Interview By Ali Blackdiamond

As it’s that ghoulish time of year again that people the world over love to celebrate Halloween for whatever their own reasons, what better time to have a chat with original guitarist from pumpkinhead power metallers HELLOWEEN, Michael Weikath.

As recently published Blackdiamond  caught up with Michael whilst he is in HELLOWEEN‘s MiSueno studio on Tenerife with the other band members, creating the follow up to 2013’s “Straight Out Of Hell”. The special Halloween Party Show featuring the chat with Michael was aired earlier this week on Blackdiamond’s Metal Mayhem show on http://www.totalrock.com. Now you can listen exclusively with Metal Shock Finland.

The new album was discussed in as much detail as secrecy allows, but as always Michael loves to chat and gives extensive answers edged with his sense of humour, which is always present. You can read a few snippets of the chat below and listen to the full interview on the audio player.

Michael revealed at what stage the band are at with recording the new album:

“They’ve gone into the drum recordings and I’ve been there yesterday to witness the recording of one of the tracks I’ve written and so that was really cool. The way we do it is that we are using Dani’s natural feel for playing the drums – he has a general tempo in his head and he records the drums for as many songs as he can manage. He actually drums from memory which is quite good. I don’t know he does that, but yeah that’s what’s been taking place. Then after the drums, they get adjusted to the grid of the demo material we have, so there’s like a session in the digital editor in the pro tools. So, his drums are being matched to the grid of the demo, everything is just on the point where it belongs, it’s drummed without a click actually.

When that is done, we’re going to add guitars and vocals and special effects and keyboards and the bass will be recorded. So everyone’s dropping by for his respective work to be done. We have a schedule and it’s looking good.

In times like this when melodic heavy metal isn’t exactly at a pinnacle in the general media, you have to keep the costs low,you have to be specific to what you wanna do regarding the bullshitting or doing work. Obviously we want to get done in time, in the given schedule, what has been said is February. If we’re ahead of the schedule, we’ve got a lot more time for mixing and mastering or whatever is going to happen. Regardless, there is no pressure, except there will be festival appearances – we have fixed already for June, that is one fact that I can reveal. There’s not so much else I could possibly tell about the process taking place, like album title or song titles.”

Discussing the Halloween topic of pumpkins, Michael stated:

“Being in this band we try to stay away from actual real pumpkins. If somebody served us pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie in the catering – it was good and pleasurable and it was a joy to eat. But it doesn’t always take that form of being enjoyable, you grow a bit wary of that business you know, when you’re in that band. Imagine you were in a band called The Sugar Cups and everybody’s always bringing you sugary sweet stuff (makes noise). There’s only so much you can do and stand as a human being obviously.”

Michael revealed what he likes about Halloween:

“What I really like is diversity, when people get creative – if Batman wants to be Superman and vice versa, that’s fun. When people dress up as tree trunks and what really cracks me up is when people dress up their little doggies or other animals, that’s just amazing.”