As I said Abortus were pretty unknown in Germany til then so it seemed natural to me to ask about the founding of the band. And it seems that every band has line-up problems sooner or later. (Gooch): "We founded the band in 1998, about the middle of the year. And as every new band does we had a lot of line-up problems, trying to find the right people. But then we found Jack who is our third vocalist. After a few local gigs where we always got positive reactions from the fans we decided to record our debut CD. It was released in August 1999, I believe, and distributed in Europe by Battlegod Productions, a little Australian label with bands like Baltak or Mortifier from Italy, really a small underground label. But now we got signed to Code666 in Italy and that's why we're here with the second CD "Process Of Elimination". We're here to promote it on our first European tour." Of course, I also wanted to know if the band released any demos before recording their debut. (Gooch): "Yes, we recorded three or four demos which we never released. They were just for us to hear what it sounds like if we wanted to make some changes to the arrangements of songs but not official releases, no, not at all." The musical inspirations for founding Abortus were (Gooch): "Iron Maiden, George's over here probably Skid Row I'd say, Jack's Twisted Sister and Mike's over here Van Halen and Dream Theatre. So we got a wide range from even stuff like Skid Row all the way through to Bathory. You know, we don't select any particular genre. We like to listen to all styles of Metal." |
Compared to their own material it was quite surprising
to hear cover versions of Twisted Sister and even AC/DC. (Jack): "Under The Blade" was my first experience with
Twisted Sister. I think that song was extremely influential to me just because it's such a good Metal song. We came together and discussed a bit
about doing some cover versions, and we all thought of put some cards on the table. We tried "Under The Blade" as well as some other songs
and "Under The Blades" worked well. We're damn happy with it and glad you liked it, too. It was cool. Eh, "TNT", that was because we're
coming from Australia." |
Next thing for Abortus will be to record their third CD before they come back to Europe. (Gooch): "We'd like to come back again many more times because one is not enough. Many bands from Australia have come to Europe once and afterwards you never heard from them again. We'd love to continue that and keep growing because Europe is really the home for this style of music we feel. USA probably has a market but everything is bigger outside of Australia. So we have to push our name outside Australia as well as within." So what would be the dream package for the next tour? George's answer comes first: "Coroner, Kreator and Sodom. I don't like the new material of Kreator so much, more older stuff like "Extreme Aggression", that's more my favourate. And Coroner back in the old days because later on they started to get a bit funny. Around that, you know, Thrash Metal of the Eighties." So nowadays it wouldn't be such a dream package after all? (Gooch): "No, but maybe Witchery. I think we could compliment each other, compliment each other's styles and play for similar fans of similar styles but, you know, we have no choice. We're just a young band and only because Gurkhas pulled out we had the opportunity to come here. But it's plain fun as Ancient Rites are really cool. It's old school Metal as far as we are concerned. They have been really nice and good to us. We're new on the scene and they've taught us a lot, giving us hints all the time, from day 1 of this tour to now. (From the background we can hear Jack shouting that Ancient Rites are jerks...) "Yeah, they're jerks, haha, no seriously, we can say that because we're making jokes on each other all the time. We've really grown, I think, altogether as a band. Also the guys of Mystic Circle were pretty cool except one of them got sick. So they had to pull out. But we're here to the end, having two more shows and then returning back home to start a new campaign. Maybe starting an Australian tour and, of course, we start to compose for our third CD. |
Of course, Abortus would also like to tour Europe
with another Australian band. (Gooch): "Ah, that would be nice because we'd have someone else from back home
to hang out... Unfortunately probably that would be impossible unless it's someone like Destroyer666 who have a fan base here in Europe.
We have to support bands who do have a fan base. If we come here with another Australian band who're just like us being unheard of - as
you've never heard of us up until now - it's going to be hard to get audiences in. So we would need like... if it's two Australian bands... at least
one or two bigger bands from Europe." |