HELLRIDE Interview - USA

Here on Hellride we talk quite a bit about music from the 1970's. For whatever reason, there is a common feeling that was a golden period in the creation of heavy music, the likes of which we'll probably never see again. Nowadays, even though there are a cornucopia of 70's inspired bands, it's a tough job to capture the passion of the music of that period. Italy's Wicked Minds, however, are a rare exception. Their brand of Hammond-drenched rock n' roll immediately calls to mind vintage Deep Purple and Byron-era Uriah Heep as well as some lesser known gems from the 70's European underground like Orange Peel, Waterloo, Birth Control and Arzachel, all while adding their own individual flair. Hellride caught up with busy keyboard wizard (and self-taught at that!!) Paolo "Apollo" Negri who goes in-depth on the band's history, creative process and plans for the future.

Hellride Music: Hello from the States, Paolo - many thanks for taking the time out to answer a few questions. Your band takes me back to what I believe was a better time for music - the 70's. It seems to me that music was more passionate and less watered down in that era. Can you give us a biography of the band to date? How did you guys start, how long have you been together and who exactly is in the band?

Paolo Negri: The band started in 1987 as a thrash metal band with the guitar player Lucio Calegari, the drummer Andrea Concarotti and the bass player Enrico Garilli. After some years spent in searching the right sound (4 demo-tapes were released in these years) the band reached a new dimension in 1999. In this year W-Records (Italy) published the first CD, Return to Uranus, where the band is in the form of a hard-trio, mostly influenced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I joined the band with my Hammond organ in 2000 and the sound of WM moved to a new dimension, more hard-progressive oriented. In 2003 the band recorded Crazy Technicolor Delirium Garden for W-Records and later that year the arrival of the new singer J.C. set the band to its definitive line up.

With the new singer we recorded From The Purple Skies for Black Widow Records (Italy) gaining an international exposure and playing live through Europe. In June of 2006 Black Widow Records released Witchflower, our new album, and we started for a tour in Europe, playing several gigs and meeting on stage big artists such as Birth Control, UFO, Soft Machine, Wishbone Ash, Siena Root, Colour Haze and many others.

Hellride Music: When I listen to your latest album Witchflower, I get a definite vintage Uriah Heep/Deep Purple/Jethro Tull and sometimes even Hawkwind vibe from your music. Do you count these bands among your influences? And if so, from what eras? Who else does the band consider influences on it's sound?

Paolo: Yes, of course bands like Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Black Widow and many others have a great influence on our music, but I think there’s something more in WM songs. We have never wanted to sound like a bad copy of someone else, we always try to mix up many different elements and the final result, even if it can remember many bands of the past, is always different from those bands in particular. We are all very interested in the underground sound from the seventies, so bands like Still Life, Waterloo, 2066 & Then, Orange Peel, Murphy Blend, Quatermass, Affinity, Arzachel, Necronomicon, Birth Control, just to name a few, are our real point of comparison. Of course we have influences from more famous bands too but we try to make the result sound as something new, something that those single bands would have not done. We always try to add some original solution to our music, changing moods or rhythm variations, sound research and so on...

Hellride Music: There are really two things that are outstanding for me when I think of Witchflower.... JC's amazing vocals (very Byron-like when it comes to the passion behind the voice) and your keyboard work. Who does JC consider an influence? Who do you consider as influences on your playing? I notice that you play quite a range of instruments for Wicked Minds... Hammond Organ, Mellotron, Moog Synthesizer, Electric & Grand Piano ... that's an amazing range of instruments to use. Did you start playing piano early on as a child and then progress from there?

Paolo: J.C.'s influences come from the West Coast and Southern rock, from folk and country, this is the music he plays with his own band and even if his voice remembers Byron’s one in some passages, Uriah Heep are not one of his greatest influences, though he knows them very well. I come from more funk and jazzy tunes. I played for 10 years with The Link Quartet, an instrumental combo devoted to Hammond jazz/soul, and so organists like Biran Auger, Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff and others similar are my background, even if I started playing in a prog trio called “Nice Price” (Hammondbeat records will release our EP, recorded in 1996, in a couple of months...) and so prog music is a field I know and love since years! I started with trumpet when I was 6 and then I passed to keys at 12 but I never took a lesson, I did everything by myself, playing on records. I bought the first Hammond at 14 and never stopped till now, so this is the instrument I consider my real instrument. All the other stuff like synths, styring machines, electric pianos and so on are wonderful machines but they are only a plus to my organ, that’s my real love!

Hellride Music: I'm curious to hear about how you guys write your music. Is it a collaborative process where everyone brings in ideas? It would seem that writing for Wicked Minds songs would be more difficult to write then straight-up riff-driven rock n' roll songs given the progressive edge to the music.. is this true? How many songs come out of just jamming in rehearsals?

Paolo: Everything you say is right!!! In most cases the principal ideas come from me or Lucio, we write riffs and most of the music but then we work all together to give a shape to the song. Usually we work for quite a long time on every song till we reach a result that’s good for us and everyone brings his ideas. Andrea and Enrico work great for arranging the songs and we usually make some different tries on every tune to get the final result. If you listen to the bonus audio tracks on the Witchflower DVD you will hear that many songs have changed radically in the two months between the promo recordings and the final album; this is the way we work usually. Other tunes, like “Here Comes The King” or “Shadows' Train”, which are not on the promo, have been written by me just few days before we enter the studio-- we played a couple of times together and then we recorded, sometimes it happens this too! J.C’s. vocals always arrive after the music is ready and they represent the final touch to our songs. Other times the main riffs or passages come from improvisations we have in rehearsals, we always record our improvisations and if there something good we will develop it in a second moment, this is another way too. In the band there’s a good atmosphere and we all know that nothing is fixed, everyone of us is free to bring ideas in the band and I think this is a very positive attitude for a band. Of course reaching the final shape of a song is not easy, sometimes we spent months before having something good, but in general we write a lot of music! We are entering the studio now for recording a tribute album to Italian '70s progressive rock, an 100 minutes album, and we already have ready a suite and some songs for our real new album due to come late this year, is a very creative period for us all!

Hellride Music: How about Wicked Minds live? Do you jam or improvise on your songs or are they played exactly the way they are played on record?

Paolo: Both things. Some of the tracks, the more structured ones, are played like the record versions, other (like “Elephant Stone” or “Return to Uranus”) are always different, we use them to jam. In April 2007 the Burg Herzberg Festival will release our live album featuring the entire performance we had at the festival in July 2006. In this album you will hear that half of the tracks are like the originals while half of them are filled with improvisations! We always have fun in jamming, sometimes, in the middle of a jamming, we watch one each other thinking: “Hey, this is cool, what are we doing??”... is always special and very, very funny!

Hellride Music: Do you guys play out live very often? Tell us about the heavy music scene in your native Italy - how does Wicked Minds fit in... or does it?? Who else do you consider as great bands in Italy?

Paolo: Italy is a strange place...there’s no space (or at least a very little one) for our kind of music. Here people want to listen to cover bands or to very famous bands, there’s no interest towards little bands and absolutely no attention to original music, this is the situation now! In the last two years we played most of our gigs abroad: Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and others. In these countries we always find a lot of people waiting for us, the crowd knows our songs and sing them, it’s an incredible sensation!!! In Italy, except some nice festivals where we have been, such a situation is out of consideration!!! There are several good bands here, I think about W.I.N.D., Mastica, ENRI and many others, but club situation is very hard! With all the bands I have had I have played more around Europe (and USA with the Link Quartet) than in Italy...

Hellride Music: Your new recording "Witchflower" - which is amazing by the way - is on Black Widow Records. How did Wicked Minds come to be on the Black Widow label and how has the experience been so far?

Paolo: Lucio, the guitar player, is friends with Black Widow’s guys since years. When we recorded [i]Crazy Technicolor Delirium Garden, BW felt that time was ready for us! We found a new singer (before J.C. Lucio was the singer of the band) and we recorded [i]From The Purple Skies” for them... from that record till today we have done everything together, the band and the label. We have a very good collaboration, they consider us as one of their top bands and we cannot think about anything more positive than working with them. We usually think together about any project and they have supported us very well in the last two years, both under the managing and the executive side, really without them we would have never done what we have done!

Hellride Music: Now that you have the new album out, what is the next step for the band? Any touring or new recordings in the works that we should look forward to?

Paolo: Witchflower came out in June and we had a lot of gigs around. We have been on the stage with Siena Root and Colour Haze in Germany, with Soft Machine, UFO, Wishbone Ash and Birth Control too, we have played with Osanna in Italy and every date has been a huge success!!! Really we didn’t expect anything like that, all the people we met during last year was someone special for us!!! But now we had to stop the gigs because we are entering the studio again. We are going to record a tribute album to the Italian progressive of the '70s, it will feature many musicians from the original bands and it will be something different for us, we will play prog and we will sing in Italian, I think it will be a good step for us! In these days is coming out the Burg Herzberg DVD, which features one of the songs we played at the festival and an interview with JC, then in April will come the live album and in autumn we will be again in studio to record the new album, a hard-prog suite that we have already composed...plus some gig here and there, 2007 will be a very busy year for us!!!

Hellride Music: Thank you very much for the interview - any last words you'd like to leave us with?

Paolo: I want to say a big "thank you" to you, Chris, for this beautiful talk and for the help and support towards the band, hope one day we could meet!!!!! Thank you very much!!!

By CHRIS BARNES for WWW.HELLRIDEMUSIC.COM