensia mini-album (The White Album, 1994) they wanted me to do a Queen coversong. In those days my recordcompany in Holland was doing everything to minimize Valensia being compared to Queen.
Even before the release of my debut-album, my leadvocals were recorded in a way that it wouldn't remind people of Freddie Mercury too much.

At times your voice is frightingly close to the voice of Freddie. Sometimes it's even hard to tell who's who.
- Our voices definitely fall into the same category. I basically have a light voice like Freddie. Even slightly lighter. So physically the voices are quite alike.
I can come near his voice in the early days, but even then it's hard to meet with that level.
To me there's a big difference.
There's no way I could ever come near this overall sound-level he could.
He just got more vocalcord or anything; I don't know.
To me his voice sounds so much better then mine.
I know there are Valensia fans and even just people I know who prefer my voice over his.
It's a matter of taste.
But musically spoken I'd say I'm doing high falsettos quite well, I can add atmosphere, I have quite a big range, I can sing raw and all that, but even if I would do anything to shape up my voice the best way possible, I�Lll always be second-best.

Many of your fans say you are amongst today's best rock oriented singers. Do you agree to that?
- Ofcourse I agree.
No, there isn't any -as far as I'm concerned- 'best rock oriented singer' anyway.
It's all about taste.
Sometimes, in a moment of sillyness I think: "hey, I really AM one of the better vocalists". 5 minutes later I think I suck, and I'm just pretending to be good.

How has Freddie Mercury inspired you?
- I don't know exactly. Since I was 4 years old he always was the perfect leadsinger to me.
My mother gave me Killer Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody at the age of 4 and 5. I used to listen to the intro of Bohemian Rhapsody again and again. Just pick up the needle and put it at the beginning of the song. The opening phrase "Is this the real life" was unbelievable. I was only 5 years old.
I didn't know a thing about layered voices. I knew it had to be more people singing simultaneously, but I never heard it that perfect and angel-like like this intro. I never heard anything like that ever again anyway.
To be honest I kind of lost track of Queen when I grew up. I wasn't into buying records anyway, and after they released 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' I never heard that same young spirit-songwriting like they did in the early days.
"I Want To Break Free", "Body Language", "Las Palabras De Amor", "One Vision", "The Invisible Man", "Breaktrough", "I Want It All" were the songs I heard on the radio. It was okay, but not really my thing.
I finally bought the albums in 1990. That's quite late; I was eighteen. A whole new Queen-world opened up for me. I never heard "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke", "The March Of The Black Queen" or "The Millionaire Waltz" until then. Those songs definitely inspired me to arrange Gaia.
Back in those days I was looking for a leadsinger myself.
I only considered myself to be a leadsinger when I was very young.
Over the years people talked me out of the idea I could be a leadsinger. Let alone a musician.
I was looking for guys to form a band with.
My plan was just to play the guitar. Somebody else should be the leadsinger. I never found them.
The Netherlands has fine musicians, but they lack a good, healthy dose of arrogance. There simply wasn't anyone who dared to rise to the challenge.
It was at that time when I heard the news Freddie died.
It was on the evening news. It showed a fragment of Bohemian Rhapsody.
I never cry; I'm not really good at it, but I cried when I saw it.
I really was hiding my tears, because I felt ridiculous. But it was like somebody close to me died,
I can't explain.
Especially because I never was a Queen-fan or a Freddie Mercury fan the way I've seen it with others. Never read anything on them, never had the records, let alone photos, videos or other Queen-thingies. I was following Duran Duran.
Later on I realized how strong Freddie's influence on me has been throughout my life.
I think I never realized because I was so young and never into 'being fan' at the age of 4.
But Freddie's impact has been enormously strong.
The day he died I started singing. Perculiar, when looking back. It suddenly was there. I'd love to make a beautiful story out of it, saying I got his voice the day he died. It's not true.
Truth is I learned to sing by listening to Freddie. I used to say I'm just imitating him, and because I�Lm doing it so lousy, it sounds like I have my own style. By now I've been influenced by so many artists and that got all mixed into one sound over the years.
On the Queen Tribute I really try to approach him as close as possible on some tracks.
Bohemian Rhapsody is the best example.
It was childish in a way; I liked to see how close I could get, but it also was very interesting to do.
I know little about Freddie Mercury. He's got the eyes of a sweet man, that's a thing I always noticed. I still have to get into the life of Freddie.
One of the few things I heard of him was this thing about finishing Killer Queen.
That he didn't really bother too much in finding a proper ending for the song.
Later on I heard Leonardo Da Vinci also seemed to get bored when he was working on one project too long. It seemed that his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was unfinished.
I looked at the painting, as it always has been one of my favorite paintings, and then I understood why some parts of the arms were painted without the usual details.
It wasn't finished! Why? because he was too impatient to finish. Got his head already into new things.
Finishing Killer Queen could be a similar story. That really made me laugh; I'm just like that!
I can work very, very hard as long as I'm interested. When I lose interest before the project ends, it costs me so much to finish it. I always thought it was me.
But hearing these legends had the same way of dealing with their works was so incredibly nice and comforting to hear! That why I want to know more things about Freddie! Until now, only the voice was my focuspoint. And it still is.
Who can sing like that?
I don't mean techniques or anything; I'm talking about the sound of his voice.
Especially when he did these harmonyvocals. God, this man was good!
Has he influenced you as a performer?
- Hell, I barely perform. The nineties have done that. I've lost so much time waiting for this doggone decade to end. I don't know.. Michael Jackson and Prince always were my examples.
I have to do some serious touring to find that out.
I can barely play guitar while standing right now. It's a bloody shame. I miss the experience.
Thank God I'm a quick learner.
The Tokyo gig in 1996 was my very first time singing on stage ever. Looking back it's almost unimaginable I've done that. You just can't fly to the other side of the planet, go up on stage without ever having played live before in your life and then do a big show. Incridible really.
My performance was not bad, my vocals were, my guitarplaying was okay...
I guess I'd do alright once I'm able to to this more then only 4 times a lifetime.
I know I enjoy it like Freddie did.
Nothing tastes better in life than performing. To me that's the whole reason of existence.
Too bad I only existed 4 days until now.
I'm planning to change that.
Why did you choose to approach the sound of Queen so closely like you did on the Queen Tribute, rather than using your own Valensia style to arrange the songs?
- Because it wouldn't be a 'Queen Tribute' if I would do Valensia. Using your own style to arrange coversongs would be a tribute to yourself. I'm still around. Why would I want to change Queensongs into something Valensian?
When I started the recordings for the Queen Tribute I didn't have any idea which way I
would go.
I only knew I wanted to hear some early Queen styled music, and I'm convinced I was not the only one.
Forget about the synths and the samplers, just drums, bass, guitar and piano.
And lots of vocals. Lots of clear harmonyvocals, lots of Roger's ultra high which-like screams one octave above the harmonies. Oh man, that really is the ultimate kick!
Forget about the overproduced hardrock canon-ball drums or the nervous Dave Weckl typed drumming. Give me a drummer who's able to arrange the song with his playing.
Roger Taylor's playing is the best you can get for your music.
Same goes for John Deacon. the bass-parts are crucial to get that Queen sound.
When I did the bassguitars for the Queen Tribute I realized how essential John Deacon's work for Queen has been.
You don't really notice he's there until you mute the bass-track; than the song collapses.
The thing I really learned from Brian May's guitarplaying, is that playing single low notes will be sufficient to carry the song. Just vibrating, low, single notes. That's brilliant.
Doing the Queen Tribute I learned some very important things about simplicity.
I always tend to overdo things. especially Bohemian Rhapsody was like going to school again.
It's not the problem to figure out what everybody played; that's easy for me.
It was the surprise of realizing what they DIDN'T play. I expected the song to be far more complicated than it actually was.
The true craftmanship of Queen lies within the choices of tones. I would feel ridiculous if I would have taken a song like Bohemian Rhapsody and made some heavily orchestrated symphony out of it.
I wanted to have all elements present which made me do what I do today and that was just the early Queen. I must add, when I got into the actual process of recording the songs, I wasn't thinking about anything. I just recorded what I liked to hear and simply enjoying myself.
I guess that's the best way to record any album, and I can't do it any other way either.

The inclusion of songs like 'Sheer Heart Attack' and 'I'm In Love With My Car' by Roger Taylor are quite a surprise. Many Valensia-fans would have expected songs like 'Fairy Feller's Master Stroke' or 'March Of The Black Queen' as they're much more your thing.
- I would have loved to record the songs you mentioned as they're amongst my favorite Queen songs. After recording Bohemian Rhapsody I felt I would be boring myself and the listeners if I would do more 'replicas'. There's nothing to add.
'I'm In Love With My Car' I could approach totally different and that's what made it a new challenge.
Things always have to be almost impossible or inconceivable, otherwise it ain't fun; I always victimize myself with this credo, but everything has to be equally interesting. If not, it's a bore.
I got this idea of Freddie Mercury and Kate Bush doing a duet together.
I always wanted to hear that; it would be my 'musical parents' together on a song.
Unfortunately it never happened, and it never will happen.
So I made 'I'm In Love With My Car' some sort of an imaginairy duet between Kate and Freddie.
The song would be re-arranged by Kate Bush and the version on the Queen Tribute is -more or less- what I would have expected this to sound like.
Oh yeah, and the guitarsolo on the end is me! Quite silly, isn't it?
But if you want to keep the recordings alive and interesting, it comes in handy to have those kind of little stories with each song. Otherwise it's just being the boring good musician, and I don't like that too much.
I recorded 'Sheer Heart Attack' because wanted to have a song that Roger Taylor sang, and then I'd do it in a way Mercury would have done it.
Turns out the song was actually done by Freddie. I thought it was Roger.
That's laziness from my part; I forgot to check the credits.
How did you come up with the idea to turn 'Liar' into a song with Bohemian Rhapsody influences?
- I don't know. I like the song Liar as is, what I like most about the song is the 'Father please forgive me..' piece. I knew 'Liar' was one of Mercury's first compositions, and that it initially was called 'Lover'. So -again- I tried to imagine how 'Liar' would have been recorded, say, in the era of Queen II.
Like a pre-Bohemian Rhapsody rock/opera track.
Too bad my version isn't finished the way I wanted it because of the deadline.
I planned to overdub the opera-part with at least 3 times the quantity of the vocals it has now, in order to get that real Bohemian Rhapsody opera-part feel. But there wasn't any time left.
The recordings for Bohemian Rhapsody took more than 2 months.
For 'Liar' I just got 2 days. And during these 2 days I got the idea of adding some phrases of 'We Will Rock You' to the first bars of the song.
The intro of the original Liar is drums and handclaps, so I asked my brother David to 'do something nice' with the drums at that point. He delivered some nice overdubbed kicks and handclaps, so I started -just for fun- singing a few bars of 'We Will Rock You'.
Then I decided to just sing the song in 1 take (it were 2 takes) and do the 'We Will Rock You' vocals the same way; record them all in 1 take.
The whole song took 10 or 15 minutes to record. It wasn't planned at all.
'Love Of My Life' was more or less the same story.
I had to skip the initially planned recordings of 'Somebody To Love', because it would take me too much time, and one night I had some hours left and recorded the song, just improvising.
It took a little longer because of the harmonyvocals, but it was a quick session.
This mixture of carefully planned songs and boldly improvised hope-I-will-get-away-with-it songs
I like a lot.
What made you choose 'Polar Bear' from pre-Queen group Smile?
- Hm. I wanted to do a Smile song, but the problem was that I didn't know any.
I got this idea quite late and moreover I didn't know if Smile ever released an album, so I looked on the internet and downloaded the first Smile-songs I found. I remember the titles: April Lady, Blag, Earth, Step On Me and Polar Bear.
The only file I could open was Polar Bear and it was hardly audible.
I guess it was a demo-tape. But again, this was a nice challenge.
See if I could make a song out of this recording and with a littlebit of luck it would be very different from the original, if there was an original.
So when I did an interview for Japan, my Japanese translator Mariko -who is a big Queen fan- heard my version over the phone and I was really holding my breath, hoping this was really something new, but she said: "Yep, that's Polar Bear alright. Nice version!"
Damn, I thought I'd done something spectacular!
I still haven't heard the original version.
What about 'Man From Manhattan'?
- Oh man, I was convinced that Freddie Mercury wrote that song! Appearently Eddie Howell did. Again, my translator had to correct me. Nevertheless I'm sure Freddie Mercury must have flavoured this song with many of his ideas, especially the middle part of the song.
I wanted -really wanted- to have another version of Man From Manhattan. For myself.
I suppose Eddie Howell is okay and everything, but it's just too tempting to hear Freddie sing in the background, and not having him singing the bloody song!
This is like another Killer Queen, and I need more Killer Queens!
It really bugs me sometimes. I just have 4 or 5 favorite songs: Killer Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, Wuthering heights, I Am the Walrus and Eleanor Rigby. Then there's Flick Of the Wrist, Fairy Feller's, March Of The Black Queen, Millionaire Waltz, some more Queen, some more Beatles and some more Kate Bush. Then here and there some songs of other artists of the seventies and eighties and that's it.
It's very limited and people used to say to me: "You have to learn to listen to other music."
I tried, but Killer Queen still is my all time favorite.
The gap between these favorite songs and others is too big.
If it's my thing to get a kick out of music performed in a certain way, I have to search for that kind of music. If noone else is making it, I'll make it myself.
'Man From Manhattan' was the ideal song to add to my list of favorites.
Only Eddie out and Freddie in!
If not, I just pretend.
Why did you record 'All The Young Dudes'? After all, this isn't a Queen track
- ..but if you'd play this track many people would think this is Queen.
It was just to show the power of the Queen sound.
Here you have a track which -actually- has got nothing to do with Queen, performed by an artist who isn't part of Queen.
Still it sounds and breathes like Queen.
Not their song, not even them; still Queen.
I think you can't do this with another band.
I wasn't sure wether I would succeed or not, but it worked.
Ofcourse I took 'All the Young Dudes' because Queen supported Mott The Hoople in the early years.
How are you able to reproduce the typical Queen sound? Do you use the same equipment, like a Brain May guitar and a Vox amplifier?
- No. That's something I'm always trying to explain in various guitar oriented magazines.
The equipment is irrelevant. I know some young hopefulls buying themselves a gear, hoping they can play like Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai or Brian May.
There is no way you can ever capture the way somebody plays by buying the same equipment.
I've used the same instruments I always use. My Unicorn guitars, a Jazz bass and a piano.
Dave also plays on the same kit.
When you understand the feel of the songs and you're able to breath the same musical atmosphere, your fingers and throat will do just as your heart and brain demand.
It may sound simple, and it basically is simple, but you also have to bear in mind that you have to practise for years at a young age till your fingers are blue and your throat bleeds.
Then you have to play for years till you understand what you're doing.
When you've mastered one or two instruments and are able to at least get some noise out of other instruments, you have to learn about sound, producing and everything that comes with it.
That also takes time.
I've made series of errors on my first self-produced album. I started at the age of 7 and I'm 32 years old now. It took a lot of time, but I start to get in control of making pop-music from A to Z. Once you're in control, you can do as you please as long as you understand what you're doing.
I could never cover a Marvin Gaye or Miles Davis. I just miss the feel.
Queen I feel perfectly. I always have.
But your guitarplaying is identical to the guitarplaying of Brian May. You must have done something to get this close?
- I will have a smooth overdrive by playing the rhythm-parts with the volume half-closed, I don't know if other guitarists do so, and I use my feedback-gizzmo that Fernandes installed on my guitars, but there are no radical adjustments whatsoever.
The style of playing changes.
The way you touch the string, vibrate, pull up.
I personally think it's all in the 'pull-up' way of playing.
I can do various and Brian May has a really unique way of pulling up the strings.
Steve Vai has a really fast, screamy way of pulling up strings and I have a 'singing' way of pulling up.
The solo on 'Illsia' (Valensia-GAIA II) is a good example.
For the Queen Tribute I used this pull-up thing to the fullest. I guess that does the trick.
How did you manage to get so close to the original opera-section of Bohemian Rhapsody? Because this must be one of the most surprising elements of the Queen Tribute.
- To be honest: I don't know. My imitations are good. That may sound silly, but there wasn't another option. If I had to sing the high voice 'Galileo', it would turn out to be so high, it could be done with normal falsetto. I remember I just screamed 'GALILEOOO!' and waking up half the mountain where I live. This was the only way to do it.
The rest was just dubbing phrases until it was good and thick enough.
That really was my concern: I knew I never could make it as thick as the original, because that was done by 3 individual voices, whereas I only have one single voice.
In the past I've tried to combine my voice with other singers, often good singers, but it just sounded dorky. It's not them, it's just that you need to have this certain feel for these kind of harmonies.
I often wonder how it's possible I couldn't find one single soul who could sing this way, whereas Queen had 3 guys. All different timbres, perfectly matched.
Lucky bastards!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website MSN Messenger
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    The Valensian Message Board Forum Index :: Valensia All times are GMT - 3 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum


Powered by phpBB - Template by DoubleJ - Supported by BizHat


Start Your Own Video Sharing Site

Free Web Hosting | Free Forum Hosting | FlashWebHost.com | Image Hosting | Photo Gallery | FreeMarriage.com

Powered by PhpBBweb.com, setup your forum now!
For Support, visit Forums.BizHat.com