BLIND GUARDIAN TRIVIA
Trivia
Blind Guardian's first tour of Japan came in the winter of 1992, and the show at Koseinenkin Hall in Tokyo on 4 December became the live album Tokyo Tales. The band's site notes that it came out only a couple of months after the tour. Victor Entertainment, their Japanese label, recalls that the album of that long-awaited first Tokyo show was well received.
In June 2026 the band posted a photo from their first tour of Japan, in 1992, on Instagram: André Olbrich shredding on a broom. The caption remembers a tour of non-stop laughter, and a lesson learned on it, that a broom and a good deal of confidence can stand in for a high-end guitar.
In February 2007 Blind Guardian toured Japan on a double bill with Angra from Brazil: eight shows from Shibuya C.C.Lemon Hall in Tokyo on 2 February, by way of Sapporo, Fukuoka and Hiroshima, to SHIBUYA-AX on the 13th. The Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan show on the 12th was added because of demand. The running order changed from night to night, and each band closed four of the eight shows. That autumn they played LOUD PARK 07 as well.
Blind Guardian started out as Lucifer's Heritage. According to the chronicle on the band's official site, they dropped that name because of its satanic ring, and it was Fates Warning, the American band, that inspired the name they chose instead.
When Hansi Kürsch met André Olbrich at school, the job on offer in André's band Zero Fault was bass and vocals. Hansi's profile on the official site says his real plan was to take over rhythm guitar sooner rather than later, a plan that did not work out. The band then renamed itself Lucifer's Heritage.
"Valhalla", now a crowd sing-along at every show, was written as the recording of Follow the Blind (1989) was drawing to a close. The official site's page for the album says it went on the record only to fill out the running time, and that the band were reluctant to include it at all. It has since become a fixture and a highlight of their concerts.
Kai Hansen, of Helloween and Gamma Ray, is on "Valhalla" from Follow the Blind, and he came back for the next two albums, on "Lost in the Twilight Hall", "The Last Candle" and "The Quest for Tanelorn". Ward Records, which issued Live Beyond the Spheres in Japan, credits his lead guitar and singing with making Blind Guardian's name among German-metal fans in Japan.
Follow the Blind opens with "Inquisition", which samples the monks' chant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The album page on the band's site traces the rest of its sources: the title track comes from The Talisman, Stephen King's novel with Peter Straub, while "Damned for All Time" and "Fast to Madness" draw on characters from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books.
The sleeve of Somewhere Far Beyond (1992) shows a circle of time-travelling bards gathered round a gyroscope-like timepiece. The band's own site says this is the picture that, over time, gave Blind Guardian their nickname, the Bards.
Frederik Ehmke first heard Blind Guardian at 13, on a radio show he used to tape, when the band introduced Somewhere Far Beyond with "Journey Through the Dark" and "The Bard's Song". He later learned the medieval bagpipes for his own medieval-metal band. In the spring of 2005, aged 26, he heard that his favourite band had no drummer, tracked down André's phone number and sent in a three-song video DVD shot at a nearby studio. Today he plays bagpipes on some of their songs as well as drums.
Nightfall in Middle-Earth (1998), built on Tolkien's The Silmarillion, won over Tolkien readers, and the band's site notes that in a 1999 interview Hansi hinted at serious talk of Blind Guardian working on the soundtrack of Peter Jackson's films. It never happened.
For the "Bright Eyes" video in 1995 the band dressed up as Pennywise and as a pink-haired punk. Looking back on that year on Instagram in July 2026, they also remembered turning into 1940s ladies for the "Mr. Sandman" video, and a tour that took them through Bangkok.
In 2008 the band wrote the theme song "Sacred" for the action role-playing game Sacred 2: Fallen Angel. The game includes a concert in which Blind Guardian perform, and that footage is the official video for "Sacred Worlds", the opening song of At the Edge of Time (2010), on both the band's and the label's YouTube channels.
Legacy of the Dark Lands (2019), credited to the Blind Guardian Twilight Orchestra, is an orchestral project Hansi and André had been working on for more than twenty years. It was recorded in Prague's Rudolfinum with the Prague FILMharmonic, with no electric guitar anywhere, and its story is a direct sequel to Die dunklen Lande, a novel by the German writer Markus Heitz. Hansi's profile on the official site says he considers it the most important album of his career.
The figure on the cover of The God Machine is the fallen angel Gadriel, painted by Peter Mohrbacher, an American illustrator known for his work on the trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Victor Entertainment, which issued the album in Japan, says its lyrics deal with modern witch hunts, paranoia, war and the death of Hansi's mother.
The band looked back on Instagram in July 2026 at "The Bard's Song" at Wacken Open Air in 2024, a moment when some 80,000 voices joined as one huge choir.
On Oricon's album chart, Somewhere Far Beyond (1992) peaked at number 15. Metal Hammer reports that it sold over 130,000 copies and topped the international album charts in Japan and Greece, and Hansi remembers it as the album that made them number one in both countries. The band's own site calls it a number one in Japan; Oricon's overall chart is a different measure.
A Twist in the Myth (2006) carries both "Fly" and its darker counterpart, "Dead Sound of Misery". Speaking to BARKS that year, Hansi explained that the band records songs in separate fragments and assembles them later; they had meant to pick one of the two, but the later "Dead Sound of Misery" came out so well that both went on the album.
The songs on The God Machine (2022) take their cues from works as far apart as Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle and Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Metal Hammer adds that "Let It Be No More" was written by André Olbrich, with a story taken from Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers.
Somewhere Far Beyond Revisited (2024) is a complete re-recording of the 1992 album, made in 2022 and 2023. In Hansi's liner notes, the idea came out of rehearsals for the album's thirtieth-anniversary shows: the pandemic arrived, nobody could be sure the shows would happen, and the band turned to re-recording instead. It was released on 2 August 2024, the day the band played Wacken Open Air.