WOLF HOFFMANN: ACCEPT Has Proven Naysayers Wrong With Latest Comeback

On November 13, guitarist Wolf Hoffmann of reformed heavy metal legends ACCEPT was interviewed backstage before the band's first-ever joint concert with SCORPIONS in Helsinki, Finland. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow.

On ACCEPT's most recent "comeback," which began with 2010's "Blood Of The Nations":

Wolf: "When we started doing [reactivating the band] this three or four years ago, nobody had any idea if this would go anywhere — if it would die tomorrow. We just knew we wanted to play music again, and we found [singer] Mark [Tornillo], and we thought, 'Here's a chance for us to do what we love to do, and we'll just see what happens.' … We just wanted to play, basically, and we just put it out there and the fans liked it. I mean, we worked really hard — it's not like it happened overnight. We really had to build the whole machinery back up again. When we started, we had no record deal, we had no… I mean, we were out of the business. We had nothing… We had no crew, we had no video, we had no web site… We just had the idea to get started again."

On new ACCEPT lead singer Mark Tornillo (formerly of TT QUICK):

Wolf: "Mark is a rare find, I think. That's what we noticed when we first met him. We thought, 'Wow, this guy can really sing the old material with ease — he sounds totally comfortable doing it, it's totally his range, but at the same time, he can do it in a way that's not just a copy; he can really put his own twist to it. And any suggestions you throw at him, he can actually perform, so that's a huge plus for us. 'Cause now we can write songs that are a little different — more melodic, more this, more that — and he's got a huge range. That was the magic moment, that we met Mark, during that infamous jam session a few years back. We thought, 'This is too good to be true. We've got to try this. No matter what the world says, no matter what anybody says. We believe in it and we'll give it a go.' Because, as everybody says, it's an uphill battle when you change lead singers, and we experienced that head-on that people said, 'It's not gonna work. [Original ACCEPT singer] Udo [Dirkschneider] is [not there].' But I guess we've proved them wrong."