Hello Marian, thank you for this interview. You must know that the questions I will ask you are from many Italian fans. so this interview will be a little bit confused and I will ask you many very different questions. Okay, here is the first question: are you working on a new album?

I'm still thinking about a concept for a new album and it's not pretty clear what we're going to do. The only thing is that I'm already working on some new songs but I'm not sure about the direction of the arrangements ot the kind of music. So there's a lot of material which I've done in the last couple of months. Hopefully I'll start working on it in the beginning of the next year, on January maybe. It's very hard to define which direction it will be. It will be very very different from what we've done on Salvation. That's for sure.

Okay, let's talk about Salvation: do you think that the promotion of Salvation would have been better with a video? Because there's no video.

Promotional activities are basically done by the record companies. We have maybe a couple of different opinions about how to do promotion and we had a lot of discussions about it, because I think the way the record company is doing the promotion is not very good for us. But it's always a meddle of money. I mean a video cost a lot of money, we must understand probably to put one is between 70 - 100 thousand marks so it's assuredly an investment. I think that a video would help us to promote because there are VIVA, MTV and so on. But it's a meddle of dealing with the record company. So may opinion is probably different from what they think.

Why was Wishful Thinking the first single and not Inside Out or Guardian Angel?

Well I don't know. I mean everybody probably has his own favourite choice; my personal choice would have probably been New Horizons. We already did a quite interesting version of it that could be a single version. But again, choosing a single is a very difficult thing to do and there are a lot of people involved. We thought that Wishful thinking and Flame were actually the most commercial songs on the album, which would probably be the right introducing to the album.

Was the music of Guardian Angel written in the Eighties? A fan has got the feeling that the atmosphere of the song is like 80's, even if with a 90's sound...

I personally have problems in creating these kind of sections: 80's, 90's, 70's or whatever... I mean, we started the band in the 80's and when we still sound like AV it's because we sound like AV, but not like the 80's. It's just like our musical identity which makes a point and not any category. We probably would never ever ask the Rolling Stones or U2 how they do songs. It's their character.

By the way, do you know that U2 love AV very much?

No, but I love U2 very much, so I think it's great if it's like that.

Why the title Salvation?

Originally we planned to call the album Inside Out because it represented one aspect of the album, especially the lyrics have some very personal point on it and the title of the song quite fit for it, to that tension. We called it Salvation because we felt so...when we went to France to write the album, we had no plans, no ideas, no concept for it, we just went down there and we simply started, we had no demos, no lyrics, nothing. After we finished the last song for it we were a kind of relived and yeah we thought Salvation therefore was a good title for it.

Talking about titles: the first title of Guardian Angel was Nightguard. Why did you change it?

Because I had a polemist with a title like that. because the word nightguard doesn't exist in english, it doesn't appear in the English dictionnary, so I just was looking for an existing word which could probably explain the situation of somebody who wakes beside a bed of a person who's very ill. That's the reason for the change.

About Control. I don't know if you know Ice MC, it's a singer or a band of technosongs. I think it's an Italian production. So the keyboard line on Control sounds very similar to "Think about the way", a song of Ice MC. Maybe you don't know it.

No I don't know it. I mean it's a very typical keyboard line. When you play it, you have this follow of chords and you want to play a rhythmical line, it's almost natural that you get this ti-ti-ti...there are probably also other similitudes to other songs in AV songs, you know.

I will send you the song of Ice MC

Okay, I hope it's a good song

It's a good techno song to do aerobic or to dance in a discotheque

Alright...

Okay...why aren't Astral Body and If the Audience is Listening on Salvation?

We wrote a selection of songs and Astral Body and If the Audience is Listening were not in this session; I wrote theses songs before we went to France and we just chose songs from the session we did in France all together, because we wanted to have a selection of songs which we all wrote together.

Now I can't do without asking you why Ricky is no more an AV member...

The reason is very simple. I mean, he lives down there in the south of France. There is his family and he has his own studio down there. He really prefers to stay at home with his family and work there and be there. For him it was very hard to manage to go on tour and to do promotion and to do all this things. so he decided that Salvation would be his last album with AV. His way gets into different directions. There was not an argument or something between us. It was just the way it goes, we were together for quite a couple of years and the time is over. We're heading for new grounds.

And maybe you will work together again.

Yeah, probably. I can't see any problem with that, it might well be.

What about the next tour ?

We're rehearsing the band and we're arranging the stuff. We will concentrate basically on the new material, I mean we'll also play the old songs, but 3/4 of the show belong to the new material.

And what about some projects for the fans? A party or a new fanclub?

We're just reorganising the whole fanclub. Actually there won't be any fanclub organised by the band anymore. There are enough fanclubs around. They're organised by themselves and I'm a strong believer in decentralising thing. What we're going to do is: we have the web page which has been organized by Tobias and Monika and we will keep always contact Tobias and Monika and all the news which we can give out to both there. We will fly over to Tobias and then he will put it into the web page. The web page will be our contact to the fans and I'm hoping that in the near future we'll find a professional merchandiser who's able to send out all these orders, to get out of this chaos that was going on over the last two years. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Is it true that the album Forever Young had got some problems or it wasn't released in the East Germany because of some political reasons?

It was not Forever Young. It was the release, I think it was in '86 or so, of an album over there which was a compilation of the first two albums, Forever Young and Afternoons in Utopia. They actually left out I think two or three songs because they were not politically correct for the GDR, which were Summer in Berlin and To Germany with Love for reasons which are obvious.

This is a question of Bertaggia: she's translating the book written by a fan, Carola from Freiburg. Maybe you know that book: she's a fan who falls in love with you and does everything to meet you...

Yes, I know that book.

Bertaggia hates this book and she wants to know your opinion.

I like it because it's been written with a great sense of humour. There are some statements on AV which are probably not very positive, but I don't care. At least it's very open, very truthful and it got this sense of humour which I think it's great. The band assented anyway . She wrote it from the position as a fan but very critical,in a more objective level which I think it's great. I like fans which also criticize the band and have their own opinions on things, different from opinions of mine or of Bernhard. It's fantastic. It's also least for an open discussion about something which makes the whole communication much more interesting.

I love songs like Heaven or Hell or many songs of Prostitute; not just because of the music but because of the lyrics. At Salvation some lines are more banal than other lines in other songs...

Okay, what's the question ?

Well, the question is...

Why AV? why the lyrics of Salvation are so shitty?? (laughs)

No, no, but... Why a return to a style like "Forever Young"?

Well, I don't know. sometimes it probably depends on the music. It depend on the inputs I get. A song is very different from a poem and maybe especially on Prostitute the lyrics were more like poems. Here it's just lyrics for some songs. And since lot of the music on Salvation is a kind of streamline music, the lyrics are a little like that as well. when I wrote the lyrics, I tried to return to very simple definitions of things, which I was fascinated with when I wrote the lyrics for Forever Young. I was very much interested in trivial, banal things which when you put them into a context can express a lot more than you probably expected them, when your read them in the first time. The lyrics on Salvation have much more trivial in it than especially in Prostitute, which is very different, is more like poetry. Salvations marks a return to song lyrics in a kind of style. I just try to think of a lyrics which I really find great represents...New Horizons: I like the lyrics very much and this lyrics are probably the most banal on the whole album. They're very simple, very short, self explaining lines, bit they are communicating in their simplicity to the music, which is also very big and mighty, but is very simple and very naive in a way. And I tried to write very naive lines, because the story you have in New Horizons is maybe the story of our biography - of three very naive persons and I just tried to reflect that. And another lyrics I like very much is Guardian Angel.

I like the lyrics of Guardian Angel, too.

Allright. What are the lyrics you don't like? Maybe Flame?

Flame! Maybe not the whole song, I'm just talking about some lines. It's different if a song is all banal, it can have a meaning inside which is not banal. But maybe a song has just a line which is banal and you notice just that...

Flame is maybe not a good example for it. what is a very good example for what I mean is Wishful thinking. The lines in Wishful thinking sound quite banal, in a way. On the other hand, there is just one line which changes the meaning of all the other lines completely and that is the line "Sometimes I wish that you were dead". And it was probably a mistake to change the title of the song because that took a little bit away from the edge of the song, lyrically. But this is exactly what I mean. If you introduce a line like that into a hurt of more banal sounding lines, you change the meaning of those lines a little bit, in a way, and it makes them turning around, it takes that in something else. And that is what I tried to do with the lyrics of Wishful thinking. it's in a way a lovesong, but it's a quite interesting situation which the song describes: the situation is about somebody who has left his lover and now he starts to think that it was probably a mistake to do that. So the situation is anyway I think it's somehow interesting and very contraddictionary. especially this song is much more contraddictionary and interesting than maybe people might think when then don't think too much about the lyrics. There in this lyrics are many hidden things, many lines between the lines.

Do you think to put together a B-Side-Compilation?

There's so much material agglomerating over the years and it's so hard to... I mean, I'm constantly working on music and sometimes I have simply not the time to realize all the projects. Sometimes I just think "Yes, it's probably the right time to do the remixes and to do a compilation of B-sides or whatever". And then again there's something else coming on and sounding more than this interesting and makes me adding to the tour. AV is a little bit like a bitch, isn't it? and I'm very sorry for that, but that's the character of the band. It's simply like that, I have no excuses for that. I still believe that we're going to do this compilation but I can't tell whenever we will do that.

Next millennium... you had your First Harvest, maybe you will have a Second harvest. A fan would like to know which songs would you like to put in your Second harvest.

I'm thinking about a kind of compilation which features basically songs, probably not the most successfull songs, but songs which I think are important somehow and belong really to the very best material we have written or represented. It would be quite interesting to do a compilation like that. But on the other hand I know that the opinions about which are the best songs differ so much that I can only offer my personal taste to it and this probably causes some problems. People would listen to it and say "why did you do that, why did you choose those songs for a compilation". It's senseless. This will become a very personal selection of songs and maybe we'll realize it all together with a compilation of B-sides. Most of the B-sides I personally like them very much, they are also quite interesting little pieces of music.

Okay, I think it's all. Thank you so much

Thank you.