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TANKARD: Current News from the Tankard Front
Interview with vocalist Gerre by Vera in May 2010
On the first of May we attended a gig of Tankard at the Rock Temple in Kerkrade (Holland). Before the show we had a brief but nice chat with the band, mainly Gerre does the talking, about what’s going on in the Tankard camp these days.
In 2008 Tankard released the album ‘Thirst’ and in December 2009 the fans could enjoy over three hours live footage on a DVD called ‘Open All Night – Reloaded’. But there are plans for a new album! Gerre: “We are supposed to record it in September. At the moment we are writing new material. We have two new songs, so we have to hurry up again like every time. It’s always a mess. We need that kind of time pressure to come up with something new. We will work with Michael Mainx as producer. It will be the first time working with him, except for one song. We did some albums with Andy Classen before. We were satisfied, but this time we thought of doing something new. The release will be on the 17th of December 2010 on AFM.” In the meantime Tankard will appear on several Summer festivals this Summer. “Yes, for example Graspop and Hellfest. We try to play as much as we can besides our regular jobs. Therefore most of the gigs are during the weekend.”
There will be loads of old material coming up in nice re-releasing issues. Gerre tells: “Now we have a deal with High Roller Records from Zwickau, Germany. They are responsible for vinyl and they’ll bring out ‘Disco Destroyer’, ‘Kings Of Beer’, ‘B-Day’, ‘Beast Of Bourbon’ and ‘The Beauty And The Beer’. They have never been out on vinyl before; it was only available as a picture disc in this box. Now they bring it out as regular vinyl. Finally they will release our very first demos on vinyl too, just for the collectors. It is strictly limited to 750 pieces or something like that.”
But there are even more re-releases in the near future. Gerre: “Universal will release the old Noise back catalogue. They were not available anymore and we want to have them in stock if people want to buy them. It concerns albums like ‘Zombie Attack’, ‘Chemical Invasion’ and ‘The Morning After’, etc. This will happen in Summer or Fall and we are negotiating about vinyl releases in 2011.”
In January 2010 we could watch a DVD with German Rock Hard magazine in which Gerre was working on trying to loose a lot of weight. Today we see that the debonair man has lost loads of weight indeed. “It was a little competition between me and Bobby, the drummer of Sodom. We always appear on these Rock Hard DVD’s. He had to loose fifteen kilos and me twenty-five or something like that. It was fun to do.” Gerre is still on Weight Watchers “but not today” In the weekend there is room for some sins.
The last release was the DVD ‘Open All Night – Reloaded’. Gerre: “It was released in December 2009 and it includes the whole concert we did in East Berlin on the fourth of March 1990. Kreator and Coroner were there too. It was the first huge rock festival after the fall of the wall and before it was only available on video VHS. And there is also our show of our appearance of the Rock Hard festival in 2007 and our three last official clips and some outtakes from ourselves.”
After the new album the band hopes to go to South America for a couple of shows. “Playing in a different country every day: Colombia, Argentina, Chile,… that will be fun. We only played one gig ever in North America, in Minneapolis. We will see, we will try to arrange all kinds of things.” Gerre has good memories on the Metal Camp festival in Slovenia a couple of years ago and this year they will play at Brutal Assault in Czech Republic. “We will play there with a lot of black and death metal bands. I wonder how the crowd will react, we are the only thrash metal band, the only accessible pop band (laughs). We played the very first time in Finland recently; that was fantastic! The reaction was great, the Finns are into thrash! We played there with Korpiklaani and they were our support band! I was amazed they are so small in their own country. In Europe they are huge! That was fun! We had a good time with those guys. But now I’m really looking forward to play at Graspop!” We raised our glass on this occasion and enjoyed a great show later that evening.
www.tankard.org
www.myspace.com/tankardfrankfurt
Geplaatst door Vera op woensdag 09 juni 2010 - 18:40:06
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