German metal scene is probably my favorite among others. I do love NWOBHM (check out the blog about it), USPM, Bay Area thrash, and basically bands from all over the world, but for some reason heavy, speed, power and thrash metal groups from Germany are closer to my tastes. They are like warriors by vocation — do their best to what they once swore and never disapoint their loyal fans. Paragon have always been in my short list for an interview, and now, when they have released another solid peice of metal called, ahem, "Metalation", I had a pleasure to talk to Jan Bünning about the album, the odds of being in an undeground band, Paragon's upcoming 35th anniversary and some more!
Hello Jan! Congrats with the new album, which is really awesome. So what's your expectation with it? Don't you want to get in the official German charts like many old school bands have done recently?
I think the thing why metal bands get into the charts is because pop and hip-hop artists who are popular among young people doesn’t sell CDs anymore. And sometimes they only do singles and not albums. So it's easier for rock and metal bands like us to get into the charts. But of course, we don't write an album to get into the charts. We write it because we like the music and we want to play heavy metal and we want to please our fans and ourselves. And that was the intention. Our last album, “Controlled Demolition”, was very heavy and very speedy with some thrash riffs and stuff like that. We are inspired by thrash bands like Exodus and Slayer a little bit. But in the end, I think we are a heavy metal band. We have oll types of songs: fast, stompy, doomy songs, ballads, we cover the whole heavy metal genre. And because the previous album was very heavy, this time we thought, “OK, where will we go with the next one”? I spoke with the guys and said, “I think we should maybe do an album with different kinds of songs and a little bit more melodic”. And that's what we did in the end.
I think that it's pretty natural that you have some thrash metal influences, because at the beginning of your career, you played in Erosion, which was a thrash/hardcore band, and Busсhi sang in Minotaur, which was thrash/speed metal band.
I knew Paragon before I joined them, when I in r thrash band which was called Asmodus. So when I saw Paragon the first time, they even covered Slayer’s “South of Heaven”. Back then I knew Martin, who is a founding member of Paragon, but I think we didn't speak at that time, and only later I really got to know him. And by now he's one of my best friends. We are inspired by the old classic bands like Priest, early Maiden, Accept and stuff like that. But we also loved twin guitar attack of Exodus and some stuff of Slayer. And we also were influenced by Candlemass. So we have a wide range of classic bands we are influenced by. It's very funny when I often read reviews where they say, that we sound a little bit like Halloween or Grave Digger or stuff like that. But the point is, these bands are influenced by the same stuff we are influenced by.
By the way, besides these power metal bands like Halloween, Gamma Ray, Mania, Abraxas, Not Fragile your hometown, Hamburg, also has a very big punk rock scene: Slime, Emils, Razzia, Abwaerts. So were you influenced by punk rock, at least at a young age?
I was in the punk scene, you know. The first band I played with in 1983, that was a punk band. I couldn't even play bass at the time, but somebody had to. So I took the bass and tried to play. And by 1985 I was able to play at least a little bit. And then I joined Black Laws, which later became Erosion. Funny that you know Emils. They are not well-known. They are friends of mine. They reunited a few years ago and played some shows. Just recently, they played in Hamburg. So yeah, I was in this punk scene. We played in the harbor, which we also did with Erosion later. But today, you know, I only listen to the old punk like Dead Boys, The Damned or stuff like that. I like more standard punk stuff and some hardcore stuff like Cro-Mags. Martin and his son Jason, who's playing drums for us, they have a band Kneipenterroristen. In the beginning they played covers of Böhse Onkelz but now they have own material and I wrote songs with Martin together for the last album and we'll do so for the next one.
Very impressive! So let's get back to “Metalation”. Why did you decide to give the album this title? Is it a reference to Metal Nation?
That's funny because you are the second guy who said it. But it's not the case. It was the idea of Buschi (Andreas Babuschkin, vocals). When he listened to the songs he said, “Oh man, that sounds like real heavy metal, like the classic stuff”. And he was thinking, “Okay, this needs a metal title”. But everything is already taken, you know, like “Steelhammer” by U.D.O.. It seemed that all titles with steel, metal, everything was already taken. So Buschi did a little bit of research and then he found this word metalation, which means making something metal, to metalize something in the end. It's a chemical process, as far as Buschi told me. At first I was like, “Okaaaa”y, but after a while I was like, “Hey, it's a really good name”. I think at first it was the song, but I said, that it was a really good title for the album.
The cover was really special thing. On the last albums we always had this skull on the cover. And this time I said, “We really need something different”. And the guy who did the cover is Aldo Requena from Hammerblaze. And he already did a cover for us for “Revenge”. But today he's much, much better. He also did the cover for “Controlled Demolition” by the way. So I told him that we needed something different. And then he sent some sketches which were awesome, so we asked him to paint it. The cover looks metal so it's not necessary to connect it with the album title. The cover was really praised, when we released it on Facebook. We had so many people saying, that they need a T-shirt with this artwork and that it is the best cover ever we’ve ever had. So we were happy with it.
And as far as I understood from the press release, “Metalation” took a lot of efforst to make and the band nearly split up during the Corona period. So could you provide some details on this matter and what helped you to carry on during this period?
The thing was, that Martin didn’t play with us live for quite a while but he kept writing songs with us. in 2019 we released “Controlled Demolition” and wanted to make some shows next year. But then Corona started and because of that we couldn't play anywhere, and that lasted, I don't know, till the end of 2022 or something. So that was a very, very tense time. We couldn't rehearse and everything. And so Martin and me at one point we said, “OK, we cannot rehearse, we cannot play live. What can we do”? And then we to write demos for Martin’ss other project and also for Paragon. We collected a lot of songs. I think in the end we had like 17 or 18 songs, and we choose the best nine for the album. We had some other good songs as well, but we had to find a balance, because you cannot put only fast songs on the album. It took a lot of time to choose the right ones. And then we started to work on the details, you know, which also took a lot of time again. All the instrumental parts were already finished in 2022, but then Buschi took a lot of time to write his vocals. So that was a problem. But that was a songwriting process. When Corona was over we could play again. But our second guitarist Cunter Kruse who played live with us left the band. We had some other guy to do the duty. And what happened then? Our drummer Soren said that he wanted to leave because he wasn’t into playing in a band anymore. He's making money with music: teaching drums, sessions in studio and playing in cover bands, tribute bands in Hamburg. Hhe was not into touring anymore and rehearsing with the band and everything. The new guitar player also left right away. So there remained only three people in Paragon. And then Martin said, “OK, maybe it's time to call it quits. We release the album and make some kind of shows with my son Jason on drums”. And I said, “OK, that's at least something better than just splitting up”. So we recorded the stuff for the album. Then I met Jason and Martin at a concert which they did with the other band. And Jason asked, ”When do I have to record the drums? I want to join Paragon”. So when Martin came in I told him, “Jason has just joined Paragon as a permanent member, so you have to join too”. Which he did. Now we have a cery good team. Martin, Buschi and me, we are friends for years. Jan Bertram, the other guitar players, he's already in the band like 13 years already. He and Martin are very good guitar duo. And to be honest, it feels better than before.
As you mentioned, most of the songs were ready by 2022 or something like this. How was it to live with these songs and not be able to share them with your fans? Weren't you mad at Buschi for this?
Yeah, I listened to each song a lot of times because from just a rough ideas with maybe the main riff and some other part. It was like seeing a child grow. I know the songs from front to back. And yeah, it was really a hard time, to be honest, because we recorded everything in 2023 and Buschi was about to enter the studio our producer Piet Sielck got sick with cancer. So we had to postpone the vocal recordings and did it only in January or February of 2024. So it was a long time from the period that we wrote the songs until we recorded them and finally release them. Of course I'm happy that people can hear it now.
You said you wanted this album to be more diverse. So did you just pick ideas which you already had or did you have to write some song on demand, so to say, to have more melodic stuff?
The songs are all new. Martin is the guy who comes up with riffs. Great riffs is he most important thing for Paragon. The rest is easy to do. Martin is able to deliver these riffs. When we have like eight songs and need one more fast song, Martin is able to write a fast song. He blasts a riff and half an hour later we have a good idea. This time we focused on writing a little bit more melodic songs. For example, in the opening song “Fighting the Fire”, we have this melody in the chorus. And as far as I remember, we didn’t have something like this before, you know, like singing on the guitar, twin guitar melody. We really did it on purpose for the new album. And as I said, we had some other songs as well, but we didn't record them for the album because they were too much alike to other songs we already had. So maybe on the next time.
So let's talk about the writing of certain songs off the new album. How did “Beyond the Horizon” came to fruition? Was it written by Martin alone or did you also contribute something to this song?
Martin and me, we wrote all the songs together. Martin comes with most of the riffs. Sometimes I also do this but I arrange everything. I am that guy who say, “OK, the riff is cool, but maybe you can do a run there or make it in a different key or something”. And so the music is all written by Martin and me.
“My Asylum” is probably your most ambitious song to date. Could you tell me a bit more about this: how all these different parts, acoustic guitars came to life?
To be honest, Martin is not a guy who likes to play acoustic guitar that. Often the ballads are written by the other guitar players. But we wanted to do it and asked Jan Bertram to write a ballad. He came up with some ideas and we were like, “We don't like it 100 percent”. Then one day I said, “Martin, we still need a ballad”. And he replied, “OK, I have some idea”. So he just came and played his ideas. It was really cool, and the arrangement came from me again. But the middle section with all these guitar parts was written by Jan Bertram. “My Asylum” is also a very special song for me because it's about depression from which I suffer sometimes. It's also written for some special person I know.
Didn't you want to make something really unusual with this song to add maybe some orchestral elements, or maybe to invite singers like Ralf Schepers to sing with Buschi?
No, this time we wanted to make it pure. I like some symphonic stuff, to be honest, but I like to keep it simple with us, because I always think that we need to record only that material which we’ll be able to play live. And then, once you recorded and released something, you cannot change it. Of course, you have to make albums more interesting, but you can also put too much into it. For example, I listen to a lot of film scores and I love that. But when I listen to some of the new bands and they have a lot of keyboards and orchestras and this all is emulated on computers, I don't think it makes sense. There are some keyboards on our album, which Piet Sielck played, but I think we could really play it live.
Some bands even use artificial intelligence tools to write and arrange music or to do cover artworks.
I don't like it. It's terrible, to be honest, you know. On Facebook I have a certain kind of people, who are very much into old US metal and stuff like that. And they always complain, “Oh, the drums sound fake and this sounds fake and too modern”. And I always say, “Hey, we live in 2024. I don't want to sound like 20 years ago because the technologies are better now. We play better and everything”. But I don't like the idea of using artificial intelligence to write lyrics or music. I don't think we will ever do it because as long as we can write our own songs, we will do that. And I cannot listen to the stuff, it's all the same. Unfortunately, I'm not a good painter, but I learned graphic stuff and I can do layouts and stuff like that, you know. I also did it on our own albums already sometimes. And when I see these AI artworks or graphics, I cannot stand it, you know, like the new Grave Digger album. What did they think about that? They earn enough money to pay somebody to make a good cover. So I don't understand why people do that.
Yeah, right. And I know that Buschi is responsible for more or less all Paragon's lyrics, but do you or Martin have a chance at least to discuss ideas with him?
Yeah, that's for sure. As I told you, the idea for “My Asylum” was mine. I said, “Buschi, let's write a song about depression”. And Martin already wrote some lyrics for the song “Impaler”, for example. And the idea of “Empires of the Lost” from “Revenge” was mine. So I speak with Buschi about it and give him some ideas sometimes. But on the new album it was only “My Asylum”, the rest of the lyrics came from Buschi's ideas.
I know that would be a question for him, but maybe you can comment on the lyrics for “Burn the Whore”, because he calls us to burn money. But how is it possible at this moment?
That's really a true story. It's about a bunch of rich, very, very rich people. Buschi read it in a newspaper or in the internet. I don't know where exactly, but some very rich people meet on an island and burn money because they have so much of it. For the world we live in It's an ultimate sacrifice to burn money, because money is the most important thing for many people. And these rich people burn it because they just have so much of it. So the lyrics has nothing to do with the horror, it's not something misogynistic.
Well, I also noticed that you decided to end up the album with two kind of slower songs, “Metalation” and “My Asylum”. Both are great, but didn't you think about closing the album with some fast, straightforward speed metal smasher?
Yeah, maybe we would have done that, if we had one more fast song. By the ways, CD version of the album includes a re-recorded version of “Hellgore” from “Screenslaves”. So the CD ends with a fast one. And then, okay, “Metalation” has a slow part, but the rest of the song is very heavy, in my opinion. And I always liked, when albums end with a ballad and stuff like that. Like the second Agents of Steel album ends up with this beautiful ballad “Traveler.
Is there some formula that you use to put songs in certain order on your albums?
To be honest, this time it was very funny because we had these nine songs and I was thinking about how to make the order. I always do that, you know, I'm the guy who arranges the songs and also the song order most times. And when I made the track list for :Metalation”, I realized that the first half of the album was more or less like the order we had on the first side of “Law of the Blade”, because we start with a fast song, then we have a double kick, then we have a half-time double kick, then we have a stomp song, then we have a doom song, and then a very fast song. So I instinctively made it like on “Law of the Blade”.
Нou mentioned new version of “Hellgore”. As far as I understood, you wanted to put it on the previous album. So why didn't that happen back then?
Yeah, it was supposed to be a bonus track for Japan. And the Japan company, they broke the contract, so there was no Japan release. This time we said, “Okay, that's a cool bonus track, we can use it”. At first, we wanted to do a cover version, but we were not so satisfied with it. So we decided to use “Hellgore”.
This time you also recorded your instruments a bit differently. Usually, you use professional studios, but with “Metalation” you decided to do everything on your own. So how did you like this experience?
Oh, it was very cool. We were doing demos first for Martin's other band. He was sitting here at my home. We had some tea. I was sitting in my living room. It was just cozy, and Martin said, “That's much cooler than sitting at the studio. I can come here every time I want. Why don't we want to record the album of Kneippenterroristen.” And so we did it first as an experiment, and it worked out great. So we decided we could do this for Paragon as well. And during the Corona period I learned a lot. I had to play a lot of bass, and I was used much more to the click. So when I asked Piet Sielck “Can we do it at home?” He said, “No problem, do it. Your guys are experienced enough, you are good enough players”. And it really worked out well. Only Buschi was in the studio for recording vocals and backings, and that's all we did at Piet's studio. He re-amped everything, because we recorded the guitars without any soundeffects, and Piet has, I think, something like an Engel amplifier in his studio. We really enjoyed that, and I think we will do that again for the next album as well.
Great! In various interviews you mentioned that it's hard to book shows and tours these days, so what's the problem? There are not that many venues to play in Germany anymore?
We are not the biggest band, you know, and we all have standard jobs, we cannot take off too many days from work, three of us have children, and two of the children are too small and sometimes need care from fathers. And then, we don’t make money from tours, it's nor for fun. The other problem is in that, that there's so many bands, and if you don’t work with a very good booking agency, it's almost impossible to get any gigs. Sometimes I write to festivals and so on and I don't even get an answer — zero reaction, you know. I did this the last weeks and I got some reactions, but not too much, to be honest. So it's always hard to get gigs. Fortunately we have Mystic Prophecy and Iron Savior on tour right now and at the last moment Mad Max cancelled their appearance and so they asked us if we would want to do the tour. But it was on a short notice, because we need to take day-offs and everything and Buschi had no holidays left at all anymore, so we said, “Okay, we can do some shows, but not the whole tour”. That would have been a great tour for us, of course, because we like both bands and we know the people from both bands, so it would have been a perfect tour, but at least we can do three shows now. We will do the Headbangers Open Air next year, we will do a show in Hamburg, maybe like in spring of 2025, and I hope there will be some other shows as well, but it will not be like we will tour a lot. For guys as old as we are, it’s not possible to jump into a car and drive 800 kilometers to play in front of 100 people and drive back, that's something we don't do anymore. We love to play, but it has to be something worthy in a way.
It's hard to believe that there were times when festivals like Wacken invited bands like Paragon to play, and now it's usually all the same bands playing every year at Wacken. And all the same bands just drift from one festival to another every summer.
That's exactly what I meant. There are, I don't know, like ten booking agencies in Germany, and they end the roster to Wacken and Wacken say, “Okay, we take this, this, and this, and that's it”. Or Wacken say to the booking agency,”I want that band”, and they say, “Okay, you get it, but you have to take these bands as well”. And that's how it works. We don't participate in that game, that's the problem. But with Wacken it's really strange, because I know we are not the biggest band, but I know the people who organized Wacken, I had some business connections to them as well, because I sold them computers for a while, and when I asked about Paragon, they always said, “No, you won't play”, without any explanations. Meanwhile I know a lot of bands who play there, which are also not as big as we are, and I was like, “If they can play, why we can't play?” I'm sure a lot of people would like to see us as well. So I cannot answer to that, I just have no idea. I wish it would be differently and a little bit easier. Before Corona we played in Italy, did a little tour in Spain, and so in Denmark, we played in Wales, we played a little bit outside Germany, and we always got good payments, they paid for the flights, we had hotels and stuff like that, and we are not a very expensive band in the end. I think there are bands which take a lot more money than we do, and sometimes we are even happy to play and have our expenses in our pocket. I hope it will change a little bit next year. I would be happy if we do like 10 or 12 or 15 shows next year, that would be great, I hope I can arrange that, we have to see.
Good luck with that! As you mentioned, that now when you are older, you have more other commitments, so how do you see the role of the band in your life now? I believe that 20 years ago, metal was a reason to live to some degree, and now what place in your life does it take?
Still a big place, because I have depressions, and I had a hard childhood and everything. At one point I started to make music, and I was like, “Wow, that's really cool! I want to be somebody, and I can be somebody” So the years of playing in bands gave me a lot of self-confidence. I was shy when I was younger, and it helped me to fight my depressions as well, and I love the metal community. Today there are three different kinds of metal scenes, in my opinion. There are the old bands which still exist, like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and Saxon, there are new bands like Powerwolf and Sabaton, which I don't like too much, to be honest, but they deserve everything, because they toured like hell, so much credit to their will to survive, and they earned the right to play. But the scene, which I really enjoy, is the underground. In Hamburg, you can go to a club several times a week and watch an underground band here. I really like to go to a club where there are, I don't know, 120 people, and you can stand right beside the band and can say cheers to them, and that's what I still really enjoy. I also enjoy finding new bands, I still buy a lot of records, and I really still enjoy listening to metal and to other stuff. Music in general helps me in hard times when I'm not feeling too well, and so it's very cool.
Next year Paragon turns 35. Do you plan some special stuff for that anniversary? I saw that some guy asked you to release a collection of demos.
I would like to do a little show with special stuff. We are doing this at the Headbangers Open Air. I don't know yet how long we can play, but I think we will only play stuff from up to “Revenge”, and maybe two or three new songs, but the rest will be like older stuff before 2007. It would of course be cool to do another show in Hamburg, which would be maybe like 90 minutes or something like that, and maybe also invite some other ex-Paragon people who played with us. I don't know if we can make it, I have to speak with the other guys, I think I will do that on tour with Iron Savior and Mystic Prophecy shows. Concerning releases, I don't think there will be another album next year, maybe we will do some re-releases. I spoke with Massacre Records about that, so that would be an idea to put some albums out which are not available on LP or not available anymore at all, and if we do this, we can release a bonus CD. We have some old demo recordings which we could release, but it would be only be for hardcore fans. I had an idea to re-record the stuff which was not released before, we haven't spoke about that so far, you know, so I don't think we'll have a real new release next year.
One thing that you haven't had in your discography is a live album. Don't you want to record that Headbangers show?
Yeah, that's always a hard question, because it costs a lot of money to do that. If we are going to do something like that, it would be a video, because I don't know if it makes sense for a band like us to release an audio version on a live album, because we would not sell enough LPs to cover the cost for recording it. What I could imagine would be like we play a good club show and videotape it. But we have to see if some record company is interested to pay for it or if we can pay for it ourselves. It would be really good, especially right now, when we have the best lineup, so the guitars are much better. Jan Bertram is a very good skilled guitar player, he's as good as Martin, actually he is the first guy who is as good as Martin.
And if you had a chance to go back and record any show you have played with Paragon, which show would you pick up for that purpose?
Good question.
Maybe the one in Barcelona with Gamma Ray?
Yeah, that was a good one for sure. I think, to be honest, we will have the best shows now with the new lineup, because Martin is back in the band and as I said, Jan Bertram is also a very good guitar player and this unit is very tight. On the other hand, another great show, which I really enjoyed was Wacken on the main stage in 2004. It was recorded, we have the rough material, but I don't know if it's possible to get that. Maybe I need to ask if we can do it for some money.
My last question is about the time when you were out of the band. I found one old interview when Buschi said that when you recorded “Forgotten Prophecies”, you were unhappy with the sound, with the songs, you criticized a lot of ideas. So what was wrong with this album for you?
When we recorded Revenge, for me it was a perfect album — the sound is great, the songs are great, performance is great, just a very good album. So we said, “Okay, we cannot improve with Piet anymore”. And so we had this, in hindsight, stupid idea to record the next album with the guys who did our live sound. But doing live sound is one thing, recording in the studio is something totally different, so it was stupid idea. And when we started to record the stuff, I was already worried. I listened to guitars, for example, and I was like, “Hey, this guitar is not in tune. Why did you record it? Why didn't you watch out?” There were so many mistakes made on “Forgotten Prophecies”, and it all sounded so powerless. The songs are great, I love the album, it would be one of the best Paragon albums, to be honest, with a good sound, but it's very weak, it's terrible, to be honest, it's not powerful. I talked with Martin about it, to be honest, on the side note now, and maybe we will re-record it someday, or maybe we will re-record at least some songs, maybe together with some stuff from “Screenslaves”, which is another album that doesn't sound too much like Paragon. But back to “Forgotten Prophecies”. When I realized that the recordings were not working well, I said, “We have to stop this right now, and we have to go to somebody else. Let's go to Piet again and do the album”. But Martin and Buschi didn’t want to do it. I'm always the guy who does everything 100 percent, so I said, “I don't want to have anything to do with the album, because it sounds like shit” and then I quit. But one year later we had a party at my flat, and I think at that point, it was already clear, that I would return at some point. It was just some stupid shit in the end, you know, but I still have to cry a little bit when I listen to the album, because the songs are really good, and I think if they were recorded by somebody who knows this stuff, it would be very a good and a very diverse album as well. Looking back, Martin also is of the opinion a little bit that it could have been sounded better. We seldom play any songs from it. The only song we play from time to time is “Forgotten Prophecies”, but we have never played anything else from it, so it's a little bit sad, because the songs themselves are good.
Thanks to Mona Miluski of All Noir agency for making this interview possible!
Paragon's promo pictures by Suzanne Spieldenner (edited by Jan Bünning).
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