Raunchy – 09-11-2008

Interview with: Kasper Thomsen
By: Sabine van Gameren

Raunchy is on a short tour through Europe. When we met in Rotterdam, vocalist Kasper Thomsen took time to answer some questions.

A few days you kicked off the tour in Copenhagen. I ve read that everyone had free entry there. Must have been crowded…
Kasper: “Yeah it was sold out, if you can call it that. It was something the venue decided, to have all the gigs in November for free. We passed it on to our MySpace page and so we had a guest list consisting of 450 people. Five pages of names. It was pretty cool and it was a cool show. It is also cool to kick off a tour in your hometown, with all your friends there. It was a really good show. We premiered a lot of new songs on this tour as well. It went well and the audience seemed to dig it.”

Wasteland Discotheque is your latest release, a lot about it has been said before. What did you consider the most interesting fact about it in general?
Kasper: “Probably the fact that we extended our vision of what metal music is about. We pushed ourselves; we pushed the boundaries for song writing a lot on this album. We tried to find what was the essence of what Raunchy is about. It was influenced by when Death Pop Romance came out; we went touring more, our first European tour. We started playing a lot more shows. We wanted to catch that energy we received every night on that tour. We made an album that is in the tradition of what we do. We have the melodies, the keyboard but there are also some really rough sounds on that album. That contrast, is probably the most interesting thing.”

You have been on tour with Soulfly, and did quite some shows in Europe. For those who have not seen you yet, what can they expect from a live show of Raunchy.
Kasper: “A lot of good vibes. We don’t care if there are 1000 people or 50. They get the same show, the same energy. To us it is just about playing as good as we can and really deliver. It sounds like a cliché but actually the fans are very important to us. They should get the same Raunchy, no matter what the surroundings are. We have a lot of tour when we are on tour. On stage we fool around and talk to the audience. It is all about putting us in the spotlights, but also put the whole audience in the spotlights. The cool thing of this tour is, that we are headlining so we can play a lot more songs than we usually do. We can play some songs from all the albums. The funny thing is, that so far on this tour, when we played the old stuff the audience was just like ‘what the fuck is going on?’ They know the songs from the last two album. There are always some people who know those though and they go nuts at those.”

Do you feel like the live experience of Raunchy music is a lot different from the cd, besides the usual differences between live and recorded music?
Kasper: “When you are in the studio, you can do loads of things. If you have a bad day, you have a bad day. You can say like let’s watch some movies instead of working. When you play live, it is much more in your face. It’s a one take. You deliver or you do not deliver. We love doing both things. We tried not to do exactly the same thing as it is on the albums, but we want to stay close to that as we play live. Not to make it boring, but create a recognizable sound.”

You won Danish Metal Awards in 2006. I have seen you are nominated for some at this year as well. That must be an honour.
Kaspar: “Totally! The Danish scene has really regenerated itself during the last years and there is a lot of focus on that genre. On national radio and television. The whole metal awards idea is a way of showing what the scene is about. It is the scene celebrating itself. To be honoured in that is very cool. Even though there are a lot of Danish bands, there are not a lot of them who make good records. So being nominated in the best album category is very cool. Also best production and live act I think. It is going to be exciting to see it, no matter if we win. If we don’t, we are glad that we had the chance to be there. The award show is in about a week from now on (November 15th).”

Is it really with an award show, like EMA’s ?
Kaspar: “It is a big production with a lot of live bands and special guest appearances. There will be like 1200 people there. It is in a very cool place, with balconies. The bands are going to enter down the hallway into the spotlight in the middle. They can do their thank you speeches. There is a giant stage as well and monitors, lights everything!”

Most people associate the award shows mainly with pop music though. I have read some people calling it “a betrayal of the scene” what is your opinion about it?
Kaspar: “Totally! It is like taking something that is suppose to be underground and making it mainstream. People also have to understand that is not really commercial. It is the scene celebrating itself. I totally understand the concept of their comments, but I also think that it is cool because it draws attention to bands and they get a chance to be in magazines that they don’t usually be in. As a true metal fan I see how bands really struggle for this. Every chance that bands are getting to spread the metal scene should be supported. In the end it kills the genre, but there will always be underground bands. That is the cool thing about metal. It is a genre that people stick to, no matter what. For bands like In Flames or Slipknot, they are always struggling with people who say they have become too mainstream. The whole genre has to evolve to survive. In my opinion, the more people that are at the shows, the better it is. If metal bands are on MTV… Cool! The thing that matters is that they get the message out there.”

Titles like “Death Pop Romance”, “Wasteland Discotheque” might give people different expectations genre wise. Is there a specific reason for choosing titles like that?
Kaspar: “We are sick and tired of bands naming their albums in the very old school traditional ways. We thought like can we come up with something different, that still has some metal connections. To us Raunchy is about the music, about reinventing metal music. See how far we can push the boundaries of the genre. The titles could be seen as genre tags for the whole. Disco rhythms, the death pop thing, the growls and the clean singing, the romance between those things, the velvet noise.
We are going to change that for the next album. We are going to do something different. This is the last chapter of that thing. Let’s see what happens. We have the discotheque, we have the death pop, we have the noise, we have everything. Let’s see what the next thing should be.”

So you are already working on the next album?
Kaspar: “Yes, we have talked back and forth about what direction we want to take things. What the lyrical concept should be. When we will record it, we don’t know yet. It is a long process for us and we just released “Wasteland Discotheque”. We will be touring for at least the next year with it. We are a band that is always working on new stuff. We are not rehearsing, we make rhymes, verses etc. I do all the lyrics and I am the guy that writes, writes, rewrites, writes. I have this nightmare that some when I am gonna wake up and see a title or a lyric and think: What the fuck was I thinking? And truly regret it. When you release official records: Out there is out there forever. I don’t want to wake up at one day and think: Why didn’t I change that? So when it ends up on the album, I am 100% sure about it. Those titles might have been there for a while. Sometimes you have a creative mood and think like: That’s cool! And then a month later you are more like: What was I thinking?
As the direction, I think we are going to be a bit more extreme the next album. Still with the melodic things of course, but I like to do some harder things to see how that works. We have been talking about pushing things even further next time.”

Back to this album I have read you were maybe going to do a video.
Kaspar: “Yes, when we end the tour next week we are going to shoot a video for the song Warriors. It will be three stories uniting in one story. We are having a story, then a lot of old people will have a story and then there are young people having a story. We are going to drive through a desert. We are not gonna travel to Africa, there are some places in Denmark where there is just sand. We will drive in a big ass pick up truck with the band in the back playing. We gonna film it from the side, and I am gonna drive the pick up truck.
Then there is going to be another scene in the city with really decadent shit. All people going over the top. They are going to be in a fight with the young ones. A bit like Sin City.
Hopefully it will be ready for Christmas eve. People can see it on the website. And release it as a single in January.”

Loads have been going on and will come up for Raunchy. With being abroad often, do you keep in contact with your fans who know you from the start as well?
Kaspar: “There are some fans who were there from the first days who still writes us and we will take the time to write back. We have experienced during the last year or so, that our fan base has exploded. We get like 250 emails every week from new people, that is the crazy thing about it. Jus to say they like us, or when they saw a show. During this tour we hang out in the merch all the time. We want to meet those people who are coming to the shows. We are not a band that stays isolated in the backstage area.”

Links:
Raunchy MySpace
Raunchy Official