PW: Hi there congratulations on the cracking new album. I do not want to dwell too much in the past but there are a few things that I really wanted to ask.

Firstly I always wondered about the name Holy Moses itself. It kind of strikes like the sort of thing Robin might have said to Batman and I’m sure it has no frank religious connotations. Can you shed some light onto the origins of the name please?

Sabina: First of all, many thanks in supporting Holy Moses for so long and here is one thing, I came into the band in 1981, but they existed since 1980 and they already had the name Holy Moses. I did not get the idea in the first years, to ask why they chose the name Holy Moses. Holy Moses was just Holy Moses. You are right, it has nothing do with religious things….It’s more like “oh my god”, because since from the beginning, the band was loud and chaotic, hahahahahaha

PW: Another thing I wondered about with all your years of experience within the music business are what aspects of it you particularly liked and disliked?

Sabina: First I have to say, that I love being on stage, growling and having fun. I need to be on stage, because I can put out all my aggressions. It makes me feel free, because in my private life I am a real introspective person, and it’s hard for me, to talk about my inner feelings. But in my lyrics and in my stage performance I can put out the other person, what is in my soul and mind. I can work here with my instinctive nature, the spiritual lands…..Holy Moses is a method I am able to recover the ways of natural instinctive psyche and through its personification in the wild women archetype. I am able to discern the ways and means of woman’s deepest nature and what I disliked….it’s the kind of business around a band, with record labels, money, distribution and all this fuckin shit.

PW: Holy Moses were one of the first bands playing Teutonic thrash metal. Although you are an institution over in Germany, here all everybody seems to mention are the likes of Destruction, Kreator and Sodom. Do you think that perhaps you do not at times get the attention you deserve?

Sabina: Looking back through all the times, I have to say yes. I know we have a strong fan base, and our fans are really great. They are telling me, that they wanna help us. We got in the last year a lot of attention with the new album and all the people told us, that we are the most underrated band in the specific genre. I do not have an idea, why we never got the same attention like the other German thrash bands, but on the other side, I am not feeling so bad with it, because we love what we are doing, and it’s a great feeling, that the fans around us, are deep with us.

PW: I guess it is also fair to say that you were one of the first women of note getting a name at singing such an aggressive form of music. Thankfully this has now changed but still I think many would look on you as a bit of a role model. What advice would you give anyone wanting to follow in your footsteps and have you found being a woman being problematic in any way (i.e. with the business side of things) in your career?

Sabina: Alright, this is a real hard question and I could write a really long answer to it. I try to make it short. The first important thing is, not following in my footsteps because each single human being has their own inner feelings and soul. So you have to find out, your own meaning of life for your life first. Creating your own methods of life and follow this. It will bring you to your own oracle “being what you are”. As for being a women in the business side of things in my career I also could write a lot of aspects from different views on things. I will answer it short in one sentence “It’s like dancing with the devil”.

PW: Speaking of the business side of things you are back with a subsidiary of SPV, Wacken Records after a stint with Century Media. How is this going for you? I have to admit after catching the group at Wacken Open Air you are the epitome of what the festival is all about so it strikes as an obvious choice?

Sabina: As a band you are always hoping that the next label will work really hard for you. Since the ‘Strength Power Will Passion’ album, we are working with the Wacken label. Before it was under the name of Armageddon Music, because of the Armageddon Over Wacken DVD releases. With the new distribution company SPV they changed into the name Wacken Records. They released with us all the old albums as re-releases – and the festival Wacken – yeah, I am into this festival since the 2nd festival, I only missed the first one, and I could see the festival rising. During the hard times in the scene right now, I hope we have a label which is behind us, and helps us also to rise. But I think in the end, fans & media is the most important fact behind an artist.

PW: Since ‘Strength, Power, Will, Passion’ (2005) there have been some new recruits to the Holy Moses army with drummer Atomic Steiff rejoining in 2007 and bassist Thomas Neitsch a lot more recently. What strengths would you say the new members have brought to the band and how difficult was it finding the right people to fit in?

Sabina: This is a great question, and I can say, that it was important that these new members know their own inner person. The strength of these people are, that they know why they want to make music and that they know why they want to play with Holy Moses. It was not easy through all the years, to find people with such an inner strength and I can’t tell you how happy I am, that I got the chance to work with them. I hope that they will not lose it and we can go on together and prepare the new album in the future again together.

PW: Onto ‘Agony Of Death’ I was wondering in general if it was mainly Michael Hankel responsible for the musical construction and you the lyrical input and if this was the case here?

Sabina: I think we did it all together. Michael is the producer and the one who has been in the band for the longest time with me. He knows me very well and he is able to transport my kind of feeling to the others in the band. So I will say that we worked it all out with the whole band. Each of the members put his kind of personal feeling into the whole production and writing of the songs. The lyrical input is always coming from my side but Michael always helps me to bring it together into the song structures – also Olli – our second guitar player worked with the melody lines with me and Michael.

PW: Obviously the remarkable thing here is the instrumental passages that act as between song bridges. I mentioned in my review that they reminded me a lot of futuristic film scores Terminator, Alien and Blade Runner. Was this the sort of idea that you were looking for with them?

Sabina: Like you already mentioned in your question, you are right interpreting our feelings. I like to explain it like that: in a movie you are working with music, if you want to describe a specific situation, what you want to transport not with words. In music, you also get the chance to work with instrumental parts if you want to work like a bridge to the next real intensive song. So with the instrumental passages, we gave the listeners some time to go deep into the whole feeling of the songs, before the next aggressive and unnatural rhythms is punching into your soul.

PW: I believe Axel Rudi Pell’s Ferdy Doernberg contributed strongly to these parts?

Sabina: Yeah, this is right. Yesterday I was meeting in Hamburg Axel Rudi and Ferdy, because they are on tour right now. Ferdy did really great work and he is a really great person. He has been a Holy Moses fan for a long time and he was a person who understood directly my kind of feeling and exploration about the feeling I wanted to bring out with the instrumental parts. Also him and Michael were finding a great base to work together in the studio. So Ferdy went with us on stage for bigger events like Wacken Open Air or the 25th anniversary show of Doro Pesch, so we would do the instrumental parts live on stage during the songs. A great new experience for us to work with that on stage.

PW: Was it the bands or the record company’s idea to release a version of the album without the instrumental passages? Did you think that they might (ahem) alienate some of the old thrashtodeath fans who would want to hear the songs in the more compact form?

Sabina: Yes, you are totally right. I see it like that and it was a wish for us, to have this different version. I am not a dictator, and I think not everybody would get into the same moves and feeling that we did. So fans who can’t work with instrumental parts and this kind of disorders can choose the jewel case version.

PW: I was wondering if there was perhaps any concept behind the album; the song titles suggest that this is about split personalities and mental disorders. I noticed in your biography that you mention “Around 1999, I was ill, both physical and mentally, but my music kept me alive.” Is this album one that is conceptually going beneath the surface perhaps, or is just something that you find fascinating on a less personal level?

Sabina: It’s a great feeling for me, that you are looking so deep into the work of ours and you are again right in both ways. I think life is really hard work, and I could see this also with a lot of friends and people around us. It touched my life also, but I had enough inner energy with the help of my music and art of writing and painting, so I could manage it. But also I could see the Agony of Death around me. So it was fascinating to go deeper into all these matters. I analysed myself and I started to study psychic. The psyche is the most mystical part in our body. It was since my childhood something I was interested in. Now it’s a part of my business next to music.

PW: The fantastic cover art pretty much accentuates these themes (unless I am reading too much between the lines here). Who was responsible for this and how closely did you work with them in getting the artwork realised?

Sabina: It’s touching me right now real deep, that you are reading so much between the lines. It’s one of the first interviews I do now during the promotion of the new album, with somebody who is so deep into it. I want to thank you that you are reading so much between the lines. It’s a pleasure for me. The cover artwork is done by Kai Swillus. He is a good friend of ours and he understood me very fast, when I gave to him the songs and lyrics and my inner concept. We work really close together. He got each part of the songs, when something was ready, also same with the lyrics. So we worked hand in hand, from the beginning, when we started to write the material. I talked with him about my future visions, the story and my kind of vision about the past, the mental disorders…..and important the strength, power, will, passion of the wolf women in the agony of death.

PW: You had a fair few special guests on the album, in fact I bet they were lining up. I have to admit the power metal sounding high notes of Metalium singer Henning Basse really took me by surprise but worked really well. Who came up with such an unexpected accompaniment?

Sabina: The first started up during our tour with Obituary in January 2008 on our European tour. We did this tour during our studio sessions for the new album and we recorded parts of the album backstage, when we got new ideas. During these sessions on tour, the guys of Obituary wanted to do some of solo parts. Specially Ralph Santolla is a very great person with a lot of inner feeling and we had really great talks about his and my visions about life. So it was fitting really great together that he played on the album some parts, which caught him really in his soul. And with Henning Basse – yeah he is a great friend of mine – and during the time I was writing the title Schizophrenia, and I wanted to bring this with different voices into the song, to explain the lyrical way and I think it was the best way, not to use one of my female friends in the scene … so it is now really schizophrenia….

PW: Are there any other artists you would like to collaborate with in the future perhaps; who would be on your dream list?

Sabina: I need always to meet the artist first. I like to get into their inner dreams. So will see in the future, which interesting persons I will meet and I hope for the new album that I will meet them….

PW: What have the press been like in relation to the album. I was intrigued if any had simply not got the idea of the instrumental interludes which the promos went out with?

Sabina: Yes, you are again right, not everybody got the idea about and the reason for the instrumental interludes…..but people with deeper views understood the concept behind it. We also got a lot of great reactions of fans and we could see it, the version with the instrumental interludes in digipack format is sold out.

PW: The album unfortunately leaked on to torrent sites for downloading a month before for release. What is your viewpoint on this?

Sabina: It is a huge problem for us if the fans are not buying the album. I think it’s fine for promotion, if people buy the album later but a month before release is always really bad, because it takes the mystique out of an album. I think it is not fair from press people, who are getting the promotion copy for free, to put the album on download sites before the release. I can’t understand that. What is the reason behind that….I really like to meet one day people who are doing that, and talk with them. I know, we are losing a lot of sales because of that. On one torrent download link we could see, that the album was downloaded more than 60,000 times. For a band like us, it’s really hard if the people only take this free mp3 instead of buying the album…

PW: Afraid there is no escaping the next question but 18 years WTF! How come it took so long for a return to England? I think the audience did you proud on the Obituary support it was a charged performance by both band and crowd. When can we expect you back, I notice it’s not happening on the tour with Benediction you are just heading out on?

Sabina: we never got offers from England and it was so great to be on tour with Obituary to get the chance to play in England. It was wonderful and I am really happy to tell you, that we are coming back to England to play a festival at the end of September. I hope more shows in England will follow soon.

PW: How do you keep yourself occupied with all the travel and I also noticed on your biog that you are a vegetarian, do you find this problematic ever in certain countries?

Sabina: I try to live healthy, doing sports, I am reading a lot and find my inner concentration. I am working with hypnotics and stress reduction systems. I try to do not so much partying during a tour and being fast into the nightliner after the show. As a vegetarian on tour, it’s not easy, but we have a nice tour rider explaining to the people what is healthy to eat and I can say, most of the promoters are great to us and taking care of it.

PW: Well that’s about it, many thanks for years of great music and feel free to leave a parting shot, just don’t go forgetting us out here in the UK.

Sabina: Thanks so much for the great interview. Thanks for supporting us for such a long time and I want to give a huge greetz to all our fans in the UK and I want to say THANKS to all of you and I can’t wait to be back in UK. See you soon!!!

For more on the band check out www.holymoses.net
http://www.myspace.com/holymosesgermany
http://www.armageddonmusic.de

Interviewed by Pete Woods

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