Heartland

Hey folks, some shameless self promotion.

I had the chance to sit and talk with Ben when he came to Saarbrücken for the Nathan Gray tour in February 2020, a month before the then scheduled Sisters gig. I've been working for a local magazine called popscene on and off since 2009, and being the local Sisters guru, it was my job to do the interview. That job was a pleasure, obviously. When the tour got cancelled, we mutually agreed to launch this when the gigs would actually happen.

So, if you can read German, here's quite a long read about Ben's musical history, his infamous casting for The Sisters and the (then new) developments in 2019. You gossip mongers will already know most of that stuff, but hey, it's mine, and now it's yours.

https://plus.popscene.club/popscene_plu ... s_of_mercy

Hey, that's a nice interview with quite some more info than what we already know
and it gives a pretty insight into how The Sisters are working these days. Lovely ... ... Thank you.

Very good interview, really! Thanks a lot Some more details about the "recruitment" than I remember having read before.

Did you meet him last night as well? IMO there has been a big change in sound and setlist even from the time of the interview, would be interesting to hear him (or someone else) talk about that.

Very glad you like it! That's one of the cool things about Ben, you'll never get a cookie cutter response from him. I knew the casting story before, but he'll always come up with new details.
I had been planning to do kind of a little update with him, but that fell flat because he was busy before the tour started. Met him briefly last night but been too busy telling him how much I loved the show, so I didn't ask him that much.

An excerpt translated by DeepL:

INTERVIEWER: You already mentioned Dave Creffielt a.k.a. "Ravey Davey", and the new official band photo features four guys instead of three. Dave has been live on stage for years as "nanny" for Doctor Avalanche, but who is the mysterious whipper-in anyway and what is his job?

BEN: Looking after the doctor is still the smallest part of his job. Dave is not only a producer who has worked with bands like Embrace and Kaiser Chiefs, but also a jack-of-all-trades. The kind of guy who can fix your amp and your shoes. Our own McGyver! An example: Dylan and I wanted white Gibson Thunderbirds for the stage. Dylan was able to get hold of one, but I could only get the model in dark red. So Dave went and completely rebuilt and repainted the guitar the way I wanted it. The man is priceless, and much more than a button pusher. He’s more of a band member now than he used to be and has been actively working on the new songs. And of course he produces our live tracks for The Doctor, which are sequenced on stage.

Uuh, nice, did you have to correct a lot? I gave a few paragraphs a ride on Google translator and was underwheImed by the result.

DeepL is better than Google in many parts. With both the quality depends very much on the issue.
I wouldn't take anything from either tool unchecked. The above bit is, however, taken almost 1:1 ...
but there's a limit of 5.000 characters for documents and you can't copy and paste the content.