home back to interviews	Making Cakes Mick Pointer - December 1999
	On October 11th Arena visited Holland for the first show of The Visitor tour. So we took the opportunity to ask the guys the questions we had been saving for them over the last few months. In the afternoon I sat down in the rock café Stairway To Heaven with the drummer who had a cold caused by the air-conditioning in the tour bus and we talked about the album, the tour and about his supposed perverted side... All over the world The Visitor has been received very well. How does it make you feel? Very happy. That's a fantastic start, of course. Now it's the first day of the tour we're going to get a very good response, hopefully, from the people who do know the music and I hope we're going to be introducing new people to it. We are attracting people who are curious about The Visitor. It's a constant thing that's moving on over time and I would like to think that enough people have heard about it and don't even know the album yet and will enjoy it. It's a growing process. It's very difficult to say how it's going to be when you bring an album out, but I think we did the right thing with this album. So as to your question, yes, I'm happy. Well, I agree, because after I had listened to The Visitor a few times, I started to wonder whether you could ever exceed it with a next album. It sounds great! Well, yes, I always think it's difficult to do another album. But I think you have to approach it in a completely different way. I always understood that you had already planned five Arena albums when you started. Yes, that was a general plan. It didn't mean we were just going to stop after five albums, but we always had the idea of doing a concept album as a third album. I think a concept album is quite hard for the listener. Because it's really intense. Yes, if you brought out a concept album as your first album and you had no fans, people would listen to it and think ‘oh my God, what's this?!’ But it's different if they're aware of what Arena do and they've had a bit of an introduction with the first two albums. I do hope that we never make an album that somebody listens to, it's the first thing they've ever heard of Arena, and they think ‘what the hell is this, what's going on?’ We try very hard not to be retentive, you know. [laughs] Sometimes you have to be more relaxed about it than that. I think we're quite relaxed about it. We took our time. The concept and the lyrics were all written by Clive. What does the concept mean to you? No, the concept wasn't written by Clive. It was actually started by me. We discussed lots of different ideas and it came out of a combination of a lot of ideas. And then there was one Sunday morning when we decided to finalise the complete concept we were going to do. It was like a coat hanger. We were going to start there and hang the coats off that. And the start of that, regarding the guy drowning and having his life flash in front of him within those ten-fifteen seconds from the point of drowning, that came from me. But there's far more to it than that. But Clive did all the lyrics, indeed he did. That's true. Clive told me that the characters on The Visitor are inspired by the members of the band and that you match the priest. Do you agree on that? [Thinks a while] Yes and no. There are certain aspects that priest's got that I don't think are particularly like me. But maybe he [Clive - eds.] sees things in my character that I don't actually see myself. Perhaps he just sees me as a perverted person and that's fine, I don't mind that. He's a friend, I don't mind what he says about me. I know he doesn't mean it. Anyway, it means you can hardly go on stage wearing shorts like you used to, right? Oh, no, I'm wearing shorts tonight, don't worry! We're not dressing up as the characters of The Visitor. You'll see how it works out. For this album the music was written by all the band members except Paul, instead of just you and Clive. Did you like this new way of writing and how did it proceed? >I think it's a natural process that the others want to be involved. I mean, in the past, with the first album, Arena consisted only of me and Clive anyway, so it had to be like that. Then there were all the line up changes from the first album to the second album and it was really just me and Clive again. So it was inevitable that we did that. We always wanted other people to write.  It's more stimulating and creative. Yes, everybody has their own flavour, their own way of doing things. It's a bit like making a cake. You put two kinds of ingredients in and you have one type of cake. You put more ingredients in and you have another kind of cake, you put more ingredients in and you have another cake. And as long as you cook it long enough, it will taste good. Just because you put lots of ingredients in doesn’t mean it's always going to taste good. And it's the same with an album and with writing. Just because there are a lot of people writing doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good. And that's probably the hard bit. So it takes more time as well. Yes, indeed. And we probably had two hours of music, but we got rid of one hour of music for this album. What a waste! Yeah, it was, but we were very ruthless with it. I mean, I think you always know when you listen to a piece of music if it's going to be any good or not. It might be in its simplest form and you think, ah, yeah, that works. Some of the discarded material may be released on a Cage CD? No, I think all the discarded music is going to be the next Arena album. Joking! [laughs] We're going to donate all that music to another poor progressive rock band. Or it's going to be Clive's solo album. [paughs even more] He heard that. [Clive's standing nearby talking to some people - eds.] He's trying to pretend he's listening to them, but he's trying to hear what we're saying at the same time. But I think the fans will be interested in the material you don't use for an album. Yes, but that's like the fans seeing us with our clothes off. You know, it's like seeing us go to the toilet. Ultimately, we live by the music we bring out. And if you start hearing the music that we've written but we didn't want to be out, then it's not what we are. It's a way for us to take a look in Arena’s kitchen. That's very true and I appreciate that some dedicated fans wish to do that, but you can also understand from our point of view that it's like, well, I'm going to bed now and you're going to stand at the end of the bed watching us making love to our wives. There's a door you don't go through. There's a line between Arena and our process of getting to Arena. And I'm sure over the years we'll go back to some of this material and in a different logic you might think, oh, yeah, actually that piece of music will work. You're quite a Rush fan. Do you feel like you've really achieved something now that Hugh Syme, who has done a lot of Rush covers, has done the cover for The Visitor? Well, yeah, that was quite something. I was actually in Canada and I saw Rush play there in the summer. We were talking to Hugh Syme, he was going to do our album, and there was a chance that we were actually going to go backstage and meet the guys in Rush. But at the very last minute they decided they weren't letting anybody in the dressing room, so I never had an opportunity to go and say ‘hi, my name is Mick Pointer’ and just talk to them about Hugh Syme or just some-thing to talk about. Such is life. Hugh Syme has really paid off. The album looks stunning! Well, he's probably one of the best CD artists in the world, I think. It's a very small piece of plastic, isn't it, a CD? When you used to have twelve-inch albums you could always fit the artwork on that. It's not good enough anymore to have a big piece of artwork and then put it into a small frame. It doesn't work right. You really have to think about the concept, about what works on that little piece of plastic and those few pages. And he's done a very good job. It looks really intriguing, because it has no title or text on it. Yes, just down the side. It's not just the front. Every page you turn has something interesting. All the texture, all the colours work throughout the whole thing. It’s a whole with the music, like it should be with a concept album. Exactly, exactly. I personally enjoy it while I'm listening to an album to take a look at the booklet. You can visualise what's going on. It's not fifty percent of the album, but I think it's a huge chunk of the whole thing. Your very first contact with an album is not listening to it, but seeing it. We thought very hard about that and I don't think we've really achieved it in the past. Clive was really relieved when the people inside The Cage liked The Visitor after hearing it for the first time. What does the opinion of the fans mean to you? Well, almost everything. I wouldn't say everything, but almost everything, be-cause ultimately if the people who are very much into Arena like it on hearing it the first time, that's a huge start. We are not expecting everybody to like it and we're not expecting everybody to like it instantly, that's never possible. I'm not immediately expecting to hear ‘it's the best piece of music I have ever heard in my life’, but maybe after six months time when they've had the chance to listen to it on their own, you really get a good response. Clive is always very nervous about playing the music to the fan club. It was rather funny. He was walking around and sighing all the time and he didn't want to join in while we were listening. And when we liked it, he sighed with all his heart: ‘Oh, thank God!!’. Oh, yeah, he does that all the time. That's good, because it's desperately important to al of us. It's like showing your new baby to your fans, like ‘look at my baby’. A while ago, Arena played the Bospop festival (Holland). How was it to play on such a festival? That was great! That was a really fantastic gig! It was probably one of the most enjoyable gigs I've ever done. I've probably done more enjoyable gigs, but what I really liked about this gig was that it was daylight, it was raining, it was open air, no lights, it was just the five of us and our instruments and the people were loving it. And we were loving it! I think we played reasonably well. We hadn't played together for a long time and it was a quite short set, but we got across to a lot of people there. I think, in fact, that we're going to try to concentrate on festivals for the summer, because I think a festival stage is a good stage for Arena. At a festival you get just the band in its raw state, it's just five people, no lights, nothing and that's great, I like that. Tonight it's the first time you're going to perform The Visitor live. Are you excited? I'm nervous, really. Probably the longest gig I've ever done is going to be tonight. A lot of work has been going into this and just remembering it is bad enough, let alone performing it correctly. It's okay when you do it in parts, but doing it in its entirety is another thing. We're also nervous that we're starting off with The Visitor in its entirety.  I love tracks we've done in the past, like we opened up with Valley Of The Kings or something, which is really a good track to ease up a little bit, get used to the music, and after ten minutes you've had a good workout, you're feeling okay and all around you sound okay. It's always different when you get on stage. It never sounds like the sound-check. And if there are any problems, like I'm not hearing somebody or something, it's not an easy album to start with. You're always a bit in the lap of the gods, of course. Hopefully we do have enough experience to get through these kinds of problems. And well, it is the first time. Is it special to you that The Visitor's live debut takes place in Holland? Yes, we've deliberately made the choice of coming here for the first gig. We always knew we were going to start and finish the European leg of the tour in Holland. This tour will be quite different compared to the Welcome To The Cage Tour. It will be more of a show and the two John’s will be playing more instruments to make things work. What are your expectations? Yes, you'll see a couple of changes. What it generally means is that more things can go wrong. Hopefully it will work out correctly. Is there anything you'd like to add? This is exclusively for The Cage? I would like to thank everybody for buying the album and for coming tonight, well, I hope you're all coming tonight, and if you're not you should be. But, thanks anyway and if you don't come tonight, see you at the Paradiso! By: Erik Beers