Another Tale’s sound evolution – less keyboards, more guitars
Drummer Reinhold Hessling & merch manager Heike Hessling talk to Nick Awde
Another Tale played Corrosion Fest 2023.
Alhambra Live’s next goth festival is Bats in the Attic, September 8-9.
Nick Awde: Another Tale is very much a Ruhr band?
Reinhold Hessling: All the musicians are from the area. Another Tale was formed as a three-piece in 1988 and the band grew from there – I joined in 1989. But when our co-founder and singer Frank Peter Hermsen died in 2002 of brain cancer, we considered the band to be dead too. We gave it a funeral at our RIP concert in 2003 at the Star Club in Mülheim an der Ruhr for our fans. So the band was history, but then in 2016 there was the idea to get it back together because we found a new singer Cowboy, and we were thinking, let’s try it again, people want to hear the old songs. We started played live in Germany and recorded old songs with the new line-up – the result was “PastPresent” , which also included two brand new songs “Gone” and “More Of You”. [The current lineup is Andreas Baumert (bass), Pierre Buttini (acoustic guitar), Stefan Bugal (lead guitar), Cowboy (vocals), Reinhold Hessling (drums), & Peavey (rhythm guitar).] After playing festivals like Dark Skies over Witten and Castle Rock we were invited to play the UK by Donna McLeod and Mike Murray of McGothicfox Productions. They had seen us at Dark Skies and asked us to come to Morecambe for Corrosion Fest 2020. But then there was Covid and all the barriers of Brexit which meant that we had to wait three years. Eventually we came to play the festival this year in March 2023, which was brilliant.
Nick: It’s that post-Covid dilemma of how to catch up on the backlog of recordings and gigs. I’m guessing it’s still difficult to plan things – or is it the usual eternal chaos of the music business?
Reinhold: It’s hard to get gigs especially here in Germany. Every band is definitely on the road again [laughs] – so we’re still in this post-Covid mess.
Heike: For us it’s also hard because Another Tale is an unsigned band. We’re totally independent, we don’t have a label, we don’t have an agency. We do it on our own and that brings many challenges.
Reinhold: We are lucky that Castle Rock is in Mülheim an der Ruhr, which is just around the corner from us and is organised by our former manager Michael Bohnes. We played the festival in 2018, and in 2024 we will open on the Saturday. It’s a big event with a big stage that’s brilliant from a technical point of view.
Heike: It will definitely be a highlight in 2024 for Another Tale. We’ll be on the same bill as Gothminister at a festival that attracts 2000 people. But other gigs, even headline concerts, aren’t attracting big audiences for bands in Germany. People don’t go out – after Covid it’s still difficult to get people to go to the clubs or concerts.
Reinhold: If you’re not Rammstein you have a problem! But we all love the smaller festivals like Dark Skies. We will also be doing our unplugged concert on December 9 at House Witten, an old castle in Witten with very good acoustics that is used for classic concerts as well.
Heike: It’s a group concert with Heartbreak Noir who are Emma Newby and Nick Schultz of Faces of Sarah. It was an event that we did for the first time last year, organised by Dark Skies’ Carsten Frauendorf. It was a great success and Carsten said on stage, hey let’s do it again next year. This time The House of Usher will also be playing so it will be three bands, totally acoustic at a brilliant venue – House Witten has an intense atmosphere with low lights and distinctive stage decoration.
Reinhold: We’re in regular contact with Emma and Nick, and we’re planning to perform a few songs together in December. We can’t wait!
Nick: I have to say that Germany is an intriguing country because of the huge offer of festivals on the darker side of music.
Reinhold: That’s because we have such a big independent scene – there are so many bands of all sizes around. We’ve been on bills with great bands like Aeon Sable, Still Patient?, I Am The Fly and The Escape. But because there are lots of bands, including so many older bands still playing, we all need places to play. That’s the level Another Tale is at: we’re small, we’re totally independent and it’s very hard to find a gig in the whole of Germany, it’s very very difficult.
Heike: There are a lot of bands at all levels, but when you compare the larger festivals like Wave-Gothik-Treffen in Leipzig, M’era Luna in Hildesheim and Amphi Festival in Cologne, they always have really established acts and each year they just change the line-ups around these three major festivals. Independent bands like us never have the chance to get on the bill. In my opinion, there are two different music scenes. The festival scene is definitely not representative. On the surface it looks exciting and new with each year’s announcements and then you realise it’s the same old story once more.
Reinhold: That’s right. They’re just shuffling the bill each time. And when you look behind the scenes, you can see that it tends to be the big agencies who book for all the big festivals and they have their own bands. The festivals and agencies are working together and they’ve changed the scene. They know it’s big business for them, to be honest.
Nick: Which is mirrored in the UK where our festivals can’t grow because of the same handful of eternally classic bands rotating at the top of each bill. It’s especially disappointing for us because you can argue that this is a compelling reason why our festivals can’t grow to the size of Germany’s. So let’s turn to recording, which is a more level playing field. What do you have in the pipeline?
Reinhold: We recorded the acoustic concert in Witten last year and the recordings are in the studio at the moment getting mixed. So that will be our next release as a CD in December as Live Acoustic – Cube In The Cube Concert. We’re also writing new songs but it’s difficult because we have all jobs – we are very amateur!
Nick: Hardly. It’s an encouraging sign of sustainability for any band today worthy of the name.
Reinhold: We are writing new songs but there are no exact plans at the moment to release them as an album. But that’s mainly because we’re also working on our old songs to play them live. We have nine records so there are lots of songs from the past and we’re rehearsing ones that haven’t been played for a long time. It means that you will see us playing a new set next year in July for Castle Rock.
Nick: Can you talk a little bit about about what it means to be goth for a band of your longevity?
Reinhold: We came to gothic music just as the 1990s were beginning which was a very interesting time. Before I arrived as the drummer, they had a drum machine because the band started as an experimental project. It was all about dreams and tears, very dark and quiet. After Frank Peter decided the band needed a real drummer, we were able to play with a more rock style. But it was still quite quiet and that harder rock sound didn’t really happen. But now with the new line-up we play the songs with three guitars and no keyboards, so we can do it harder, more actual. But although the songs get better that way, they stay the same, because Frank Peter wrote very very good songs. At Castle Rock this year, we saw The 69 Eyes – they’ve been doing goth’n’roll for 30 years and it always sounds good. That’s the sort of direction we have been working towards – more guitars, less keyboards.
Heike: On a personal level, for Reinhold and me being gothic, it’s about how we are a bit different from the others around us. [laughs] We wear black but I don’t need to wear a silver skull patch on my leather jacket to be gothic, you know what I mean? So it’s a lifestyle. Musically, we grew up with the Mission, Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim and New Model Army, that’s the influences of Another Tale.
Reinhold: We had an interesting time in Morecambe when we played Corrosion Fest because the people there are totally different to Germany. We saw things like handmade clothing and also older people who came for the whole two days of the festival. You won’t see that here. For example, our young people all dress the same because they buy everything from the same places so everybody looks the same. But in the UK it’s not like that, you still have the real, original gothic scene. So Morecambe was as much about meeting and watching the people there as enjoying the music.
Nick: Although I have to add that there is a generational divide – for all sorts of complicated reasons and it’s certainly not intentional – where there’s a disconnect between the younger and older bands and so while the UK kids can have very distinct identities, they’re mostly identifying as post-punk rather than goth. Goth isn’t offering them anywhere meaningful to go. As you’ve both said, the music is fused to the community’s identity, and it seems that Another Tale at least is a band that’s moving with the shifts in our communities across the years.
Reinhold: We do try to change but we always stay with gothic rock. It will be gothic rock forever because it comes from our hearts. If you look at M’era Luna now, where you’ll see pink unicorns, heavy metal people and its party party party. The general lineup has changed a lot and there are pop music influences on the stage. Twenty years ago when we visited M’era Luna the first time in 2000, it was a real gothic festival. Now it’s a heavy metal party festival and we ourselves don’t go there. Our daughter goes there she loves it but it’s not for us. In fact I don’t like the big festivals, I like the smaller ones because I can see new bands from everywhere, like Italy, France, the UK. It’s important for me to see new things, new bands, new influences. A great band that we saw recently is The Traitors in the small venue in Witten, organised by Carsten Frauendorf as well, where there were 50 people or something. They’re electronic but we thought they were great.
Heike: That sort of experience shows why it’s important to us to always find new things and new influences.
What’s the story behind the band’s name?
Reinhold: That goes back to Frank Peter, DT Hügen and Horst Leis, the guitar player. They started Another Tale. It was Horst Leis, who came up with the name and the logo. They wanted something totally different, so it was ‘another tale’, another story, different to what was around in these times. And so it became Another Tale with songs about dreams and tears – and that’s how it all started.
www.another-tale.de | Facebook: AnotherTale