HAMMERFALL Singer Shoots Down EUROVISION SONG CONTEST Rumors

Mark Carras of Rock My Monkey recently conducted an interview with HAMMERFALL singer Joacim Cans. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: There seems to be a much bigger buzz in American for this release ["Threshold"] than any HAMMERFALL release before it. Why do you think that is?

Joacim Cans: I have no idea. Maybe we put so much pressure on the label now that they had to do something (laughs). I don't know. I think that since we are actually here in person doing promotion, I think it's so much easier to create some attention for this release. Since we have a market all over the world, you cannot really be at every place at the same time. So this time around we set off the four or five days to actually come here to meet some people in person, and have a nice bed in the hotel room doing a phoner. And hopefully we've got people who like the new album.

Rock My Monkey: I know that "Natural High" has been chosen as the first single. But I heard that "Dark Wings, Dark Words" was originally your vote for the first single. Is that true, and why is that?

Joacim Cans: That is not true as far as I remember, because I think that song is too long, and is not really single track, in my opinion. That would probably only confuse the fans if you put out that as a first single. But is definitely one of my favorite songs off the album. It is my favorite song off the album. It was never considered being the first single, no.

Rock My Monkey: Okay. On "Natural High", as far as the video goes, who came up with the concept for that? Was that more of the band, or the production company behind the video?

Joacim Cans: We've been working with the same production team since the year 2000. But for this video we decided to try something different, so we got in contact with a production team in Serbia, in Southern Europe. And since the lyrical theme of the song is about getting high in a natural way, talking about vampires of course, drinking blood, we told them that we wanted to have a story that was going hand in hand with the lyrical concept, so of course we want to have some vampires in there. We also want to have something more like short movie, and we told them that we could make it inspired by "Blade". From this, they came up with the concept of the song. Of course, every time you do a concept in a video, you don't really get it when you see it, because it's too short. Like three and a half minutes, and you want to tell a story, that is impossible if you don't read the lyrics.

Rock My Monkey: There's also been talk of HAMMERFALL possibly being involved in the Eurovision Song Contest [see previous BLABBERMOUTH.NET story at this location]. How much truth is there to that, and why get involved with that so late in the band's career?

Joacim Cans: Thing is that this is something they wrote in some Swedish newspapers one or two weeks ago. They were claiming that HAMMERFALL or EUROPE would be in the Eurovision Song Contest. They got this joker, what they call the joker position, that we don't need to qualify. We will be more or less in the finals directly. And that we have been having discussions with the national television in Sweden for a couple of years, and this is not true. We have not had any discussions whatsoever in regards to this. So I sent letters to the newspaper denying everything. I said, no, this is not true. We were approached by a label guy who said, "hey, you should be in the contest." And we said no. First of all, we do not want to perform any other person's song. And we don't see this as something that would benefit the band. Probably the other way around.

Rock My Monkey: Right.

Joacim Cans: So there were no talks whatsoever to be part of this. No.

Rock My Monkey: Cool.

Joacim Cans: But of course they turn this around, and the next day in the newspaper said, "HAMMERFALL just said that they're turning down the offer," blah, blah, blah. We didn't turn down the offer. We never got the offer.

Read the entire interview at www.rockmymonkey.com.