Ahead of the release of their new live album, An Acoustic Night At The Theatre, Planet Loud caught up with Sharon from Within Temptation.
Planet Loud – Hi, thanks for your time. New live album ‘An Acoustic Night at The Theatre’ is released a little later this year… How did you find the acoustic tour from which it was recorded? It must have been worlds apart from, for example, the recording of ‘Black Symphony?’
Within Temptation – Yeah, absolutely right, it couldn’t be more different from ‘Black Symphony’, the show also because ‘Black Symphony’ was big fireworks, big sound, with Street theatre, an Orchestra, a choir, everything… and there were 10,000 people at that show. With the theatre shows there were sometimes 500 people, sometime 1500 people, and we stripped down all the songs to the bone, and rearranged them again. We had a lot of 3D holograms on stage, so it was a very dark show… I don’t mean like, ‘dark’ dark, but that there was not much light, so it was very atmospheric, but a lot of things you saw were not real because they were projected. That really suited us in a way; it was Within Temptation with the same ingredients, but more intimate.
Planet Loud – Did it take a lot of preparation to arrange the acoustic sets; in the configuration of the songs, and your approach to performing in a more intimate setting?
Within Temptation – Yeah, we had to rearrange it all again. It was also nice to do it, because then you surprise people in a way, and because of the fact that we’ve been playing these songs for such a long time already. We’ve been together for about 15 years together now, and eventually you have to change a little bit. It was a new interpretation of the new songs.
Planet Loud – Were there any songs that stood out as working especially well acoustically?
Within Temptation – There were a few songs that really surprised me; one of them was ‘Frozen.’ ‘Frozen’ surprised me with ‘Black Symphony’ because the song’s not one of my favourites, it’s not that I don’t like it but… But with ‘Black Symphony’, playing with this orchestra I was like, ‘My God… It become almost like this fifties song. With the theatre show the arrangement was so different that it became like this Massive Attack kind of feeling, it was very different again, and still the song stood strong, with a lot of instruments or almost without anything, you know? It was pretty cool.
Planet Loud – The album also features a new song, ‘Utopia.’ Could you explain a little about the track, and how UK singer/songwriter Chris Jones came to be involved?
Within Temptation – Well ‘Utopia’ was a song that was actually not meant to be on a Within Temptation record actually… We would never put it on a studio album because it’s so different from what we normally do, but this is an acoustic album, and the song is mostly acoustic. Well, acoustic with an orchestra underneath! So we put it on this album. Daniel, who is one of the Co-writers that we work with showed us… we were totally surprised, like is that really a Within Temptation song? And then Robert came in and said ‘ah, you can make it Within Temptation, we’ll have to change it a little bit but it’s a great song and we should use it, the fans will probably like it’ and especially for this album as it’s an acoustic one, it should work really well actually. And I met Chris Jones through a side project that I did… well it’s not my side project, there’s this Trance DJ called Armin Van Buuren, he’s a number one DJ. I wrote a song with him called ‘In and Out of Love’, then I asked him if he had any other musicians working with him… he said ‘yeah I’ve got this Guy, Chris Jones’, and I thought he was American because of his name… ‘Chris Jones,’ you know? But no, he’s a guy from Liverpool, he’s now living in Edinburgh by the way, but that’s a small detail. He just blew me away with his voice, I just thought ‘my god who is this?’ But ‘this is Chris Jones, it’s going to be the first single,’ wow. And then I met him, we had an immediate good click, so we started writing songs for him… that’s something we’re doing now and we have recorded some songs. We were like maybe he could sing on our new single, as his voice would sound really great on Utopia, and that’s how it came about.
Planet Loud – The video for ‘Utopia’ has received an astonishing number of plays on youtube in a matter of a few days… How did the video shoot go? Do you generally enjoy filming music videos, or are they more of a necessary evil?
Within Temptation – Yeah for me it is, because I’m always having the biggest part of it… everybody’s having a great time at the side and having fun, and I’m like play-backing my song, and acting and stuff! Though I must say that I don’t mind it as I’m always happy with the end result, so if that’s happening it’s nice. It’s the same with photoshoots, but photoshoots are even worse I think, but it’s a part of the whole picture of course. I’m always glad when it’s finished, I can really enjoy videos, I do like them, it’s more the making of it that always takes hours.
Planet Loud – Are there any plans to play these kinds of acoustic shows internationally in the future?
Within Temptation – Not at this point, because we’re going to do this tour again; we’re going to do another 18 shows in Holland and Belgium. The reason that we don’t really do it outside of Holland is that it’s already very uncommon for us to do it in theatres in Holland, and it was difficult to find theatres outside of Holland to do a similar kind of thing because they’re not really used to having bands like us… they do have this bombastic picture in mind, and it’s very difficult to tell them that’s not what we’re going to do now, we’re going to do something different. They didn’t see that immediate connection. But on the other hand it was also the fact that it was taking even more away from the studio album also, so we’re just focusing on Holland and Belgium. Unfortunately if people want to see it from outside of Holland and Belgium then they might have to fly in of course. With the previous tour that we did we saw a lot of English people, Americans, and there was even a group from Australia that saw about four shows in a row, which was really nice.
Planet Loud – Ah that kind of leads into the next question that I was going to ask… could you give us an idea of what to expect from Within Temptation over the next couple of years? Is a new studio album in the works?
Within Temptation – Well we want to release it next year, we’re aiming for that, don’t pin us down on that (laughs.) It’s difficult to say because it’s always like we don’t release an album until we’re totally satisfied with it, that’s always been the case, we always take our time. That’s one of the biggest complaints that our fans always have, like ‘it took four years’ (laughs.)
Planet Loud – I suppose if you release it and there’s something that you don’t like it’s like ‘oh no, why couldn’t we have changed that…’
Within Temptation – And also you have to play it for almost two years, playing it every night, you’re going to be really hating yourself for it!
Planet Loud – (laughs.) Over the last few years as a band your popularity has been steadily growing with every album, culminating in some spectacular live shows and a cinematic, expansive to your albums. Could you see the new album continuing in that vein, or incorporating different elements, perhaps things that you might have picked up from playing acoustically?
Within Temptation – With the next album, it’s going to be more organic I think. The total opposite from organic was ‘The Silent force…’ ‘The Silent Force’ was a really clean album, everything was perfect, while we already went with ‘The Heart Of Everything’ to this more organic sound, which we’re going to do even more I think. Again the sense that we have in mind in a way is ‘less is more.’ So using the orchestra in certain places, but sometimes for a few songs not even have an orchestra, jut really rock and metal, more heavy in a way, more direct. And no slick things, no loops… we’ve done it. Done that, been there, never going to do it again (laughs.) We did like it at the time, but we’ve grown over it.
Planet Loud – So, as you said, Within Temptation have been together for around fifteen years now… casting your mind back are there any moments that stand out as particularly profound or significant, relating to the band’s development or otherwise?
Within Temptation – Yeah, I think that the big change that came for us was when we were just a hobby band of course, when we started, we were just students having fun and making music, the thing that we liked. We recorded ‘Mother Earth,’ and then nothing happened for a whole year with the album, nobody wanted to touch it really, radio didn’t want to do anything, and television, nobody except the fans. Eventually the fans… they were the key, the ones that made us more mainstream, brought us to a bigger audience. Because of the fact that they were supporting us… we didn’t ask them to do it, they just did it by themselves, that’s the nice part of the story that we didn’t do anything to get ourselves where we are, it was purely the fans. They started to call radio stations by themselves, started forming groups on the internet, like ‘we have to call this person, and call them until they finally play us.’ Radio didn’t do that, but there was this television station called ‘The Box, and they just surrendered! A lot of people saw the video… on the box you can select on a regional basis; in every region they have ‘The Box’ with a certain selection, twelve different regions. You could see our video at different times in different regions, so people would call and pay 99 cents, say ‘I want to see the Within Temptation video’ and within ten minutes your video is being played. Well within two weeks we were number two. And then it just seemed to grow over to Europe and different countries more or less. That’s probably the most special, not because we became known to a more mainstream audience but because our fans did that, that’s special I think.
Planet Loud – wow… Finally, is there anything message that you’d like to give Within Temptation fans that might be reading this?
Within Temptation – Ah, well we’re hoping to be back soon in England of course, I’m getting a taste of it again, I love being here. Especially the last shows that we did, one with Iron Maiden and the other at Download, they were both really really cool.
Interview by Rob Sayce
