AREA 54: Our Old Record Label Wanted Us To Sound Like KORN

November 3, 2004

British metallers AREA 54 recently spoke to Holland's Metal Maidens magazine about the group's split with Dream Catcher Records and tehir future plans, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

Metal Maidens: Your first album, "No Visible Scars", came out on Dream Catcher Records. What happened, they dropped you after this release?

Lakis Kyriacou (guitar/vocals): "It just wasn't working because they wanted something different. They wanted us to sound like KORN or something but obviously we don't. They even took the piss out of the bands we liked…They also insisted we leave our jobs as they were going to pay to keep us going so that we could work on the band full time — they insisted. Then they paid us nothing and I watched as I got myself in serious financial debt waiting for them to do what they kept on promising was around the corner. It was a joke from start to finish and that was the wake up call to how it really is in this disgusting industry."

Laura Salmon (bass): "Nothing happened, that was the problem. They made promises they didn't keep. They didn't promote us and wouldn’t give us money to tour or any adverts or support slots having promised us new equipment and tours of Japan etc. For the recording they sent us to someone that was so clueless about how to record a complex metal band such as ourselves, it defies belief. When you're new to it all you have no choice but to trust those you work with. In this case we got let down. A different engineer confirmed he had done things badly in the recording. We should have been given a fair introduction to the public. As every band does, we learnt that you can only rely on things never going smoothly!"

Metal Maidens: You're still a relatively new name for a lot of people outside the U.K., what makes you different from all the other "new" metal bands?

Laura: "We like to put on a good live show and we like to be visually appealing as well as musically. I love playing live soaking up the volume and energy. Our riffs are often complex and we go through texture and time changes in our songs. For lots of bands, musical ability seems to be way down the list of qualifying factors. Image seems to be more important. I love having a strong image on stage, but as musicians we hold our own and we're just doing what we want to do. I think that’s quite different."

Read the entire interview at this location.

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