home back to interviews	THE RELEASES Clive Interview – September 2002
	Contagion has been delayed. This happened before. Delays don’t ‘just happen’, there’s always a story. A conversation with Clive about the release process. Before we can talk about delays, it’s important to know how a release date is set. Is it a wild guess or do you really say ‘well, let’s bring it out in six months’? Well, it’s become a bit of an art for us these days, but when we started we had less than an idea. Generally there are certain periods in a year that are better for releasing albums than others. For example: the very beginning of the year, January/February/March are pretty good. April and May are ok, and at the other side of summer you have a small window in September/October. By the time you get to November/December you don’t want to go selling stuff because it will disappear in the flood of ‘Best Of Britney Spears’ and stuff like that. They don’t put you in the shops at that time of year. So our date is usually based on that, it’s reality. So we sort of pick out a suitable period of time, after that we just pick a date and then we work backwards from that. We need a certain amount of time to do the promotion, we need a certain amount of time to press the CD, to press the promotional albums and thus we work backwards. Then you need some time for the mastering session and we have to record the album. That’s usually how it works.  We also plan a month or two extra in case something goes wrong. Unfortunately in this case things went more unexpectedly in different directions and that’s why we missed our deadlines. Was it the band’s choice to release Contagion in January? We had to. We started talking to the distributors that we work with and they said when we’d finish later we had to delay the release, and once we were at a certain point we realized that we had to wait.  Let’s go back to 1995, to the release of Songs From The Lions Cage. Was there a release date or some schedule for that album? Well, when we worked on Songs From The Lions Cage, initially Mick and I didn’t have a particular plan. You know, in that stage there wasn’t a band really. So the first thing we did was writing. Then we thought ‘when we do this album, let’s bring it out ourselves.’ We didn’t really set a time, but by the time we finished recording we went to some distributors and they said that it was too late to bring it out that year. Actually, Songs From The Lions Cage almost mirrors Contagion. We finished the album at the end of August and by the time we did the calculations based on what we needed to do we were advised to wait and bring it out in February. So we did the same thing, we said ‘OK, we wait, boring though that is, we get the CD’s copied earlier and we promote it the best we can.’ In those days the Internet wasn’t such a problem, so we were all free with that. That’s what we did and it came out in February. I suppose it’s quite frustrating when your album is ready, but you must wait several months before it can be released. Oh, yes, it can be. You get used to waiting anyway, I mean, the normal process of recording an album takes about three months, but to wait six months with Songs From The Lions Cage, yes, that was frustrating. Isn’t it tempting to change parts and bits when you have to wait six months? I don’t find it so. The album’s finished and we’re satisfied with it. Of course there are always things that we can do to changes things or whatever, but it is what we wanted, we make very few compromises in the end and we are happy with it. What's the story behind Pride? In that case we kind of messed up the organisation. I really don’t know if it was delayed. We came up with this plan of basically going on tour immediately after the release. What actually happened – because the release was delayed a little bit and the tour was so close – we ended up going on tour virtually on the day of its release, which is not a good thing to do because we went on tour to support the album but it had only just gone out.  It suffered in terms of sales as a result of that. So now we always try to keep a good few months between the release of an album and the tour. With Pride we could not do anything about it. We were all committed to the tour, everything was so close together, we couldn’t delay the release because then it would have come out after the tour, which is silly. We didn’t have enough time to cancel the tour, like we did this time with Contagion.  After Pride came The Cry… I really don’t remember how that release went. I think we were pretty much on time. But with that one the release date was less important than with a regular studio album. The Cry kind of just appeared on the market, you’re not trying to create the same kind of impact as with a regular studio album. It’s nice to get it but it’s not the main point. So we probably set the date once we finished the product. We didn’t promote it the same way as we did with the regular albums. The Cry was more sort of extra. Then the The Visitor arrived. With The Visitor we had a lot of the elements quite right. I think it was released in April 1998 and the tour was probably in September. So that was the right kind of distance. We finished the recording of the album somewhere in January, so we just had enough time to set the promotion in the right place. We did some good promotion on that. We got the opportunity to do some unplugged gigs. So lot of the elements were right with that album and that really makes a difference. It’s not just the music and the front cover, also the timing makes a difference.  With The Visitor you continued to write music during the recordings, that must have made some difference? Yeah, the recording of The Visitor was really hard work! We were in the studio for about six months. For me that was every day and it really wore me down to pull that album off.  I never enjoyed being in the studio since. Whenever I’m in the studio I just want to go out. I want to be on tour or be writing. I don’t really enjoy recording albums in the same way I did once. Perhaps the suffering paid off because I think the result was very good. But it was a very difficult album to record. For some reason we thought it was interesting to write some excerpts within the studio, which was a silly thing to do because the studio costs a thousand pounds a week and we were in it for about six months, you do the math! I do believe it’s good to records albums in different ways. Now we know the process of recording very well, and that’s a good thing. With our latest album Contagion took us seven months, the longest we did ever take. Not seven months just in the studio, it took seven months to make because of all these problems that arose. That is really the worst experience, just to hang on to the whole thing, trying to push it forward. That was a nightmare! But again, I think the result is very good. Could you enjoy The Visitor when it was released? By the time it was released I was very bored by the whole thing. To be honest, when it had been released it had no real impact on me. I stayed at Mick’s place at that time and one morning Mick says ‘ah, the album comes out today, that’s nice’ and that was it. Because we had done all the work by then. When the album goes out to the distributors, we have already done the promotion, done all the interviews, we have done everything we possibly can. Basically, when an album comes out we just sit there and hope the distributors will re-order. Nothing really happens on a release date. We usually promise ourselves to open up a bottle of Champaign, but we usually don’t in the end. Immortal? was released in 2000. What’s the story behind that album? Funny enough Immortal? was the most working album we ever did. The whole process was well planned and pretty much went according to plan. We allowed ourselves about three months in the studio. We had an excellent time for promotion and an excellent time for mastering, it all just happened according to plan. I don’t think there were any kinds of problems. When I look back on all the Arena releases, I see a studio album every two years and a live album after every two studio albums. Was it planned to bring out a live album after every two studio albums? No, that is really accidental. We didn’t intend to make Welcome To The Stage, that was never a part of the original 5 master plan. We wanted to bring out a live album later. Breakfast In Biarritz was more intended. We actively recorded concerts with the intention to use some stuff for a live album. Welcome To The Stage just happened to be recorded in Canada, that’s how that one turned up.  In the beginning we planned to bring out one big live album after four or five studio albums, so that’s where Breakfast In Biarritz fits in. The others were accidental. It’s tempting from a band’s point of view and also from a record company’s point of view to bring out more live albums, because it’s so hard to sell albums nowadays. It’s harder to make any money, so it’s tempting to just bring stuff out. But it’s dangerous because the quality gets less when you just bring out stuff. We don’t want to do that and we haven’t. I really hope that with Contagion we can release a DVD. It would be nice to bring out a DVD so that you can hear and actually see the concert. It’s exiting that we made a concept album and we’re hoping to take a great stage show out, making it a bit more exiting and trying to make it the biggest thing so far. Maybe we can use some video stuff on tour and, yeah, it really would be nice to do a DVD.  We still have three releases to go. Contagion will come out in January and then we have the two EPs… Contagion will be released on January 27th, Contagious [the first EP – eds.] will be released in time for the tour and the other one later on in the year. We leave the second EP an open ending, because maybe something will come out of the tour and maybe make the EP a bit more interesting. That’s seven years of Arena in a nutshell! By: Maarten Goossensen