home back to interviews	THAT DOESN’T SEEM LIKE TEN YEARS AGO Clive Nolan – 16 September 2005
	What is your first reaction on your ten year anniversary? It’s a bloody miracle! Just kidding! It’s nice that we have finally come to this tour and amazing that we have got to ten years! Especially remembering sitting in the pub with Mick saying ‘let’s turn this into a band’, and that doesn’t seem like ten years ago. A lot has happened since then, considering the history of Arena, the line up changes and the albums we made. It’s amazing we have done as much as we have. To summarize: a feeling of satisfaction. What do you consider to be the most important achievement of Arena in the past decade? I think it’s quite an achievement for a band to actually stay together for ten years and to keep going. If you look at what we’ve produced; six studio albums, three live albums, a DVD and a bunch of EP’s. We’ve been quite prolific in a way. That’s a lot of stuff to keep turning out. If you look at most average bands, they come and they go in 2, 3 years, you get a couple of albums and that’s it. So I mean, that in itself is an achievement. Some of the countries we visited, tours we’ve done, every time we got an album we tried to make it bigger and better. I think those are the achievements! Do you have a favourite Arena song written in the past decade? To be honest I have different favourites for different reasons. I will always have a soft spot for Solomon, because it represents one of the first big accepted songs that we did and that people wanted to hear. In terms of the actual songs that I really like, it depends on the day, to be honest, what songs appeal to me. I am enjoying the set of songs that we’re playing at the moment; it’s a nice mixture, a good representation of Arena. There isn’t a song that I don’t like. Do you still feel that you have enough inspiration and spirit to move along another ten years? If you’re a musician, that’s kind of what you do. Music isn’t something that works on any kind of limited lifetime, hopefully not! Music is something we choose to do, so yeah. What do you want to tell us about the latest album, Pepper’s Ghost? Well, it’s our sixth studio album, it is the next logical progression for Arena. There are some sort of new elements on the album as well as the sound that people would find familiar. Some people say it has a heavier edge, I don’t know if it has, but if they think that it’s fine. We do a lot of concept albums, but this is a set of seven songs; each song is self-contained, although there is a kind of a flavour through the whole album of madness and misconception and things like that. There is still a theme but it is not a concept album. Is there still something left to be desired for Arena? I think for any band there is always something left to do, bigger venues, bigger audiences, bigger album sales, whatever your particular kind of wish is. We would like to reach as much people as we can, there is no end to that unless everybody in the world has a copy of our albums and comes to our gigs. Until then we would never stop having an ambition. Besides, that would be an interesting idea: if everybody now owns a copy of your CD, what would you like for your next album ? Will you still be continuing your personal plans and personal projects, like your involvement in Pendragon? Yes, as always. Pendragon just brought out a new album, there will be a tour next year. There are various other projects I’m involved in, we have an active music studio that brings music through there, we take part in that. All sorts of things may happen over the next year or two. What about the current Tenth Anniversary Tour, how is it going? Well, this is the first gig! [Boerderij, Zoetermeer, October 16 2005 –eds.] We have done the festivals, we did gigs in Mexico, Spain, Portugal and America. So far it has been very good. We have been getting the right flavour for the tour. So, yeah, I hope this is going to be a good tour. Can you tell us about the concerts in Mexico? We did four concerts in Mexico, it was quite an experience. We were asked to play out there, the audience is real good though it was chaotic in some way. We did some good gigs. By: René Kaptein