Plastic Head

Interview By Alison Booth

Norwegian vocalist, LIV KRISTINE is a true a pioneer of women in metal. She is well known for being the vocalist with gothic metallers THEATRE OF TRAGEDY and also the founder and original vocalist of symphonic metal band LEAVES’ EYES, plus much more besides! Liv is set to re-release her “Enter My Religion” album for the first time on vinyl on August 19th via Allegro Talent Media/ Plastic Head/ Zyx Music. The album will also be released on cassette, with two bonus tracks and as a double CD with unreleased tracks and demo recordings.

A little while ago, Metal Shock Finland’s Alison Booth caught up with Liv for her radio show Blackdiamond’s Metal Mayhem, which is broadcast every Tuesday from 6PM GMT on UK station TotalRock. The show with Liv can be heard here.

The forthcoming released was discussed, as well as Liv‘s career and more besides! You can listen to the interview on the audio player and read some excerpts below:

Discussing the album release, Liv explained:

“I’m very, very happy about it because Enter My Religion was, as it was released back in 2005, it was there just shortly and then it disappeared and the reason for this was that my label partner back then – Roadrunner Records, were bought by somebody else. So there was an internal structural change in the company, so I was one of the ones who had to leave Roadrunner Records for that reason.

I really liked working with Roadrunner Records, but I got my rights back after many years and my first thought was let’s bring it back with a facelift. I’m very happy about the re-release, because it was a very important step in my personal development back then, but it just as much reflects where I am today.”

Regarding her career, Liv revealed:

“Sometimes I thought I really just wanna get out of it and around the times of Enter My Religion, or I would say before, a couple of years before, there was a court case, there was all this stuff going on, which has nothing to do with personal development, authenticity. It’s all about money and I felt strange in the music business. So now, being able to release Enter My Religion by myself is a huge step forward.”

On how her role has adapted over the years, Liv reminisced:

“It was very exciting to be able to go on the road and play gigs at the age of eighteen, nineteen years – coming from Stavanger, from the darkness of Norway where it always rains. All of a sudden we were out there and it went really fast and we got famous overnight.

We found ourselves in the middle of everything, this great music circus and we seemed to be pioneers. But we didn’t feel that way, because we were just being so authentic. We loved Shakespeare, we loved doom metal, we loved Black Sabbath, Anathema, Paradise Lost and we were just eager to express ourselves.

It was kind of refreshing to see how things have developed since then. You have a lot of bands now, female fronted metal bands and I think that’s great. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the gothic metal genre or if you’re like more the rock ‘n’ roll lady, it doesn’t matter. I just think to me personally that it’s important we have more women in metal. I adore Doro and the work she has done, she was a pioneer for me.“

“Enter My Religion” Tracklist:

LP, Tape, CD:
1 Over the Moon
2 Fake a Smile
3 All the Time in the World
4 My Revelation
5 Coming Home
6 Trapped in your Labyrinth
7 Blue Emptiness
8 You Are the Night
9 Enter my Religion
10 Streets of Philadelphia
11 You Take Me Higher
12 For a Moment

Demotracks CD
1 Over the Moon
2 Trapped in your Labyrinth
3 You Are the Night
4 Streets of Philadelphia
5 You Take Me Higher
6 Stjernenacht (unreleased)
7 Woman in Me
8 One Thought Closer (unreleased)

Demotracks Tape: