Interview with BALZAC

On the 4th of April, we entered Kofferfabrik, a rather small but cozy location in the middle of Fürth, Germany. While BALZAC did their sound check, we were led to Matthias bureau, where it wasn't as loud as beside the stage or back in the dressing room. We made ourselves comfortable and soon Hirosuke, BALZAC's vocalist, arrived with a member of their management and Ryan, the translator.

First of all: welcome back to Germany! You haven’t been here for a long time so we’re happy to see you playing a show here again. What has been your impressions of your recent lives over here, also with MUCC? How do you feel, returning after nearly two years?
Hirosuke: We’re always happy to come back to Germany and we had a really good time on the coupling tour with MUCC. We played a lot of great shows and the crowd was pretty good.

Your show in Berlin was really great! So, where did the idea for the coupling tour come from? How did you meet MUCC and who asked who?
Hirosuke: It’s actually been a while since we first got together in Japan. It had been at a big festival where we played together and we became friends at that time. We started talking a lot and we like MUCC’s music, and they had been fans of BALZAC. Although we’re usually labelled as a “horror punk band” and not a visual-kei band, which MUCC is, we both don’t really care what genres we’re part of. We just like good music and that’s how we first came together. In 2005, we did a coupling tour in Japan and the title we used for our tour in Germany was the same we used back then. There’s often times in Japan too, when MUCC’s playing and they ask BALZAC to come and play as well. We’ve often done events together.

There had been another collaboration with Bela B. (Die Ärzte). You also seem to have a long history together. BALZAC, for example, had once been the opening act for Die Ärzte and Bela is wearing clothes from your Shocker brand. Could you tell us more about your friendship and how it came to be that you created a single together?
Hirosuke: It actually started when we came for a tour in Germany in 2004.... I think it was in Cologne. Bela came to that show and we found out that he had been a BALZAC fan for a few years already. We talked to him when he came backstage but at that time, we didn't realize that he was a huge rock star in Germany. We just said “It’s cool, this guy here is another fan of ours”. We just realized afterwards how much of a big star he is.
Since that time, too, our Shocker brand from Japan had started selling in Germany as well through Shocker Europe. The guy who runs it is a good friend of mine and he’s a good friend of Bela, so this relationship was kind of created through him. We were always talking together, all three of us, that it might be cool in the future to put out something together. We’re musicians, Bela is a musician – let’s do something together. So the idea had been there for a long time, but it just finally happened recently. It was good timing for us to have that on this tour. That’s where that relationship came from. And he’s always wearing Shocker stuff because he likes BALZAC as well.

Have you been in studio together?
Hirosuke: Bela recorded everything in Berlin but since we were in Japan, we weren’t together.

How did you like the outcome of the single? Bela’s style is really, really different from BALZAC’s.
Hirosuke: When we first heard it, we were so happy that he could take something that we had written and arrange it in a totally different way and have it turn out that great. We were just extremely happy with the way that turned out and what he did with our song.

Back to the Shocker label, how did you decide to create it? You take care of your visuals a lot and you seem to have fun doing so and also create merchandise, etc. What plans do you have with it now?
Hirosuke: I think that a band’s merchandise is important. The things we wore onstage were always desired by our fans in Japan, so we thought that we should start making things as well. In 2000 we opened a store called “Shocker” in Osaka. We officially started selling BALZAC band merchandise and at that time, I also founded the Shocker brand together with Akio, our bass player. Our staff and our friends who were helping us with band things before also started working at the store. I started my own brand, “Dementia 13”, back then, too. We sell a lot of Japanese style jackets and really nice shirts made of kimono fabric. Recently, we founded a fourth brand called “Culture” which is a little bit more expensive and high quality.
It’s been 13 months since we started Shocker Europe on Hamburg. A friend of ours, a guy called Armin, runs it. He sells not only BALZAC and Shocker merchandise and Dementia 13 and Culture things but also merchandise for MUCC and Merry. So there’s also visual-kei merchandise being sold.

You’re also doing a special show for that, aren’t you?
Ryan: Yeah, we’re celebrating our 13 month anniversary. So it worked out really well for this tour.

BALZAC doesn’t only have merchandise but also a lot of special releases and demos that're sold in various countries. Was that all planned and what're your views on it?
Hirosuke: To be honest, when we started BALZAC we didn’t want to make things limited, but we didn’t have enough money so we had no other choice but to limit our CDs. Then after we started getting popular, we could afford more and we had regular releases. But there are always the crazy fans who have been there from the beginning or people who're really into collecting things. They always want something special and I know that feeling since I'm a record collector myself, so we always try to make a special limited edition with a special CD jacket or cover or that comes with an extra. I think a lot of bands want to do that but not many actually do, so I’m proud that we really do have so many limited things. They’re sometimes really expensive and hard to find.

You also have a side-project called Zodiac. What can you tell us about that?
Hirosuke: Yeah, we do. A funny story that goes along with that is, that when we decided to release that The Deranged Mad Zombie CD, we made all the packaging so that it had nothing to do with BALZAC. We didn’t write our names, we didn’t write anything about BALZAC on there and when the record was free to order, people barely ordered anything because they didn’t know who the band was. There was like 15 copies or something. On the day of the release, a few people figured out that this was us, it was our sound, and after that all of our fans went crazy, trying to get the release, but no record stores had it. So they started getting really angry about it – afterwards they laughed about it because they knew they could get it later, but no one knew about that. So it was kind of fun for us to do, because we could control how everything was happening.

Are there any further plans for Zodiac, concerning concerts or releases, including perhaps some over here?
Hirosuke: We actually don’t have any plans right now to play more Zodiac shows in Japan or release more Zodiac stuff, but the album that was just released here under the BALZAC name through GanShin records was a Zodiac release in Japan. So those songs were Zodiac releases, we just did it under the BALZAC name because it just doesn’t make sense to use the other name here. And this night and at every show we do on this tour, we play Zodiac songs as well, so it’s a kind of rare performance, I guess, because we’re used to just do that in Japan and that’s finished now. If another opportunity comes up and we feel that we want to do it, we’ll release another album and play some more shows.

What are your plans with BALZAC at the moment? You have this European release but are you recording another album as well?
Hirosuke: After the tour here, we’ll be back in Japan and do another tour there. Probably after that, we’ll start recording again.

Back to concerts, are you planning on playing live in other European countries and the US this year or maybe next year?
Hirosuke: Sometime this year we plan on going to support the album that’s going to be released in the US, so maybe in the fall. There are no concrete plans yet, but it’s in discussions already and it’s probably going to happen. Right now, we’re in the middle of our European tour, but as soon as we release something else here again, which probably won’t be too long, the fans might want to see us play live again. As long as the fans here want us, we'll be returning to Europe for sure.

About your musical tastes and looking at it over the years, what changed? What are the bands you liked in the beginning and what would you recommend now?
Hirosuke: I still listen to the bands that I listened to back then. I’m a huge fan of rock music and my number one favourite band is probably The Beatles. I really loved them many years ago, but I’m a huge collector of their stuff now as well. So my like for them has probably grown over the years as well. And with regards to punk bands that I still listen to - they were like the Sex Pistols or the Misfits or, you know, all those bands that were popular. I still listen to them now, of course. In the US we’re on the Misfits Records, so we’re on the same label together and we play a lot of shows together. I’m happy that the bands that I looked up to for many years… that I’m friends with them now and we play together. I like the music from the 50s and 60s but I’m also into a lot of bands that are just recently getting popular.

Please give a message to your fans and those newer listeners who've come to your shows.
Hirosuke: We’ve met a lot of new fans on this tour because of the promotion from our new label. The fans that had gotten to know us through G-Force Records, which we used to release from, a lot of those fans are still coming to the shows and we were happy about that. We’re also hoping that the next time we come back, that there’ll be a lot of new fans as well that come to see us. We just want them all to come out and have a good time at our shows.

Thank you very much for this great interview!

Afterwards we still had time left and continued to talk apart from the interview. We were happy to find out that BALZAC also like BUCK-TICK as well as Hisashi Imai seems to be a fan of BALZAC, asking them to contribute to the Cover Parade album released back in 2005. Of course, the topics also included the current visual kei and Japanese music fan scene in general over here but the rumours about the X Japan reunion were also brought up. Altogether it had been a great conversation and we’re really happy that this was made possible.

Many thanks go out to Ryan Moldenhauer, Matthias, Steffen Wiedemann, GanShin and, of course, BALZAC!