CORELEONI Trivia — 89 Entries
89 sourced facts about CORELEONI.
Trivia
What the band was for is set out by Leo Leoni himself, on the front page of its own site. At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Gotthard album he wanted to pay tribute to songs the band had set aside — and he names them: "Downtown", "Firedance", "Higher", "Here Comes The Heat", "In The Name", "Ride On", "Let It Be" and "All I Care 4". CoreLeoni did not begin as a vague homage; it began with a track list.
The first drum kit Alex Motta ever played was built for him by his grandfather out of pots and buckets, and he played it with chopsticks from Chinese restaurants. A real kit arrived when he was eleven, and formal lessons began from there. He had started at five, he writes, drawn in by the rock'n'roll records and cassettes his parents kept in the house.
When the drum stool passed from Hena Habegger to Alex Motta was, for a long time, written down nowhere. The band's own announcement is dated 26 November 2019: posted the day before a tour began, it says that it is just over a year since Motta stepped in to cover for Hena, and that it is therefore time to confirm him as an official and permanent member. That puts the start of the stand-in period in the autumn of 2018.
Less than a week on sale, the debut entered the Swiss album chart at number 3 — the band said so itself on 7 March 2018. The same post carried a second figure that appears nowhere else: locally, in Ticino, the record went straight to number 1. It is signed off with the five names of the line-up at the time: Leo, Hena, Ronnie, Jgor and Mila.
The tenth song on III was written by nobody in the band. "Deep In My Soul" is the work of Nello "Neil" Otupacca, a Hammond player and a former bandmate of Leoni's. Leoni fell for it the first time he heard it, but the song had never been released — so, as the band tells it, he simply had to go and ask Otupacca whether they could record it for III. The lyrics are by Flavio René Hochstrasser and Otupacca.
The Magic Rock Night at Vallemaggia on 25 July 2024 was a stand-in job for CoreLeoni: the announcement of 14 May says they were filling in for Glenn Hughes at Cevio. In mid-July the band announced a change of venue from Cevio to Gordevio, saying the Alta Vallemaggia community had been hit hard by the events of recent days. Together with China, the band put a signed Maybach guitar up for charity auction in support of the affected community.
On 3 July 2025 CoreLeoni opened for Judas Priest at the Hallenstadion in Zurich. The nine songs and roughly forty minutes of that set became the live album Live at Hallenstadion Zurich. The band's announcement says those forty minutes simply had to be kept — and not only, it adds, for the people who were in the room that night. Band and label both put the attendance at seven thousand.
Leoni does not accept the label "Gotthard cover band". Asked about it by a Swiss magazine in May 2022, he answered that they have never covered Gotthard at all, because those are songs he co-wrote — and asked in return whether Roger Waters would become a Pink Floyd cover band if he played the whole of The Wall.
Leoni found Bushpepa on a television broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest. He did not understand a word of the Albanian, but could hear that the singer was exceptional. His next thought, he says, was that he hoped the man spoke English — and when they got in touch it turned out he also spoke Italian, which is Leoni's mother tongue. From there it came together naturally.
Romero's route into Michael Schenker's band ran through a CoreLeoni tour. He told an interviewer in November 2020 that it all began by chance: Schenker's producer Michael Voss and his band Mad Max were the support act on the tour CoreLeoni did in 2018, a friendship grew out of it, and Voss later rang him to say Schenker was thinking of a guest on his new album and had put Romero's name forward.
Leoni gives one reason why III became the band's first album of new songs: Covid. A lockdown that was supposed to last a fortnight became four weeks, then two months, then a year, and in the end ran to two. They had set out to write two songs, and suddenly there was time to compose ten. The only masterplan behind the record, he said, was that.
The fourth song on III, "Greetings From Russia", was not written to the news. Leoni said so directly in May 2022: it was written before the war began and has nothing to do with what was happening then. Russia had always been a promised land to him, as America was — more interesting still, he said, for an artist. He is married to a Russian, which is how he came to know another side of the country and its history.
The second advance single from Generection, "Howling At The Moon", is not a newly written song. BURRN! ONLINE reported on 27 August 2026 that it was built up from unreleased material dating back to Gotthard's earliest days — from the years when the late Steve Lee was still in the band.
Every Japanese edition has come from one company, Ward Records. Its CoreLeoni listing holds exactly four titles — The Greatest Hits Part 1, II, III and, on pre-order, Generection — which is to say the four studio albums. Neither live album has a domestic edition; in Japan they circulate as imports. Across eight years in which the international releases changed label with almost every record, the Japanese end never changed hands.
The band's own LIVE page runs year by year from the first four shows of December 2017 to the autumn tour of 2026, and no Japanese venue or date appears anywhere on it. That is not to say nobody in the band has played Japan: Jgor Gianola went round Europe and Japan on Gotthard's Dial Hard tour — but that was the 1990s, and a different band.
Japanese coverage began two months before release. On 21 December 2017 BARKS presented the album as a set of re-recordings marking twenty-five years since Gotthard's first record, noted that the Japanese edition would appear ahead of the rest of the world on 14 February 2018, and reported the music video for the new song "Walk On Water" — describing the song as an appeal about the state of the world and a wish for peace.
The clearest published breakdown of which re-recording came from which Gotthard album is a Japanese one. TOWER RECORDS ONLINE, writing on 6 February 2018, sorts them out: "Firedance", "Downtown" and "All I Care For" from the 1992 debut, "Higher", "Get It While You Can" and "Here Comes The Heat" from Dial Hard, and "In The Name", "Let It Be" and "Ride On" from G.
Leoni's own member page puts the same motive far more bluntly: there are plenty of bands out there paying tribute to Gotthard and playing those old songs, so why not do it himself and enjoy it. The page opens, a few lines above, with him falling in love with a Les Paul at the age of twelve.
The official site opened on 15 December 2017, and that day's post is the oldest news entry that can still be reached. It is a short welcome — this is the place to keep up with Leo's new project — naming Hena, Ronnie, Jgor and Mila, and promising that the early Gotthard years would come alive. The band's first public document doubled as its line-up announcement.
How Gianola stood with Gotthard is written two different ways. His own page says his first real step into the professional world was with Gotthard from 1993 to 1995, as a stage performer on the Dial Hard tour, more than a hundred shows across Europe and Japan. AFM Records, meanwhile, calls him "ex-Gotthard" and Metalville a former Gotthard guitarist. This site follows his own wording and does not describe him as a full member.
Gianola's first band was called Sabotage, formed in 1985 when he was fifteen; its first gig came the following year at a youth centre in his home town of Lugano. He had picked up a classical guitar in 1978 and cheerfully records that he was not the best student on the planet, but says the time was useful preparation for going electric.
Motta was born in 1985 and took a music diploma in 2008 at the NAM school in Milan, studying with the Italian drummer Tullio De Piscopo. His own account of how he built his playing runs from John Bonham, Alex Van Halen, Keith Moon and Cozy Powell through to Philly Joe Jones and Buddy Rich — an attempt, he writes, to mix power, groove and musicality into one style.
Two of CoreLeoni's five did not meet in this band. Motta's first professional live work came in 2013, in Alto Voltaggio, the band of his friend Jgor Gianola. Before that he had started out in 1999 at fourteen with a rock band called HeadOrCross around Milan, and played across Europe with groups such as Why Out and On-Off.
Bassist Mila Merker was born in Bellinzona and has played bass since she was thirteen. Her own page lists five previous bands — Nostran & Vomitors (grott punk), Soulline (melodeath), Imperial (grunge), Naïve (stoner) and Mydevice (post-hardcore). The Japanese label material names two entirely different ones, and the two lists do not overlap at a single point. AFM Records credits her as being from Soulline, which puts the weight on her own page; the Japanese pair is recorded here rather than adopted.
Bushpepa's CV had rock in it long before CoreLeoni. With the band Sunrise he opened for Deep Purple in Tirana in 2007; he opened for Duff McKagan on the Loaded tour in Tirana in 2011, and for Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal at the traditional festival in Korçë on 18 August 2013. Since 2011 he has also been a vocal coach on the television programme The Voice of Albania.
In 2014 he stood on a metal stage as well: he joined Darkology on tour in place of Kelly Sundown Carpenter for the Killfest run alongside Overkill, Prong and Enforcer, through Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. From 2006 to 2017 he also worked for the Albanian private television station Top Channel.
The band's own announcement, dated 17 July 2021, is remarkably short. They had been lucky enough to meet a new friend with whom to share their lives and their passion, a fine human being with the added benefit of being a fine singer — and would readers please welcome him to the family. Fifteen months had passed since the previous singer left.
The band did respond, the very next day. Its post of 14 April 2020 runs to three lines: that it is with great respect that they must say farewell to their friend Ronnie, thanks for the good times, and best wishes. The item has long since scrolled off the live news page and survives only in the Internet Archive.
Romero's own website still lists CoreLeoni among the bands he has been part of. The entry reads as Leo Leoni's Coreleoni, two albums, Greatest Hits I and II, sitting in the same column as Michael Schenker Group, Vandenberg and The Ferrymen. His count of two records agrees with this site's.
After the autumn 2018 European tour the band posted, on 1 December, a thank-you naming the support acts one by one: Redeem, MadMax, Underskin, Crystal Ball and Silverdust. By Romero's own account it was MadMax's presence on that run that later brought him to Michael Schenker.
One song reached the public before the album did. On 19 December 2017, in the same post that opened the band's merchandise store, CoreLeoni announced the new song "Walk On Water" as a digital download in the webshop. The album followed two months later, so on a record otherwise made of re-recordings the newly written song was the first thing anyone could buy.
Release day had a second event attached to it. The Lugano show of 30 December 2017 had been filmed in full by the Swiss public broadcaster RSI on its La2 channel, and the broadcast was set for 23 February 2018 — the very day the debut album came out. Ahead of it the band put out the newly recorded "Walk On Water" from that performance as a taste of what was coming.
The debut had one deliberately scarce edition. The announcement of 16 January 2018 says a gatefold 180-gram gold vinyl pressing would be sold through the Frontiers webshop only, and that it was very limited indeed: a hundred copies were made.
The promotion around the release included a format that has largely disappeared. In March 2018 the band announced listening parties at three venues in Germany — Bistro Denise in Krumbach, the Rockside Club in Ulm and Gloria Stages in Saarbrücken — where fans could come and hear the new CD together and stand a chance of winning copies and merchandise.
The second album came with a change of label. On 31 July 2019 the band announced AFM Records as its new home, along with a release date of 27 September for II and the formats it would come in: a standard CD, a limited digipak, and a gatefold double LP in clear and in red vinyl. The same post named the two brand-new songs, "Queen Of Hearts" and "Don't Get Me Wrong", and the John Lee Hooker cover, "Boom Boom".
II was recorded at the Yellow House Studio in Lugano. The band said so on 14 September 2019, when it posted a video of Leoni talking through the making of the album from inside the room. The studio is his own, and III would be recorded there too.
AFM Records' own description of the band leans on relationships rather than on sound: a high-class ensemble of close friends and long-standing colleagues who, alongside Leoni, were part of that era and share a great many memories with him. It then lists the line-up of the day — Ronnie Romero, Hena Habegger, Jgor Gianola and Mila Merker.
The Travellin' Men Tour of December 2019 was the band's first proper run across Europe. On 23 December, once it was over, CoreLeoni thanked its "Bastardos" road crew one by one, with each person's job beside the name: a tour manager, two at front of house, one on lights, two on backline, one on merch and three drivers — ten people in all. One of the backline pair was Davide Pagano, who would go on to record III with Leoni. MAXXWELL, the opening act, got its own line.
One date on that tour disappeared for reasons entirely outside the band's control. The Deggendorf show of 17 December 2019 was reported on 22 November as unlikely to happen: word was that the promoter had gone bankrupt, ticket sales had been stopped, and the venue had told the band that all his other shows were off as well. CoreLeoni said it was trying to reach the liquidator, and went as far as spelling out that refunds would depend on where the ticket had been bought.
CoreLeoni have played the Montreux Jazz Festival. The announcement of 7 June 2019 gives the details: Sunday 7 July at 22:30, on the free Music in the Park stage. It is an unusual billing for a hard rock band, and the post treats it as one more date in a summer that was filling up with Swiss festivals.
On 15 December 2018 the band played the Knock Out Festival in Karlsruhe. The announcement of 27 July names the company it kept that day — Helloween, Pretty Maids and Primal Fear — which put a band less than a year past its debut album on a German indoor festival bill of that weight.
The band's own LIVE page lists every concert year by year from 2017 to 2026 — and has no 2020 section at all. 2021 holds a single entry, the Run to the Hill Festival at Boltigen on 30 July. The first year, 2017, holds four: Agno, Aarburg, Dietikon and a free show in Lugano on 30 December. The gap between the European tour of December 2019 and the return to the road in March 2022 is exactly where the change of singer and the global stop on concerts overlap.
The blank 2020 is not the absence of plans. A post of 20 March that year lists three confirmed dates — Pförring Open Air in Germany on 18 July, Open Air Etziken in Switzerland on 25 July and Rock Of Ages in Germany on 1 August — and signs off by telling everyone to stay safe. Five days earlier the band had already announced that its Rock the Boat appearance was cancelled because of the coronavirus.
In a year with no concerts the band's news page was updated only a handful of times. On 5 October 2020 it carried a single line: forever with us, beautiful soul. On 18 December it pointed to a Christmas song, "Xmas with you", recorded by Leo and friends. Those two items, the farewell to the singer and the cancellations are very nearly the whole of that year.
The first stage booked for the new singer did not happen either. On 13 September 2021 the band announced that Bushpepa had tested positive for Covid-19 and would not be with them at the Sunday Tamaro Music Day. They meant to go anyway: Alto Voltaggio — the band of Jgor Gianola and Alex Motta — would play instead, with Leoni and Mila Merker joining as special guests. An update appended to the same post says the show was then cancelled for bad weather.
The Atomic Fire Records deal was announced on 1 December 2021, and the band reprinted the label's statement on its own site. The comment from the label's founder and CEO, Markus Wosgien, carried a personal history: he had worked on Gotthard's Lipservice, Need To Believe and Firebirth and had become friends with the members along the way. Leoni's half of the announcement is a thank-you to a label he credits with keeping the metal community healthy.
In the same announcement Leoni explained the new record by way of equipment. He did not think anyone had put out an album like it in a long time: hardly anybody still thinks and writes this way, or uses Les Pauls and Marshalls as they do. As a rock fan he had missed that, he said — and Bushpepa had turned out to be exactly the stroke of luck it needed.
The chart result for III was reported by the band itself on 30 May 2022: number 2 on the Swiss Hitparade and number 39 on the German Official Charts, announced as a fine way to start the week. It moved them up one place in Switzerland from the debut's number 3.
III was first announced for 13 May. On 3 May 2022 the band said the release had to be pushed back to the 20th for production reasons. One date did not move: the release party at the Old Capitol in Langenthal, announced on 6 April, went ahead on 13 May as planned — a release party held a week before the release.
The credits for III are all in the band's own announcement. Leo Leoni produced; he and Gotthard's Davide Pagano recorded it at the Yellow House Studio; Charlie Bauerfeind mixed; Sascha "Busy" Bühren mastered it at TrueBusyness Music in Berlin; and Ekaterina Bosova Leonova made the artwork. Bauerfeind is known for Gotthard, and for Helloween and Blind Guardian besides.
The opening act on the Let Live Begin tour in the autumn of 2022 was the Swiss singer Seraina Telli. The same post of 28 October carries a second, smaller notice: for the Temus show in Agno on 22 November there would be no pre-sale at all, and tickets could only be had at the door.
The comment Metalville printed on its Alive product page is a short one from Leoni: that these live recordings, from their first tour with Gent Bushpepa, captured the real essence of CoreLeoni. The same page notes that the material was taped in March 2022 on the Rock Generation Tour. It was the band's first live album.
The ALIVE on tour run of January 2024 took in thirteen shows across Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The post that closed it, on 29 January, thanks the band's own "bastardos" road crew and The Modern Day Heroes, the opening act. It is signed Leo, Alex, Gent, Jgor, Mila — the current five.
The band changed booking agency twice in a short span. On 23 January 2023 it announced The CBF Booking GmbH of Peter Harasim in Nuremberg as its new international agency. By 14 June 2024 it was announcing a new chapter with Good News Productions instead, and thanking Concertbüro Franken for everything done over the previous two years.
Why "Sick & Tired" was chosen as the first song off the live album is explained by Jgor Gianola. It is probably the heaviest track on III, and its vocal parts reach some of the highest notes on that record. The Zurich crowd pushed the band — and Gent in particular — to give everything they had, and that, Gianola says, comes through plainly on the recording.
The Hallenstadion date was settled almost eight months ahead. On 8 November 2024 the band announced that it would open for Judas Priest in Zurich on 3 July 2025, and in the same post that it would join Priest again on 17 July at the Sous Les Etoiles Festival in Sion — two shared bills with the same headliner in one summer.
The live album came out on Perception, a label under Reigning Phoenix Music. Perception's own CoreLeoni page describes the night of 3 July — a hot summer evening, supporting Judas Priest at Zurich's Hallenstadion in front of seven thousand rock and metal fans — and characterises the set as a passage back and forth between classic Gotthard songs and newer material from III.
Reigning Phoenix Music makes three claims for Generection in 2026: that it is built on a foundation of unreleased songs, that the whole band contributed more to the writing than on any previous record, and that its analogue mix is what sets it apart — an attempt to recreate the feel of seventies and eighties recordings with a modern edge. It is, the label adds, heavier and harder than its predecessors.
The physical Generection runs to ten songs; an eleventh, "Lady Marmalade", is marked digital album only on Reigning Phoenix Music's own track list. The same press release says the second disc of the digipak carries the Zurich concert of July 2025 — the Live at Hallenstadion recording, until then available only as a download. This double set is therefore the first time that live album exists as an object.
After Generection comes out, CoreLeoni go on the road in October 2026 co-headlining with Tyketto. The itinerary announced on 8 July runs from Bensheim on the 4th to Lindau on the 18th — twelve shows across Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. September holds a Swiss run, including the Swiss Metal Night of the 26th, shared with China and Shakra.
No two of the six releases carry the same label name. The debut came out on Frontiers Records; II moved the band to AFM Records; a deal with Atomic Fire in December 2021 produced III; the first live album, Alive, went to Metalville; the second live album came out on Perception, part of Reigning Phoenix Music; and Generection arrives on Reigning Phoenix Music itself. Laid end to end, the band's own announcements trace the whole sequence; counted by company rather than by imprint, the last two are the same firm, which makes it five.
Generection is set for 11 September 2026. The first advance single, "Generation Rock", appeared on 2 July, and the band used that announcement to lay out the album title, the date, and the fact that disc two of the digipak would be the Live at Hallenstadion Zurich set. The second single, "Howling At The Moon", followed with a video on 8 August.
Asked in July 2026 what had started the project, Leoni said it was not really meant to become a long-term band at all. The idea was simply to celebrate the music of his earlier years and give those songs another life — something special for the fans. The response was so positive that it gradually turned into a band of its own, and once they began playing together it kept growing by itself.
In the same interview Leoni divided the ground between his two bands. CoreLeoni covers Gotthard's early years, the hard-rocking ones; Gotthard itself moved toward the mainstream. The energy is different, he said, and CoreLeoni's style no longer fits the sound Gotthard has today.
Guitarist Jgor Gianola told an interviewer in January 2025 that he, Leo Leoni and Steve Lee all grew up in the Lugano area and had known each other since he was fifteen. When Gotthard went looking for a guitarist in 1993 they already knew him, and that, he said, was the opportunity that opened the door to earning his living as a musician.
Gianola joined U.D.O. in 1998 and left in 2012. He gave two reasons: the family cost of a schedule that kept him away from home for long stretches, and the plain fact that even the most interesting job turns repetitive after fifteen years. He does not regret the choice, he said, and CoreLeoni is the right band for him now.
Gianola's other band, Alto Voltaggio, began almost by accident: a request for a single concert at the end of 1998, with no particular idea behind it. What made it last, he says, was a repertoire narrowed to rock from the seventies to the nineties and a line-up of good players — the aim being that Swiss clubs should offer what larger markets take for granted, first-rate musicians in small rooms. The band marked twenty-five years in 2023.
Asked what it was like to join CoreLeoni at Leoni's invitation, Gianola described it as a bit like coming home. Gotthard shares his roots and played a special part in his career, and going back to that music after so many years, he said, was genuinely stirring — the audience took the line-up and the sound back just as they had in 1994.
Gianola's roots are not only in Ticino. On his mother's side he is Poschiavino, of the Tuena family, from Val Poschiavo; his grandparents lived at Annunziata, a hamlet of Li Curt. He spent part of his childhood in the valley, still goes back about once a year, and says he can follow the Poschiavo dialect perfectly well.
Eugent Bushpepa started singing at six; rock reached him at ten, in the form of an album his elder sister Eva gave him for his birthday. From there, he says, the passion only rose, and he has been part of Albania's rock scene through festivals and shows ever since.
Before he sang for a living Bushpepa meant to be a doctor. He did well at school, by his own account; he moved to Bologna to read medicine and got two years into it before the other passion pulled him back and he left university. Looking back, he says those years abroad helped his musical career a great deal and that he would happily do them again. The label's announcement when he joined the band calls the subject dentistry, so the sources do not agree on what he was studying.
By his own account Bushpepa did not arrive through an introduction or an open call but through an audition. After CoreLeoni parted with Ronnie Romero, the invitation came from Leo Leoni and Jgor Gianola together. He had grown up loving Gotthard and rates Steve Lee among the finest singers humankind has heard, so the invitation was, as he put it, both a challenge and a dream come true.
Once he was through the audition Bushpepa went straight to Switzerland to meet the band. The fit was immediate, he says, musically and socially alike: they talked about a future record made mostly of new songs and, in the same visit, recorded three of them in four days. Those three are on III. He offers the arithmetic himself as the measure of how fast it clicked.
Bushpepa arrived too late to write much of III. He entered at a later stage of the process, when most of the songs were already finished, and reckons his own contribution to be a few melodic lines here and there and a handful of lyric phrases. The lyrics themselves were written by Danny Lee, who works with Leoni on his other projects as well.
The Rolling Stones cover on III, "Jumpin' Jack Flash", was chosen by the rest of the band before Bushpepa was in it. He says so plainly, and adds that he only found out the song was on the album at the mixing stage.
The four bonus tracks on III are all Gotthard songs the band recorded again, and the choosing was done around Bushpepa's voice: they looked through the early Gotthard albums for songs that suited the band and suited him. One of them, "Say Goodbye", he picked himself — it had long been among his favourite Gotthard songs.
The five videos from III are largely told apart by where they were shot. "Let Life Begin Tonight" was filmed by Kevin Merz and his crew in the modern church on top of Monte Tamaro in southern Switzerland; "Purple Dynamite" by Maurizio Del Piccolo in Ticino; "Sometimes" during the actual recording of the song in the studio; and "Like It Or Not" in a live club in Agno, Ticino. They wanted to keep things simple, Bushpepa said, so that listeners would stay on the songs.
Only the fifth video, "Deep In My Soul", leaves Switzerland. It was shot entirely in southern Albania, Bushpepa's own country, in a church dating from the fifth century, by Renuar Locaj and his team. The band's own note calls the setting an old church ruin and points out that the singer is the only person seen performing in it.
The comment Leoni gave with the announcement is drier still. He first noticed Bushpepa at the ESC, and liked the voice and the song at once. When the band found itself needing a new singer, the man came straight back to mind and Leoni simply contacted him — to which, he says, Bushpepa reacted with a fair amount of astonishment and just as much pleasure.
Ronnie Romero's exit surfaced on 13 April 2020, through a Facebook post of his own. The Swiss outlet theart2rock reported the same day that, according to the post, the band had parted with him some three weeks earlier — and remarked that the wording read like a dismissal. Nothing, the piece added, had yet been heard from the band.
Leoni gave his own account in May 2022. Romero had many projects on the go, which made scheduling steadily harder; some of them were bigger bands, and his priorities shifted, something the band felt on their last tour together. It was Romero himself, in Leoni's telling, who advised them to carry on with another singer.
Three and a half years later, in December 2025, Leoni put it more gently. Romero is definitely a great singer and interpreter, he said, and easy to work with in that sense; there were simply too many projects at once. In the end going separate ways was easier for everyone — and he added that he does not really follow what Romero is doing now.
He described the same sequence to a British interviewer in the same weeks: they had time during lockdown, so one song became two, two became three, and it kept going until, by the end of it, they had a complete record. They had been forced to stay home, he said, and used the time the right way.
The reason "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is on the record has less to do with the Rolling Stones than with Aretha Franklin. As a boy Leoni played Top 40 songs at dances and this one stayed in his head — but he preferred Aretha's reading to the original, and it was that harder version the band took as its base. Gotthard's ABBA cover, "S.O.S.", had come about the same way on their previous album: he hummed the vocal line in the rehearsal room while they were cutting the demo.
Who Ekaterina Bosova Leonova is does not appear in the band's own credit for the artwork of III. The Swiss music site bluevisions identifies her as Leoni's wife. Leoni has spoken elsewhere about being married to a Russian; it is this page that joins that fact to the sleeve.
The recording was not an accident. Leoni told an interviewer in December 2025 that they had decided to tape the show before the concert, hoping the magic of the evening would be caught. Listening back, the energy was plainly there, and they decided to release it the day after playing it; the label conversation came after that. The Hallenstadion, he added, is an important room in Switzerland, one he had played many times with Gotthard.
There is a third band in Leoni's orbit that regularly confuses people: Gotus, which involves Gotthard alumni, and which his interviewer duly mixed up with his own projects in 2022. Leoni corrected it flatly — he has nothing to do with Gotus, which is Mandy Meyer's band; Meyer was with Gotthard for a period and then went back to Krokus. He has, he said, just the two bands.
Whenever Leoni talks about changing singers he reaches for the same figure. In 2022 he noted that he had already lost a singer once in Gotthard, and called it a tragic story; a band, he said, is like a family, and a family is not something you play games with. What he concluded from the change was simply that they no longer wanted to share their singer with other bands.
It was Leoni who brought Jgor Gianola into CoreLeoni. In December 2025 he described the background: the two grew up in the same area and have known each other since they were teenagers, and because they live in the same town they never lost touch. The idea of doing something together again had always been there, so when he started CoreLeoni he rang him. On stage, he says, it felt as though no time had passed at all.