Mid-to-late-April finally sees that situation change finally, Epica making their first visit to our shores. Stunning flame-haired mezzo soprano vocalist Simone Simons, speaking from her home in Germany, is relieved and overjoyed that her band is about to break their Australian duck.
“We haven’t been to Australia yet, and we’ve wanted to go there since day one,” she says. “We’ve travelled a whole lot already in ten years, but never there. Australia has always been on our wish list, and it’s finally happening, and that’s great.”
Despite never having visited Australia, even as a tourist, Simons has some pretty high expectations of out nation from her exposure not only to the media but to other bands who have toured here.
“I’ve only seen the country from TV,” she says. “I know you have a very beautiful country and from my colleagues in the metal scene I’ve heard good stuff about Australia. I talked to Mikeal from Opeth, he’s in Australia right now, and he said that I was going to love it. He always loves to be in Australia. Nobody loves the long flight though. But I’ve heard that when you’re actually there, it’s totally cool.”
The band are bringing a lengthy set Down Under, covering material from their entire five album back catalogue. Given the bombastic, over the top nature of their music, a truly ‘epic’ evening of classically tinged brutality is assured.
“We are going to play for one hour and 45 minutes,” she says. “We have a nice mixture out of all the records. We don’t play more songs off the most recent record, we have five records to pick songs from. We start off the set with the intro from the new record and the first song. But after that it’s going to be a nice mixture of all our classics.”
The Australian jaunt will not be the only first for the band on this tour. They’ll be covering much previously uncharted territory on their coming journey.
“This tour is going to be a first for us, with all the countries we go to. China, Tawian, Indonesia and Australia. We always keep a list on new countries we go to, and on this tour we hit quite a few more, so that’s great,” she says.
Not only have Epica been around for more than ten years now, they have been extremely productive in that time. Despite their heavy touring commitments and the highly involved nature of their music, which involves full orchestras, choirs and heavily complex arrangements on top of the guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and vocals, the band have consistently maintained a punishing schedule of one album every two years since their inception. Simons says that simply comes down to this being what all of the band members do for a living.
“The band is basically our profession, so we don’t have other jobs besides Epica. We dedicate our full time to the music. Epica has been writing albums non-stop, touring non-stop, we’ve never really taken a break. If we were not touring, we were writing records or we were recording them. So in indeed, [we are] a very productive band,” she says.
Simons feels that it may be difficult to maintain that pace for another ten years, and feels that they may ease off the accelerator a little at some point soon. But at the same time, she is very happy with the steady rise that the band has experienced across the course of its journey.
“I think it will almost be impossible,” she says. “We are always on the road for six months in a year, and we need the other six months to write and record the record.
“We would love to keep growing as a band. So far we have been growing from day one. Epica played to maybe 20 people in the beginning, and now next week we have a sold out show for 4,500 people. We can’t really grasp that, it blows our minds a little.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
