 Jimmy K here, Metal Voice. Look at us. The Metal Voice shirts are now on sale. Just go to the video description to find out on how you can purchase one. Metal! Welcome to the Metal Voice today on the show. I guess who I've wanted for a very, very long time. I'm a massive Merleion fan since the beginning till now. Steve Hogarth, singer, writer, mastermind of Merleion. How you doing Steve? Steady on. Very well, thank you. I'm admiring your ghost in the machine t-shirt. Nice, huh? Got on. Yeah, good album. Yeah, great, great. First things first, okay. You're playing Montreal because we are in Montreal, so I just want to throw this out. July 1st, which is Canada Day, by the way. Oh, is it? Yes, it's our national holiday. Is that good or bad? Well, it's good and it could be bad. No, no, it's good. The weather is nice. People are out on the streets and people are looking for things to do, so I think it could be very good. Yeah, that sounds great to me. July 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Olympia in Montreal. So if you guys, there's still tickets. If people want to purchase those pick tickets, go right ahead and grab them. Merleion's a great band. What has been, and I'm going to start things right off with Montreal. What has been the love affair with Merleion and Montreal? And I've seen the band from the beginning in Montreal to, you know, later on, right, let's say. What has been that love affair? Well, it comes down to the people, of course. There was always a thing and the boys told me about it. When I joined the band and we were first touring with the season's end tour, they said, oh, wait till we get to Montreal because we'll probably do the spectrum and it'll be amazing. And we did, and it was. So I can't put my finger on why that happens. I can celebrate the fact that it does and be grateful. I mean, we've got a funny thing with, it's the same in Paris, you know. So I don't know if it's something to do with a touch of the French spirit. A kind of romanticism or a passion that maybe isn't quite so hot in other parts of the world, certainly not the English speaking world. But there it is. And it's the same in Quebec when we go, when we play there. And it's sort of the same in France. There's a kind of heart thing that goes beyond mere excitement. It goes into sort of a commitment. And it's beautiful to behold. And I'll just tell you this, even when fish left and you came into the band in Montreal, like they accepted you right away. I don't know if you remember this, going back. I do remember. I do remember. It was amazing. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting it anywhere, to be honest. I thought it was going to take a while. But that first tour, just about everywhere we went, people kind of, they watched the first couple of songs with one eye closed. And then you could feel this kind of wave of relief go through the room. Okay, we made it. And, you know, and it's always been great. Really. Cool. Cool. All right. So let's talk about the new album now or before it's dark. Going to be released March 4th on here music. What did you do differently on this album? And I know, but what did you do differently for those people who don't know yet musically on this album than on Fear the Last Album? Well, I wonder what you do know. I mean, well, I can tell you what I know. Not much really. I mean, we've always written by jamming. So the process was essentially the same. I guess the big difference, and I don't know if it made any difference, but the big difference was that because we were writing this in the jaws of the first lockdown here, and the very first wave of the COVID thing, Steve Rothery was freaking because he perceived himself to be in a high risk category. And he genuinely felt that it might kill him if he got it. And so we couldn't get him out of the house. And that's fair enough, you know, but the rest of us, we just carried on really as though it wasn't happening. We erected a few extra extra screens in the studio, but we have quite a big room where we work, and we work on headphones. So we don't really need to be anywhere near each other physically when we're jamming. So we just carried on going in and jamming without Steve. It may be that because of that, their songs are perhaps a little more keyboard driven. I don't know, really, because fear was pretty keyboard driven. I think Mark Kelly came up with an awful lot of it, just as he did on this one. So Steve joined us later in the process after he'd been vaccinated and he felt a bit more comfortable about his chances of survival. And he came in, and that was the only real difference was that he was a little more late to the table. More choirs, more upbeat, with those different musical stylings that you've injected because you were influenced by the sort of, or inspired, I should say, by the orchestration that you had, I guess. That's a good point. We had made with friends from the orchestra, we then toured with those six orchestral players, String Quartet, Flute and French horn, and really enjoyed that. Really enjoyed having access to those real the real tones that in the past we'd always just used samplers for, but nothing really beats the real thing. In fact, that's not true. Occasionally, depending on what you're after, a sample can beat the real thing. And that happened to me on which was, I did a song called Better Dreams on the Ice Cream Genius album, and I had a flute that was a Kurzweil sample. I'm digressing, but what the hell. I had a flute that was a Kurzweil sample. And at one point before we mixed it, our producer Craig Leon said, oh, I know this amazing flutist called Tim Wheater. And we'll get him to come in and replace all the flutes. And I said, yeah, that'll be fantastic. And he came in and he did a perfect job, but I didn't like them as much. So occasionally, depending on what you're after. The fake thing actually is better than the real thing. Is that what you're saying? Fake thing can be better than the real thing. Next title for the next album. There you go. I think you too did that. Even better than the real thing. But where was it? So, yeah, we got used to working with those classical elements. And so we hauled them in again to do the quartet for a bit more scraping, as I call it, much to their delight. And then towards quite a long way into the process, we went down to Real World. And Tim Sidwell, who makes our movies, he came over there to shoot some stuff. And he'd been working with a band called Bring Me the Horizon. I don't know if you heard of them. They're doing sort of good things in the UK at the moment. And he'd done a show at the Royal Albert Hall with them. And they'd been using this choir called the Choir Noir. And Tim said, have you heard about this choir? They sort of do choral arrangements of heavy metal tunes. Worth checking out. So I googled them and had a listen to what they were doing. And we thought, wow, that's really interesting because it's really choral, but it's really rock and roll at the same time. We should give them a shout and see if they'd be up for doing something. So we got hold of a girl called Kat Marsh, who seems to be in charge of it all and does all the arrangements. And she also sang some backing vocals on the album. But then she she did some choral arrangements. And that has made a difference, particularly on the Crow and the Nightingale. And then on the end of Care, it's it's taken both those things up to another level, really. Yeah, it's pretty interesting in the lyrics. Now, okay, I've seen the videos where you discuss, we didn't really want to talk about the pandemic, but we did talk about the pandemic. I mean, you know, there's different angles about the pandemic, right? There's the people who are getting sick from the pandemic. And then there's a psychological aspect of being locked up, getting sick from the pandemic, right? I mean, what were the angles you were covering? Well, I was covering, I was sort of of the opinion, and I'm of the opinion that these pandemics are a direct consequence of the global crisis in general. The fact that there are now too many human beings on the planet, maybe not too many human beings on the planet if we were to live in a sustainable way, but we're not going to. I'd like to think we are, and I'm shouting about it, but I'm not terribly optimistic. And I think that these pandemics, or this pandemic, is a harbinger of more serious shit to come, to be honest, if we don't change our ways. And unfortunately, I don't see any sign of us changing our ways. I read a statistic that even after COP26, which wasn't that long ago, there was more Brazilian rainforest cut down in January this year than in January last year. So what are any of these things worth? You know, all these guys flying in and they're private jets or whatever to have these big meetings and eat these big dinners and make these grand statements and then go back home and do bugger all about it. You know, it's scary. I don't want to bring everybody into a massive downer, but you've got to wake up and smell the coffee at some point. And I think the pandemic and the climate crisis are very closely interrelated. I think one is a cause and one is a fact. So that's kind of where I was at when I was making this record. And so even though I didn't want to reference the pandemic, it was the reality of the life I was living at the time. And so I couldn't really express myself honestly without referring to it. You know, you just can't get around it. That's what it comes down to. It's been part of our lives for two years. Every conversation we've had with families and friends always comes back to that, right? And it's done us more mental damage than I think we acknowledge. I mean, some people will acknowledge it and say, look, I'm in a right state because of this. And then other people will go, no, no, you know, I know it's not been easy, but I'm fine. But they're not fine. Nobody's fine after they've been through this. Some people have just coped a bit better. Some people have just buried it a bit deeper. But it has been a very unnatural way to live. And I was trying to explain that with murder machines, you know, I put my arms around him and I killed him. And that was the reality of that was a risk. You know, you go and put your arms around your old man, you might kill him. And so suddenly you're not allowed to touch him. And it's like, so ordinary life becomes like a prison visit. You know, you're staring at one another through screens. So that is messed with everybody on a level that perhaps a lot of people don't fully acknowledge or realize yet. But I think it's messed with all of us. What are their lurks on the album? Are you proud of that sort of go into that dive into that area that people would be interested in? Or at least you are really interested in? Well, proud. I don't know. I'm very happy with how care turned out because it's a song that looks at death through a couple of prisons or maybe three prisons. There's three sections of it. An hour before it's dark, every call and angels on earth. Every cell. Oh, sorry, every cell. Yeah, maintenance drugs. The first part of that song is about a friend I have in Mexico City and he was diagnosed with a load of tumors running down in his spine and they were inoperable because they were right next to his spinal cord. And I had lunch with him in Los Angeles a few years ago. He happened to be in LA with his family and we happened to be there doing a show and we had lunch. And he first told me about it and it was shocking and upsetting and I could see that he was frightened as you would be. And he went into a couple of years of chemotherapy because that's all they could do. And every time he had a session he would watch at me with a selfie of him smiling defiantly back at the camera with his tube in session number three. And so I went through the chemotherapy with him in a way. I was witness to the process and I tried to be there, although I'm over here, I tried to be this kind of guy in a band who cared about him, who was there on his team. And so maintenance drugs came from that. No one knows how much time they've got left. And when you're staring down the barrel of something like a cancer or a life-threatening, a serious life-threatening condition, you might be given six months to live. And that's terrifying. But none of us know if we've got six months to live. Any of us can be dead tomorrow. We'd walk under a bus or whatever, have a bloody heart attack on embolism, whatever. So no one, no matter what age they are or how healthy they are, no one's immune to skipping down the street and being dead the same day. And it's worth remembering every now and again. So the whole of care really was reflections on death. The middle of the song, I pictured someone in a hospital bed contemplating their own mortality and saying goodbye to the world and wanting to acknowledge the love that the people who have loved them, wanting to acknowledge that and say thank you for it, be grateful for it. So the middle of the song is about thanking someone who's made you feel alive, who's made your life worthwhile and given your life a reason. And then the end of the song is a sort of a journey down the tunnel. Now whether it's a journey down the tunnel out of life or not isn't really specified. When I say an angel here on earth came down here to carry me home, that angel could be carrying you home or the angel could be carrying you out. And so I left that as a double meaning because I liked the idea of it perhaps having an optimistic ending. But really that whole section is a thank you to the healthcare professionals who have damn near killed themselves or actually killed themselves during this pandemic in order to care for the rest of us. And I wanted to put that down and close an album with it so that it's there forever. And I'm very proud of that. Yeah, that sounds great. Sounds amazing. I love the angles. I love all the different angles you're talking about. Very interesting. Over the years Merlion's always been that crowdfunding or fan funding model that you've used from Merlion.com I guess from there to today, right? What would it take to get Merlion back on the radio? What is the resistance in your opinion? It just blows my mind time and time after again. Not only Merlion but other bands of sort of the legacy bands we'll call them. What's that gap that needs to be bridged or what needs to change in society to get the alms from our bands that we loved? I don't know. I mean, I don't think we'd do ourselves any favors a lot of the time. We're banging out these, a short song for us is nine minutes. Nobody's going to put that on the radio. It's not very often we knock out three, three and a half minutes. And when we do, I know what you mean. I mean, nobody's in any hurry to playlist it. Is it because radio have become like conglomerance and they're all just one, whereas in the past they were all private and they could do whatever they wanted to. Is that part of the problem? Yeah, there is an element of that. It's a bit like what's happened to shops really. You go out shopping or you travel around the world. You see the same shops on every street just about. And they're all stocked with the same products that they've screwed their suppliers down into the ground or the price to stock. And the little independent shops that would therefore be doing something different and interesting just don't have the clout to make themselves felt for the most part. I don't know if it's the same with the music business. To be honest, I've never understood the music business. I've been in it now for 40 years. And if I'd been a carpenter, I would understand woodwork by now. If I'd been a plumber for 40 years, I would know all about plumbing and pipes and how it works. But you can be in the music business forever and still have no more idea of how it works than the day you arrive. It's a total enigma wrapped in a puzzle under a cloak. I mean, you've had your short, sweet little hits too. Don't ask me, it's a mystery. I mean, you've had those, at least maybe not so much in the last few albums, but you've had the short, quick little songs commercially melodic enough to, especially on an acrophobia, right? Those were the radio songs there that could have been, should have been, but weren't. Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, I don't know. I think we're one of those bands that's so hard to put in a pigeonhole and hang a genre on. And yet we have this reputation as a prog rock band. And we are that, but we're also not that. And we're also more than that. And we're also less than that if you want to put it that way. But we don't really comfortably fit in any box that anyone would try and define us by. But at the same time, some of those boxes that we get put in, I think actively put other listeners off if they don't know, unless they sit down physically, listen to our album a couple of times, they go, oh, no, I wouldn't like that. I don't like them. I don't like what they do. Oh, yes, I heard Kaylee in 1980 blah, you know, and it wasn't for me. Didn't like the guy's voice or whatever, you know, so do you still like, is there like, and those are the, and this is to my point again, like, like I'll turn on the radio and I'll hear it here, Kaylee, but I won't hear anything from your vast catalog, right? It's just, it's frustrating. It's frustrating, but there's kind of no point worrying about it. Yeah, just move on. I mean, if we'd had a string of hits, we'd be under, we'd be in a very different place to where we're at today. I mean, obviously, I'd be sitting in a much bigger house and driving a sports car. I nearly said with a much, much prettier wife with much longer legs, but the fact is, I'm not sure there is one. Look, you know, it is what it is. I've got a very pretty wife with long legs. Do people, people sort of just said, you know, that fish era, it's done. Do they still request the songs or is it, you know what, you're, you're basically just Steve Hogarth is the singer? Well, that's the thing, you know, when we go out and play or when we get email or anything that comes our way, nobody's remotely concerned about those first four albums. The trouble is, when we go and do a newspaper review or we go and talk to national radio, those guys, it's like nothing ever changed. It's like they just don't know because they don't know. So in a way, a part of me really, really seriously questions the point of talking to any of you guys because I'm not sure that most of you deserve it. Let me just show you something here. Here we go. Here we go. Here's the point of talking to us right here. Okay. I'll show you the point of talking to us. Right here. Right here. I'll make an exception. Wait a second. Hold on. I got one more. All right. There's the point of talking to us. I'm making an exception. But you know what I mean? You go and talk to these people and it's like it's still 1987. And you think, what on earth am I doing here? And what can I possibly say to this person that will in any way mean that in four years time, if I come back here, I'm not being asked the same stupid, bloody questions because I have been now for 30 years. So that ain't going to change. It's not like me showing up ever made any difference. It's like you're howling at the wall. Very strange. Yeah. Well, on that note. I don't care because what I was going to say is that if we had had a string of hits, we'd be in a different place creatively. We'd be tied down to keeping that thing going. And I think it would tarnish the honesty and the resondetto of, you know, the reason we made art would be, you know, we'd be lent on by that very success that we'd had. And we'd been fortunate really to have had enough success to be able to keep going and not go bankrupt and split up. But not to have had so much success that we had to pretend to be something that we're not in order to keep the machine rolling. And we've also been fortunate not to be under the kind of pressure that hit groups are under because I think we would have split up years ago. You know, that's a great point. A last question is, there's success in the UK and it keeps building in Canada, at least in Montreal. I know it's building. I'm not sure about the rest of Canada. I can't speak for it. But the US, is that still some place that you're looking to continue to sort of build on or is just you're like whatever it is, it is or Yeah, I mean, I'm a singer. I'm not a manager. So you need to ask questions like this to management. I don't really think in terms of world domination, let's go and do that. And let's go and do this. And let's make this bigger. And let's make that bigger. I can sell myself much more with becoming a better singer, writing better words. And, you know, I'm making more complete art. That's really what I'm about. I'm 65 years old. I'm no longer ambitious. I don't want to be a pop star. I don't want to be a rock star. I really don't. Maybe I am one. But but if I am one, then all right, I'll be what I am. But I don't want more than that. I don't want to be Bon Jovi. I don't want to be any of these characters, you know, that are larger than life. I don't want to be Prince. I admire him, but I wouldn't want to bloody be him because it kills you being that kind of person and it kills him and it kills most of them eventually. So I'm cool where I am. And I'm not really worried about breaking America or not breaking America or being bigger and bloody Italy or wherever, you know, we're in a good place. We've made a great record, I think. I mean, people are telling us we've made a great record. So fingers crossed. That's it. Steve hats off to you, Marillian. An hour before it's dark, going to be released on your music. March the fourth, I'm very excited for you. And I'm really, you know, I've been a huge supporter of the band since the start to today. I haven't dropped off at any point. I kept following the band just so you know. Looking forward to Montreal. All right. Montreal date also July 1st. Yeah. Second and third Olympia Theater. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that immensely. All right. Thank you and have yourself a great day. Thank you. Thank you for your time.