Threshold – we’ve never been dependent on one person, even if it’s a singer.

It’s always a pleasure to chat with Karl Groom, the riff engine of Threshold holds the flag of progressive metal high for more than 30 years now. He’s a man with lots of things to say about his music but also a friendly down to earth human being. With the band’s remixed first four albums this was a perfect chance to meet again. Interview: Michael Ntalakos

Rockpages.gr: Karl welcome to Rock Pages! Hope’s things are much cooler over there! I see we have the same background (I had “Psychedelicatessen” as a background, Karl had both albums)

Karl Groom: Thank you, good to be here. Yes, we have a nice 20 degrees here. Yes, it seems that we are thinking in the same way (laughs).

Rockpages.gr: I have a very nice 28 degrees inside the house, 38 degrees outside the house… I know that a lot of people want to hear about your early works and it’s a great opportunity to talk about the past. Let’s start with the decision to remix the first four albums. How you decided to do such a thing?

Karl Groom Well, it came to the renewal of our contract for our back catalogue, which is I think it was anything before our contract with Nuclear Blast. We signed with them for “Dead Reckoning”. So, anything before that, the first seven albums were due for renewal.

And when we came to that, the newer policy of record labels is to make back catalogue available just digitally. We were trying to explain that, you know, our sort of area of music and the fans that we have, they do still like to have hard copies, artwork and interesting things to go with it as well as the possibility to stream or download.

We particularly love to have the vinyl available. They weren’t… I don’t think there are any left in stock from previous pressings. So, we came to the point where people were asking us, you know, “hey, where can I get them” and I didn’t really know. We came to an agreement that we’d have to do something special to make them release everything on vinyl and CD.

So that’s when the idea came up for remixing. There’s another reason behind it as well. I’ve never been impressed when people kind of remaster their works because they take the original mix and maybe they fiddle a little with the EQ, maybe make it a bit louder or something, and it’s essentially the same album. And usually there’s not much improvement.

So, we thought with those albums they were done on very low budget in the first place with limited equipment. And I thought I can restore quite a lot of what was there in the first place and improve it to come out with a significantly better sounding album, but still keep all the performances and the essence of what was there in the first place.

I wanted to just open it up more so you could hear what we were trying to do and just keep the kind of the romantic nature of the original recording back in 30 years ago, I guess it would have been, but have it with a slightly more modern sound, something you can hear clearly, a bit more power, make the guitars work better, all these things.

So we eventually came to this agreement and Nuclear Blast said they would start with the first four albums and we’ll see how that goes. I think two will come out this year, the other two maybe early next year, and I pretty much finished everything with those first four albums.

But of course, you know, when we agreed to do it, it sounded like a fantastic idea.

And then I started looking at it and thought “my God” (laughs), some of these albums, you know, “Wounded Land” was recorded on partially analog and a mixture of that and some keyboards coming from a computer. So, there was a mixture of different things and it just just even finding the parts for the keyboards, you know, it was a nightmare.

Τhey took a conversion process through three different computers. Α friend of mine’s got some very old PCs and he managed to convert the files enough so I could get them onto the Mac and then eventually into the newest version of Pro Tools and just that was difficult!

And then fortunately, I transferred “Wounded Land” from analog to digital tapes, which they were called ADAS at the time and they were kind of basic early version of a digital recorder. So, I transferred those across to Pro Tools as well and eventually lined it all up. And by that time I was pretty exhausted before I’d even started mixing (laughs).

So, it’s quite a process. But, you know, it was always done with a lot of enthusiasm for myself and Richard. We really wanted to do this. It was something that we were really sort of passionate about doing. And luckily, we came to the agreement with the label to sort it out.

Rockpages.gr: So far, the first two albums have been officially released. Now, I already got a copy of Wounded Land and I have to say that it sounds phenomenal. I mean, for someone that doesn’t know, this could be an album that was released in 2024. How difficult was that to actually work with all those outdated productions and bring them to 2024?

Karl Groom Well, as I said, it’s hard to get it just to one place so I could start mixing. But of course, there were compromises. We had cheaper microphones and every element, the guitar sound was not great. It was just that Threshold was a band that we weren’t trying to get signed. We were just making music for our own pleasure.

And someone that we knew involved with a small label in Holland said “could you make an album for our compilation”? And we did. That was a small magazine called SI Music. And then we had a couple of offers of making an album. Because we had no track record really, it was very small budget. And we recorded it and made our album, made the music we loved.

And for some reason it sort of struck a note and it sort of took off really well. And I guess probably it was the early part of the genre of progressive metal that we were right at the beginning. So that helped. But we were never a band chasing a deal. It just sorts of happened for us. And same when Nuclear Blast approached us, we weren’t looking for another label. It was just they gave us the opportunity to move up a little and we did so when it came to remixing it, of course, because there was such small budget, it was difficult. A lot of the source sounds were not the best. And I just spent a lot of time on each element just trying to improve it.

I sent the whatever keyboards I was missing to Richard, and he could find them because we were looking for old keyboards that we didn’t have any longer. We had the parts in what they call MIDI and that would trigger the keyboard. So, we had to find the original sounds. A lot of old keyboards are available on soft synth versions you sign up for some sort of subscription. So, we did that for a while. Richard did a lot of work sort of trying to restore some of the vocals, you know, because coming from tape, there were inconsistencies and he sent them back to me to mix. And there was a vast improvement once he’d done that.

And really it was just a lot of time finally because you’re working with a difficult source. It was a lot of time fiddling with EQ and compression and just trying to get the best I possibly could out of the voice of the guitars as much as anything.

I put them on my headphones, go out for a walk, listen to it and come back and make more adjustments. It was quite a slow process as the albums have gone on, getting into “Clone”, it was a little bit easier because things had improved somewhat, a lot easier to compile. And some of the sounds were a lot better put together. So, it wasn’t quite as difficult. But “Wounded Land” was a major test of our patience (laughs) to do everything we could to make it sound better. It was recorded. I think it was in the early part of 93 that we recorded it. So that really would be sort of 31 years ago. So, things have moved on a lot since then. And you’re able to restore sounds where they were bad recordings and clicks and noises. You can obviously deal with things like that and that makes the overall recording clearer.

I think the the biggest improvement for my ears is Damien’s voice, you know, in terms of getting a really full sound out of that. It was difficult in the day with such limited bits and pieces that we had to record with.

Rockpages.gr: The first four albums have been released over a certain period of years, I assume that you, as time passes on, you use different equipment, different recording techniques. As you say, things are progressing. Do you think that now there is like the first four albums, will they sound pretty much on the same level a little bit, or do you think that each album still has its own personality when it comes to the final product, the final mixing product that is?

Karl Groom: Yeah, that was something I didn’t want to lose was the the original sound of the album, its own identity. Some bands I know of have gone back and rerecorded the album, an old album. I think Mike Oldfield rerecorded “Jupiter Bells” because of the same thing. He was on a budget recording at nighttime in downtime in a studio and he desperately wanted to do it. But I think I remember him saying in an interview that it didn’t get very well received by fans because they had listened and said it sounded great, but they wanted the original recording.

And I was kind of aware of that. I wanted to keep all the elements of the original recording, but try and restore them all and then remix. So I’m trying to get something approaching the modern sound quality, but still keeping those original performances, because I think if you play a game, many times we played those songs live. I know all the parts, but you wouldn’t really play it in the same way that your ability and the way you just approach sounds and performances has changed over time.

I want to keep that the charm of the original recording. So that was the approach that Richard and I both agreed on, you know, not to start replacing everything. There are a few changes in the performance because I found in, but I think all of the albums, I found the extra parts we’d recorded, whether they were either so low in the original mix, you can’t hear them or else we just decided not to include them.

And the ones that I liked, the extra parts, I put those into the mix on the new albums. They are the original recordings, you know, with restoration and everything I can throw out to make it better. And of course, in those 30 years, the quality of effects, like sort of, you know, reverbs and whatever else, compressors and things that I have now, those effects are considerably better. The original recording would not have the shine and the ability to make great spaces that we have today.

Adding all those small elements, I guess that’s the thing that causes the slight variations of the durations of the songs, because I’ve noticed that there are not significant changes in the song’s durations, but there is like a couple seconds here and a couple of seconds there. Is that the case?

Yeah, I think some of those are me finding a little bit extra on a fade where I think many people have always said “I wonder what happened at the end of that song”, and if you haven’t taken the fade right to the end, which was a bit of a guess in those days because there was a button you pressed in those days and it would give you 20 second fade.

You had to figure out where you were in the song, press it, and then it would fade and it would give you an auto fade. It was nice and professional sounding. But of course, there might be something at the end that you didn’t quite hear. So I was conscious to take the fade to the end of wherever we stopped recording. So that might be some reason. And also particularly “Wounded Land”, because it’s transferred from analogue, there’s very slight difference in speed when the machine, sometimes machines operate differently, the reel to reel tape machine, as they get older, maybe they speed up or slow down a little bit.

And so there might be on a 10-minute song, you might find there’s an extra half second just because of the transfer. There might be one or two seconds here and there that are different. But it is essentially the same thing.

Rockpages.gr: I’ve read in several occasions in interviews when you mentioned that you never expected “Wounded Land” to become such a popular album, but I’m pretty sure that you guys knew that you had like a really good album in your hands.

Karl Groom: (laughs) We were happy with what we had. I mean, we wanted to do both. I’m sure I remember the guy in GEP records, Martin Orford, saying “if you guys sell a thousand records, we’ll be happy”. And after about a month, I think fifteen thousand or something were sold! It far exceeded their expectations immediately. But we didn’t expect that would happen at all. We thought “we were making an album, we’d have a copy at home” and, you know, it would be a record of what we’ve done as a band. We never really had an ambition at all.

When they started selling, they said, “do you want to go on tour”? And we sort of thought about it and said, yes. And that was really the launch of the band. Not when we were learning to write songs and rehearsing and playing in pubs, but that wasn’t the start of the band, the start of the band was when suddenly there was a demand to go out and play and and it was a bit of a shock.

I think the album must have come out maybe it was autumn in 93 and we did one gig to promote it in London. And then they booked us a tour in January 94, by which time Damien had found a better offer and left the band, so we had to find a singer. But it was all happened quite quickly.

And then from there on, we just sort of made a second album and things sort of snowballed. And each time we moved label from GEP to Inside Out, it got bigger. And then when we moved on to Nuclear Blast, obviously with their reach and their promotion, we were able to sell a lot more albums then and go on tour sort of whenever we really wanted to, I guess. But and it sort of continued.

And I never thought when we started, we’d still be making albums today and looking back, you know, but this is it’s a wonderful thing to be able to go back and look at those albums and improve them, because I was always thinking, I wish we’d had a bigger budget and a way of making these sound better. And of course, it was just really when the label decided that they were going to put them out digitally only that we sort of came up with this deal and decided to look at it again.

Rockpages.gr: On the Wounded Lad album, aside “Intervention”, which is a song that we have heard before, there are also two songs from your demo days. So, should I assume that all the rereleases, all the remixes include songs that we haven’t heard?

Karl Groom: No, I think I think those are the original tracks, the ones that came off before. I think they’re the same bonus tracks I mixed I mean; we had four albums to mix and construct a huge amount of work really to do that. I couldn’t find all the tapes for the bonus tracks. So they’re as they were in the first place. But I concentrated on that.

And there’s also a fifth album which has been done, which will be coming out through the Fan Club, which is when I moved studios two years ago, I found a lot of old drives with recordings on. And there was a multi-track recording from a gig in 1999. I think it was the second gig on the Clone Tour where Mac had just joined, his second ever show, and it sounded great. So I wanted to go in there and try and remix that as well. And we finished that. We restored the bits that weren’t so great and same sort of process. So that was five albums to do!

Rockpages.gr: Now, you have mentioned the label, you have released some really weird albums, interesting albums there. And you’re one of the few bands that actually do that. Releasing with remixes and acoustic parts and all that stuff is something that you will continue to do on in the future, or are there any conflicts with blast on this subject? Do you have like the freedom to do to continue doing this? Because it’s been a while since the last time you released an album from the Fun Club.

Karl Groom: I think the last new album we did was maybe a “Paradox – The singles” box in 2009. Yeah. Oh wait! We did “two zero one seven”, which was a live album. So yeah, 2018. Now we have it in our contract that we can carry on doing these. We have to offer to Nuclear Blast first. But we ask them, can we put this out? And on one of the albums that they took it, the option to take it. And if they don’t take it, we’re allowed to release ourselves.

So it is something we want to continue to do. Definitely. It’s just we’ve always wanted to keep that standard as high as possible. So not just release a bootleg to try and release the same studio quality, the same the same quality as we were with anormal release. You won’t find us releasing, you know, five or six a year (laughs).

It’s never going to happen. You know, so once every few years we will make another release. And I think probably one of my favorites was making “Wireless” our acoustic album. I really enjoyed that because it’s just something so different from what we normally do.

So I would definitely like to do another one of those, particularly now Glyn’s in the band. I think it works really well with this voice. So that’s something I’d like to do in the future.

Rockpages.gr: With the whole reemergence of interest for vinyls, is there even a slight chance to have those Fun Club albums released on vinyl as well, maybe?

Karl Groom: We did one, but it’s it’s kind of difficult, really. I mean, Nuclear Blast has a deal where they can get those albums pretty cheap. And they obviously press hundreds of thousands every year. But for us, you know, a few thousand copies of LPs or something for Fan Club, we did “two zero one seven”. And that is, you know, the problem is if you’re selling those to Europe, that’s all right.

But you can’t refuse people from further like Australia and America. You can’t say “we’re not sending them to you”. But, you know, the cost of postage is absolutely insane. I mean, if you sell a vinyl for maybe 25 euros, cost of postage to the US, that’s about 25 euros. So it’s absolutely crazy. And then we end up losing, you know, it’s not possible. It was difficult from the pressing point of view being very expensive because we’re pressing only a few thousand. And also, from the postage point of view.

I guess we could do it if if we were going to go and sell them on tour. But it’s very difficult then to refuse other people. And I think, you know, you just need that reach like Nuclear Blast has. They will send them out bulk to different countries and sell them in the local area. It’s easy for them. We make the CDs still and, you know, it’s available for streaming and download. But I’d say it’s unlikely at the moment.

Rockpages.gr: I assume that a band that has such an extensive career like you guys, are there any leftovers, are there any songs hidden in maybe some old drawers and stuff like that? Which I’m just guessing. And is there a chance for us to listen to them at some point?

Karl Groom: There were the songs that Threshold wrote as a band before we wrote our first song for that compilation and it’s a completely different style of music. It’s what we used to play in pubs, really.

It is kind of irrelevant. And every now and again, Richard says, “wouldn’t it be interesting if we released those old tracks and”, you know, and then I send them to him and he has a listen and goes “I see why we didn’t release them” (laughs). There’s no relevance and the lyrics are embarrassing and we were just learning how to write music. And I don’t know why, but when we were told there was a chance we were going to release some music seriously and it was going to actually go out by the time it will be on CD and people will get to hear it, we suddenly thought, “oh we better write something serious, something better” (laughs).

But we were playing covers and writing songs a bit like I suppose it was the late 80s. It would have been like Rat and Van Halen and these sorts of bands. And you can imagine how different that sounds to the style of music Threshold represents. We do have probably two albums with the music like that. And I can imagine, you know, I wouldn’t be fully against letting people hear it. But as soon as they do, they think, oh, that’s why they didn’t release it and they put it away (laughs). I think it wouldn’t represent the band very well.

Rockpages.gr: Let’s pass from “Wounded Land” to “Psychedelicatessen” and what a title that was! Where did this title came from? Because it’s like, wow.

Karl Groom: I think you’d have to ask Jon, Jon Jeary who was the master mind behind these things, you know, he could explain clearly why… well he probably wouldn’t know clearly (laughs), but I mean, that was the way he was thinking at the time.

And, you know, like a delicate testimony, you take lots of nice little things and from the psyche. And when we released the album originally, there were lots of little images. And I don’t think they’re in the booklet any longer. But there was it was like an ice cream cone with a brain on top and someone licking it! All these crazy images. And Jon’s, he was in a different headspace in those days (laughs).

It was it was interesting title, definitely. It’s fantastic because I think I’ve seen it somewhere else since. But I mean, at the time it was original anyway. So it was definitely, yeah, definitely one that hadn’t been out before.

Rockpages.gr: Now, you’re probably one of the most known progressive metal bands from England. But on the other side, there aren’t so many progressive metal bands from England. Why do you think that’s? I mean, most people consider England like the birthplace of heavy metal and heavy music in general. But we only know like a few, a handful maybe bands. And I’m not talking about successful bands only. I’m talking about bands in general. Where’s what? Why progressive never really became like super big in England?

Karl Groom: I think you’re right. Actually I think the only band I could say that I know that have progressive sort of elements is Sylosis. I mean, I think they’re from Reading, which is quite close to where I live. So I don’t know of any other bands in the UK that are progressive metal. I mean, do you know some (laughs)?

Rockpages.gr: I mean, if I search in my archive or probably find some or maybe find the few ones that are loosely mentioned as progressive metal, because, I mean, you know, there’s even a lot of people who say, what really is progressive metal? But yeah. Why do you think that’s happened?

Karl Groom: You’re right. That was the new wave of British heavy metal. And Britain sort of dominated that. Those bands are still popular now. They haven’t really left the scene. They’re still going. But I think for our instance, really, we never considered our self-progressive metal. I suppose there wasn’t really a progressive metal title when we started. So I think it just arrived in the early 90s as we were starting. So the only reason Threshold ended up there is because Nick and I, the other guitarists in the original lineup, we loved anything kind of metal at the time.

And Jon Jeary was particularly into progressive bands like Pink Floyd, Rush, Genesis. So because we were a bunch of friends, we just put our influences together and we came up with this mix of progressive and metal. And then when our first album came out, it got labeled progressive metal, which we didn’t really kind of recognize until then.

I suppose Queensryche were the earliest band in that sort of genre or maybe Fate’s Warning, but they were what you would call progressive metal now. But I think they were probably going before the title arrived. But like I say, we didn’t really recognize that. We thought we were just a metal band at the time, so.

We have a small intervention from Karl’s son

I work at home now, to be honest. And a lot of my work is mixing. So I have a room at home and do that. So he comes in and out as he wants to. So he’s used to it.

Rockpages.gr: You actually have closed down the studio Thin Ice, right? Are you thinking about reopening them or?

Karl Groom: Well, like I say, I realized when I closed the studio, I realized that most of the time I was just mixing. It started off when the pandemic came. A lot of bands didn’t want to come and travel from abroad to come to the UK at that time. I started mixing and I used something called Audio Movers, which is they can hear what I’m doing in real time as I’m mixing. And we have a Skype or WhatsApp open and we just speak as I’m mixing. So we started doing that.

And I just realized there’s very few people record now. Nearly everything, all my work, people send me albums to mix. So, I did most of it at home. And we did plan to restart Thin Ice again. But I moved and Clive moved, who was the other person in Thin Ice, Clive Nolan. And we’re quite a long way apart now.

We’re about two and a half hours away from each other. So, we never really got round to starting a second studio. And what I do now is when I record something, I’ve got three or four studios. I just go and work there instead and then bring it back home and use my mixing room to work.

I don’t think we’ll start Thin Ince studios again. It was good because we both lived about 15 minutes apart. And at one point I lived at the studio as well when I was younger. So, you know, it was very convenient. But, you know, I don’t think we’ll start again.

Rockpages.gr: Threshold is one of the few bands that somehow managed to survive changing three singers in four albums for whatever reason that happened. We pretty much know what happened or we don’t know… But the past is the past. Doesn’t matter anyhow. But how do you guys manage to survive that? And aside surviving, how do you think that all those lineup changes, especially for the vocalist, really influenced the band?

Karl Groom: Yeah, I suppose, you know, it was a shock the first time when Damian left because we just finished the album, done a gig and then he got an offer to get well paid and we understood why he wanted to do it, because they were offering, you know, sort of financial security to go and travel around the world and sing for another band.

And that didn’t work out. When Glenn left after the second album, Damian came back, but the same thing happened again (laughs). So we got used to that. And I think what happened is nearly all the songs were written by the beginning.

It was just myself, Nick and Jon Jeary. And then Richard joined in writing pretty quickly as well. So four of us were writing nearly all the music. When a singer left, we weren’t left with a whole catalogue of music that someone had taken the rights with. They were all our songs which we’d written for them.

I stopped even thinking about which singer I was writing for when I write an album. These days, if Richard doesn’t do a demo of singing for the album, his wife will. In the old days, it was Jon Jeary who was singing all the demos. I don’t really think about who’s going to sing it. We just sort of write the music and go from there.

I suppose because we kept all the writing to the people that stayed in the band, it was a lot easier. And now Glyn returned, he started to write a bit more music as well, which is it’s quite nice to have that diversity. But the identity of the band was always quite strong. And I always felt that even if I left or Richard left, I felt like the band had its own identity and would continue if we wanted to.

So it’s never been dependent on one person, even if it’s a singer. I know that’s unusual. If you look at… you can’t imagine Queen able to continue without Freddie Mercury, really, but we were never at that level. Of course, it’s different to the genre, which is a lot smaller. But I never felt that we were attached to a particular singer in the same way as that.

Rockpages.gr: You guys have announced the tour where you will play at least a song from each album. Should we expect some like very interesting songs in the set or will it be like more or less like a best of kind of set?

Karl Groom: Yeah, I think they’ll be interesting songs because we haven’t played many of those for a long time. And obviously we’re going to start with “Wounded Land” I think we wanted to play “Consume to Live” because that was the first song on the first album. So I think that hasn’t been done for quite a long time.

We did it with Glyn originally in tour in 94. But I mean, I’m not sure he sang it in thirty years. So that would be interesting. And we’re going to work our way through each album. And many of those albums we haven’t played songs from for quite a while. So, yeah, there will be definitely songs we haven’t played for a long time.

I’m busy working out what good guitar parts I want Glyn to play. So I’ll make a video for him of all the parts. And then he tries to learn those at the same time as singing. So there’s quite a bit to be done to arrange for this. And the good thing about remixing these albums is that I was quite familiar with a lot of these parts, because if you were to just listen to, I don’t know, “Wounded Land”, you would hear the album, but you wouldn’t hear necessarily all the guitar parts. But when when I was mixing, I was hearing all these parts individually. So a lot of those were familiar to me on those early albums because I’d been through all the way from “Wounded Land” to “Clone”.

So, when I had to learn those parts or started learning and when I had to get some parts for Glyn, it was a lot easier than maybe it would have been if I’d just gone back and thought, what did I play that long, long ago? It’s quite a hard thing to remember, isn’t it? (laughs). Yeah, it would be really good. I mean, I think in the past we’ve done, we’ve either gone out and done the same kind of tour a second time or else we’ve gone out and we’ve done the whole of the album, the album we’ve just released, played it from beginning to end. And I just remember when we were, I think we might have been doing the “70,000 Tons of Meal” Cruise, and I was speaking to Richard and I said “I’d really like to do something different”. And I just said, what about if we go back and try and play a song from every album and make that?

I wanted to find something different to do for our second tour instead of the usual sort of ideas. And the funny thing is I met my friend Arnie from the band Edenbridge, which is a sort of symphonic band. I met him on the cruise and I said, oh, “we’re going to do this tour and we’re going to play a song from every album”. And he goes “You won’t believe it. We’ve decided to do the same thing”!. So, I thought we were being highly original, but they’ve been out and done that as well (laughs).

I think it will be something we’ll really enjoy and hopefully it’ll be giving people a chance to hear some of the older songs that they never get a chance to hear. And that’s the only way it will ever happen. If you have, I don’t know how many we’ve got (laughs), maybe 12 studio albums that once you played five or six songs from a new album and then you pick a few others, that’s a set. So this will at least give a chance to hear some of those older songs that people sometimes ask for.

Rockpages.gr: But there is a mistake on the tour dates because I don’t see Greece in them.

Karl Groom: (laughs) I think it would be. When did we go to Greece recently? I think maybe last year. Yeah, we were in Athens. We did speak to the guy that arranges the shows for us and he said he would he would like to do another show. So hopefully this sort of chance.  We had to cancel Rock Hard Festival this year because we had a period of time where we couldn’t do any shows.

And that’s why we don’t have a London show and we don’t have a Greek show as well. All sorts of things. So our agent is looking at more dates now and certainly I think we’re almost there for a London show. And hopefully we’ll get some other ones as well. So hopefully we come back again. We had a great time. It was last year.

And the only problem was that we had to fly by Istanbul. And on the way back, our flight got cancelled because of the bad weather in Turkey. So that wasn’t so bad. We had an extra day in Athens! So we went back out again and had a good walk around and a nice meal.

Rockpages.gr: There were actually a lot of jokes about that live show because you played again with the same support band. And the guys from Silent Wedding was very great.

Karl Groom: They’re a great band and I really, really enjoy their music as well. It’s always a good thing if they’re going to come and play with us in Athens. I mean, we might have done another tour, but we’ve already done two tours with them, I think, already. So, I mean, we have to do something different. And that’s why they’re not with us on the tour. I would never object to playing with the Silent Wedding.

Rockpages.gr: If you had a chance to travel back in time, what do you what would you say? What would be your advice to a very young Κarl Groom?

Karl Groom: I think I wouldn’t tell him how difficult things have been, you know, because I mean, there are times there are real highs and real lows, particularly when you’re in a band. And they’re rarely to do with the music. I mean, it’s to do with sometimes when you play a live show, you get so surprised, it’s so uplifting because I can remember it might have been 2019 we arrived in Helsinki and somehow all these years we never played there. And I thought, well, that means it’s going to be a tiny crowd. But we got there and it sold out and incredible show and really fantastic.

So those moments come, you get real highs. And then you get moments where, you know, someone’s left the band or there’s an argument or something, and it just it’s so crushing. It’s sort of it’s very difficult to deal with. It’s almost like being in a marriage and you have an argument. It’s everything so heartfelt and people take things so badly. So, it takes a lot of fixing some of those situations. So, I’m not I’m not sure I would tell myself anything.

I’d say just just go ahead and let everything happen because it would be too difficult. Otherwise, the amount of work you have to do to to get to this situation. But I would never swap anything that we’ve done. It’s been a fantastic time so far. And I think we’ve arrived at a position now where the band members are old enough not to spend their time arguing all the time (laughs).

So we we actually love going out on tour now and like I say, when we have the flight cancel, that’s great because we all have another day together, you know, wherever we happen to be. And we love spending time together these days, which is something that I don’t think we would have done in the early days. It was quite difficult at times.

Rockpages.gr: Do you guys have any timetable about a new about a new album? Have you worked on ideas or is it too early yet?

Karl Groom: What normally happens is one of us will just say, “have you got any ideas for music”? I’m interested in starting writing with some enthusiasm for it and some inspiration and then it will happen. But I think we’ll probably start looking at that after we’ve done this second tour, which is not what normally happens after we’ve done the tour a year later.

We start thinking about writing some new music. But I never put a specific deadline on it because we don’t have to. But we always, I don’t know, it’s for other people to judge, but we’re always trying to strive to make an album that’s better than the last one. So I don’t want to do it just for the sake of it.

And, you know, sometimes we’ve left five years between albums, sometimes two, sometimes one even. But when we’re ready to write and we have some inspiration, we definitely do it again. And I think the last two albums have gone down. So I think we’re enthusiastic to write again for another album, something we love doing anyways.

It will come, I’m sure.

Rockpages.gr: I want to thank you for your time. I could go on for hours, but I’m pretty sure you have a life that you have to go on with it. So I want you to close this interview with anything you want to say to all your friends here in Greece.

Karl Groom: Greece, I’d love to come and see you again! You know, we never complain about going to Athens, except maybe not now. Well, it’s 38 degrees. I was in, I think, was it Corfu last year in, I think it was August. It was unbelievable temperatures.

So I think that’s the way it’s going, isn’t it? Yeah. But I mean, we usually go to Greece with a family, usually most summers we like to go there. We’ve got some friends there. But yeah, we’d love to come over and do some more shows, so it’d be great to see you again and look forward to it!