HIGHWAY TO HELLOWEEN
“It’s very hard over here, because this is not a rock ’n’ roll country,” says Helloween guitarist Michael Weikath, over the phone from his home in Hamburg, Germany. “The music magazines we have over here are just pop and disco, and there’s just a few radio stations which have a heavy metal hour once or twice & week.
HIGHWAY TO HELLOWEEN
Harold DeMuir
“It’s very hard over here, because this is not a rock ’n’ roll country,” says Helloween guitarist Michael Weikath, over the phone from his home in Hamburg, Germany. “The music magazines we have over here are just pop and disco, and there’s just a few radio stations which have a heavy metal hour once or twice & week. But there are about 200,000 people here who are listening to very hard heavy metal. And Germany is very small compared to the States, so that’s quite a lot of people.”
Helloween is currently expanding its sphere of influence with the U.S. release of their smash European album Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part I, which would have been out here sooner if not for a legal dispute over the rights to the band’s pumpkinhead logo. RCA, Helloween’s Stateside label, says Keeper is the fastest-selling indie LP in European history, and it’s not hard to understand why. The quintet combines prodigious speed, a knack for melody, a flair for Wagnerian dynamics and a sense of humor to create one of the year’s most impressive hard rock discs.