YOU MUST ACCEPT... ...YOUR FATE!

YOU MUST ACCEPT... ...YOUR FATE!

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

Their very moves stand as a living testament to our glorious simian ancestry: legs astride, heads nodding, hair flying, hips swivelling in simultaneous bop, lit-tle, BOO-sized Udo-Dirkschneider's mirror-shades reflecting a sea of sweaty denims. Legs part, heads nod, hair flies, hips swivel, and chords crash, riffs roar, guitars attack, brains burn, vocals soar and swoop like a Messerschmidt, hnnnnzzzzgrrrrrng, direct hit on the solar plexus. The jackboots are scrunching up your spine. The truncheon is aimed at your skull. Accept are the grit in the bellybutton of metal, the art of bludgeonhood personified. And they’re good— ah, they’re good. And they’re from Germany, Scorpions country, Scorpions hometown too, for that matter—Hanover, a place described to me by Klaus Meine as “not a big, huge city or very exciting, but a good place to go back to.” Accept haven’t been back in a while. They’ve been around the world, veritable S&Mbassadors of can-the-gloomdom, taking their new album Metal Heart for a walk.

It’s their fifth. And you thought they were beginners! The first was in 78, independent German metal, self-produced, silly-lyriced, messy-but-nice; their second had a title track written by Angus and Malcolm AC/DC’s brother George (Easybeats alumnus); their third quite rightly caused a few international ripples; their fourth, the first with a major label, was wrapped in a black and-white sleeve of Scorpion shockingness, oh yes, and produced by Scorpion producer Dieter Dierks, who seems to have the job for eternity. So what are they after, these Accept boys? A wide audience, like the Scorpions? American acceptance, like the Scorpions?? A hairdo like Klaus Meine’s???

“I wouldn’t say that,” says Wolf Hoffman, lead guitarist (second guitarist Hermann Frank, bassist Peter Baltes, drummer Stephan Kaufmann and vocalist Udo make up the rest of this fine Deutsch outfit). “Our music has nothing to do with the Scorpions. It’s totally different.”

What about Dieter? “Dieter Dierks didn't influence us with a Scorpions touch or anything. He did a perfect job for us. It is very different.”

No ballads then? “No, we don’t do any ballads at all. Just really hard rock songs, heavy metal songs, or whatever you call it.” Only I read in British metal mag Kerrang not so long ago that you said you were after the Journey crowd?

“No, we never said that! Nobody ever said that we want to have the Journey crowd! No,” Wolf, pleasant chap, is naturally horrified, “not at all! We are nothing like that! We are pure HM, pure metal.” And one of the few bands to admit it—most cringe from the category even as they diddle its afficionados into money-spending delirium.

“We don’t want to come into that category,” nods Wolf, “like for instance Venom or Metallica or those HM bands." Like the basic black trash-metal with the silly lyrics you mean? “Yes, that’s right. We’re a different kind of lyric than most HM bands.” Go on, take a look; they’re printed on the inner sleeve, some moments of almost-poetry there. But things were different, my metal puppies, things were different. Those early albums were all Hell-and-Motorbikes. “That,” says Wolf, “is true. About two years ago we decided to change the whole lyric side; we never thought about it in the past really, we just did the normal stuff, and then we thought hey that’s shit, let’s try something else. ” Not so easy when you’re writing in a foreign language (something, incidentally, if Wolf’s anything to go by, they’ve improved on no end since early Janet-&-John-type interviews).

‘‘Sure we had difficulties; but we have a few friends who are working with us, we are having the ideas, and somehow after you’ve done it a few years you can think of a few expressions here and there in English already; you don’t have to translate everything you know.”

Funny, I’ve never had an idea in German, though I did write a poem in German in high school once which the teacher told me was gramatically illogical; stream-of-consciousness she knew nothing from; but were I to have ideas in German these days would they take the form of fo/der-eeee-knapsack-on-myback-bier-in-my-keller lyrics? I wonder. I wander, lonely as a kraut...

They’ve had little in the way of line-up changes over the years, and little, apparently, in the way of disagreements. Wolf was 17 when he joined the band, which hadn’t been bashing away long. ‘‘I was still in school and the others still had jobs and it was more or less an amateur type of school band or bar band or whatever you call it. And nobody of us really had a strong idea of what music is all about. And we all made our first experiences together, from the very first one on. And we had a very bad record contract in the beginning, but we made step by step together. And the same with the direction of the music. Just the other way round: usually you have one or two real musicians in a band and maybe some youngsters who are playing with them together, but at least a few members of the band have got experience so they can tell the others what to do, tell us how to play and how to record an album or whatever. But there was nobody who could tell us, so we made everything together.” Wolf’s happy—no, ‘‘more than happy”— with the way things have been going, especially the last two years. ‘‘Because we’ve made so fast progress from our point of view.” Like the progress from basic metal, for instance, to classically-influenced stuff. They’ve all liked classical music for four years or so and reckon ‘‘classical music is pure heavy metal!” Yeah? ‘‘It was just played with different instruments in those days. It was fantastic, those old masters. We copied it and used it in a different way”— the odd Beethoven guitar solo and the like ‘‘you’ll probably recognize them when you hear it.” Says Wolf: ‘‘We always make experiments. We don’t want to stick too much to any cliches. It’s very interesting to combine HM with what seems to be the biggest contrast in the world.”

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Perhaps they’ll stop calling them the German Judas Priest now. "Hopefully,” says Wolf. Maybe they’ll start calling them the German Rainbow, though?

"I am influenced very much by Ritchie Blackmore and Judas Priest,” says niceguy Wolf. "And AC/DC. I heard so many good songs in the beginning when I was a kid, like 10,12 years ago, when I listened to bands like Deep Purple or Slade or Alice Cooper in the early 70s and said, ‘this is brilliant.’ Bands like that they have influenced me without a doubt—all of us. But we never said we want to be exactly like them or somebody who has influenced us. We are very open-minded against any kind of music. We are listening to classical music, middle of the road music, pop music, everything that is played on the radio. We are not bound to anything.”

Which reminds me. Sado-masochism...

"Summassacre?” Wolf stammers, confused. You know, S&M, sweaty leather boys and whips and truncheons and mirrored shades and hairy thighs and grunting in the dark, in short (excuse the expression, Udo) the kind of men your mom warns your little brother to stay away from.

"Aha,” the pfennig drops. "I understand. That was a big misunderstanding,” and they don’t come much bigger. "Most people thought we are a gay band, but we don’t want to have anything to do with that,” Wolf laughs. Then why the gayerthan-gay album sleeve on Balls To The Wall, and the song titles, eh? "We wanted to look, the album, aggressive and interesting, that’s all we wanted to do. Most people just saw the cover and they saw a song called ‘Balls To The Wall’ and another song called ‘London Leather Boys’ and that was it, they didn’t read the lyrics at all, they just said ‘this must be a gay band.’ That’s absolutely bullshit.” But must have led them into some, uh, embarassing situations? "Ah no,” Wolf responds, “a few interviewers or whoever. People who don’t read our lyrics we are not interested in anyway.” But they are interested in the violent side of metal? "Sure—but I wouldn’t say violence, I would say aggression, because our music is aggressive. And you have to have that—otherwise, it’s boring. You have to have fun and all that, but there should be the loudness and a certain amount of aggression in the good sense of the word.” (As far as the bad sense is concerned, Lido’s dropped the truncheon from the act, "but he’s using his uniform or whatever you want to call it; it’s more or less the same.”)

More or less the same, but getting better, a mighty band destined for their own little crumb of the HM history gate. "I would be happy,” says Wolf, "if we could have something like a piece in the whole music history, you know, if you are a part of everything, if people will say This is Accept’s style,”’ as opposed to another Scorpions, another Rainbow, another Judas Priest. "This is all we can reach, I think. There’s a big difference between common heavy metal bands and Accept. We are a long-term band. We are not an overnight sensation or nothing like that. We don’t want to have success for one year, one hour or nothing. We want to go step by step and improve with every album and have success as long as possible.”