Interviews

 

QUEENSRYCHE

 

Seattle metallers QUEENSRYCHE have just released a follow-up to their legendary Operation: Mindcrime album. Geoff Tate tells ROD YATES that revenge isn’t always sweet…

In a land where dope is legal and women have their own shop front through which to sell their body, getting arrested in Amsterdam is no mean feat. As Queensryche singer Geoff Tate discovered recently when he tried to check his bags onto a flight from the Netherlands to Norway, however, there is one sure fire way to get yourself in trouble: carry a replica gun in your luggage.

 

“We use a replica in the show, and unbeknownst to us it’s highly illegal to have one in Holland, of all places,” he chuckles. “It was just a fine and a missed flight. And of course they took the gun.”

 

A replacement will have to be procured for the band’s upcoming tour of Australia – their first, a mere 25 years after forming in Seattle – during which they’ll perform their landmark Operation: Mindcrime opus and its just-released sequel, Operation: Mindcrime II, in full. Eighteen years after its release, the former is still regarded as one of metal’s greatest albums, and certainly its premier concept album. A convoluted tale about a junkie, Nikki, who’s drugged into performing assassinations for nefarious revolutionary Dr X – a mission complicated by a former-prostitute-turned-nun called Sister Mary, with whom Nikki falls in love – it provided the band with their first real taste of success, and paved the way for 1990’s Empire to truly catapult them into the big league. For many, though, Operation: Mindcrime remains their greatest moment – one the band swore for years they’d never make a sequel to. Turns out, though, a follow-up was always in the pipeline.

 

“We intended putting it out after Empire, and had begun work on it, but Empire took off and became huge and kind of took the band in a different musical direction for a while,” explains Tate. “Before we knew it, several years had gone by, Chris [DeGarmo, founding guitarist] had left the band, and that kind of changed our direction as well. So really, it was sitting on my computer for years under a file called ‘Nikki’, and I’d brought it to a point where it was all kind of jumbled together. I opened it one day and was reading through all my notes and figured I had a solid story finally. So I brought it to the band and said, ‘Hey, I think we should revisit this, what do you think?’ And everybody was very enthusiastic about returning to the story, so it just seemed like the right place and right time. But the majority of it was together, at least story-wise, back around 1990.”

 

Fittingly, Operation: Mindcrime II begins 18 years after its predecessor, with Nikki finally being released from jail. Throughout his incarceration he’s been obsessed with gaining revenge on the man responsible for his imprisonment, Dr X, hence Tate calling the album “a study in revenge, what that does to a person, how it leads you down certain paths and what it does to your psyche.

 

“And then,” he continues, “the last part of the album is, what do you do after you’ve accomplished this revenge? Do you feel any better? Are you in a cycle you can’t get out of? It’s not a pretty story, it’s tragic.”

 

As with its predecessor, Operation: Mindcrime II reflects the political and social climate in which it was written, as the story investigates and dissects the actions of one-time terrorist Nikki. Given that the basic plot was written more than 15 years ago, you’d think Tate would have had to update it substantially for it remain relevant. As he discovered, though, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

“I didn’t have to adapt it too much, because America’s very similar to what it was like back in 1988-’89 [the time of Operation: Mindcrime’s release] with the Reagan-Bush era – there’s kind of a real puritan outlook on things, there’s a very religious fervour sweeping the country. And a lot of people are getting sold a commercial, in this case, the American administration selling this inane war in the Middle East. On the one hand, it was a brilliant sales campaign, and on the other it’s a tragedy of epic proportions when you think of honest people getting manipulated. So it’s not much of a stretch from 1989 to now.”

 

In order to write the album, the band had to turn their creative clocks back almost 20 years to try and recapture the vibe of that first record. Having de-tuned their guitars for most of the ’90s, they returned to the standard tuning of Mindcrime (A440), an event Tate describes as being “a big breakthrough” in the creative process. They also spent hours listening to the original, after which they sat around for months coming up with ideas and riffs.

 

For Tate, one of the biggest challenges was finding someone who could play the role of Dr X in one of the album’s pivotal songs, Murderer?, the moment in which Nikki finally confronts his nemesis. In the original, actor Anthony Henderson voiced the character, but Operation: Mindcrime II called for someone to actually sing the part. Enter metal legend Ronnie James Dio.

 

“I’d just finished writing the song, and I was struck with the horror of trying to find another singer that could make it work,” chuckles Tate. “And then Ronnie’s name popped into my head, so I called him and said, ‘Hey, I just wrote a song for this new record, it’s for the part of Dr X, and I’m going to play it for you.’ So I’m playing it over the phone and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, send me a copy, let me check it out.’ He called me back a couple of days later and was like, ‘Yeah, this is great, I’d like to be a part of this.’ It was incredible to work with him, I just love the sound of his voice. And he’s very creative and sets the bar very high in a lot of areas.”

 

Though Dio doesn’t perform live with the band, Tate guarantees the 25-year wait to see Queensryche in Australia will have been worth it.

 

“It’s close to a two-hour set, and it’s pretty intense, there’s a lot to it,” he says. “It’s going to be special.”

 

 

 

[BACK TO INTERVIEWS]