EDGUY TRIVIA
Trivia
Edguy first played Japan during the Mandrake cycle in 2001. The biography kept by their Japanese label, Marquee / Avalon, records that the band played 62 shows in 23 countries inside that year, four of them their first in Japan. The live album that came out of this period, Burning Down The Opera Live, was their first. They returned after Hellfire Club (2004), the first record of the Nuclear Blast deal, and that visit brought their first headline tour of Japan. Around Tinnitus Sanctus (2008) they came back twice more — once for their own shows and once for Loud Park.
Edguy's Japanese editions carry songs you cannot get anywhere else. According to Marquee / Avalon's release listings, the Japanese Hellfire Club (MICP-10425, 10 March 2004) adds three bonus tracks: Children Of Steel, a version of Mysteria featuring Kreator's Mille Petrozza, and Heavenward, the demo of Navigator. The Japanese Rocket Ride (MICP-10565, 21 January 2006) also adds three — a live Land Of The Miracle, Reach Out, and an acoustic version of Lavatory Love Machine. Tinnitus Sanctus (MICP-10790, 19 November 2008) gains one, and the reissue of Mandrake adds The Devil & The Savant.
The name Edguy does not mean anything. According to the official page kept by their label, Nuclear Blast, the four fourteen-year-olds who started the band in 1992 simply took the nickname of their physics teacher and used it. Tobias Sammet looked back on it in a 2014 interview as a terrible band name that they nonetheless carried around the world, picking up a decent number of followers on the way. He takes genre labels the same way: call them power metal or call them old-fashioned hard rock, he says he does not mind, and if you come to a show and call them a stand-up comedy act, that is fine too.
It starts in February 1992 in Fulda, a town in central Germany. Four fourteen-year-olds from the same school — Tobias Sammet, Jens Ludwig, Dirk Sauer and drummer Dominik Storch — put a band together. Their label's official page says they began by playing Bon Jovi, AC/DC and Kiss songs, and that the first demo cassettes of their own material came two years later. Fulda is a small place where the workings of the music business reach you only by hearsay, and Sammet has since pointed out that they were playing Edguy shows before any of them had been to a concert as a fan.
There has been no new Edguy album since Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown in 2014, and the reason came from Tobias Sammet himself in a long social media post on 28 March 2020. Edguy, he said plainly, had been on hiatus for a while, with nothing in the pipeline. Space Police was a good album, he went on, but assembling it into something he was satisfied with had been exhausting; after nearly three decades of delivering like clockwork, a band should be allowed to run out of mutual agreement and take a break rather than put its logo on something for the sake of it. The core of his explanation is simple enough: he cannot split himself in two.
Asked by a reader when Edguy will come back, Tobias Sammet answered in a 2025 Louder feature that he genuinely has no idea — and that people are wrong to read this as him not caring. As he tells it, they came together as fourteen-year-olds when none of them could sing, play an instrument or write a song, and they grew side by side at the same pace. At some point the directions diverged: different work ethics, different ideas about how things should be done, and arguments. Eventually ninety per cent of the energy was going into finding compromises. With Avantasia he can produce an album in two months; with Edguy, two months would not be enough to agree on the key of the first song. They still get on, he said, and the book is not shut — but nothing is going to happen soon.
On 14 July 2012, at the Bang Your Head!!! festival in Balingen, Germany, Tobias Sammet went off the front of the stage. He slipped during the fifth song and landed on the concrete of the photographers' pit, coming away with a fractured nose, severe hip and rib contusions, and an assortment of cuts and abrasions. The band played the remaining hour of their set anyway. Sammet later said he had no idea how it happened: the stage was not damp, his shoes were fine and he was, obviously, completely sober. The blood and the pain got worse song by song, but between the adrenaline and the crowd it felt wrong to stop, so they carried on and had the doctors put him back together afterwards.
The Japanese edition of Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown went on sale on 23 April 2014. Marquee / Avalon's release listing from the time shows two configurations: only the first-press limited MICP-90075, a two-disc set at ¥3,000 plus tax, carried the bonus disc, while the standard MICP-11155 was ¥2,600 plus tax. The same announcement introduced the album to Japanese buyers as the most aggressive and metallic set of songs in Edguy's history and their first record in about three years. Love Tyger had appeared as a digital single in Japan on 28 March.
In 2017, to mark the band's 25th year, the Japanese catalogue was reissued as paper-sleeve SHM-CDs. Marquee / Avalon's listings show Kingdom Of Madness (MICP-30082), Vain Glory Opera (MICP-30083) and Theater Of Salvation (MICP-30084) arriving on 30 August, followed on 20 December by The Savage Poetry (MICP-30085), Mandrake (MICP-30086) and the compilation Hall Of Flames (MICP-30089/90). The Japanese Monuments (MIZP-60060, two CDs and a DVD) landed between them on 12 July, carrying five new songs: Ravenblack, Wrestle The Devil, Open Sesame, Landmarks and The Mountaineer.
The King Of Fools EP, the advance guard for Hellfire Club, appeared in Japan as MICP-10419 on 4 February 2004, about a month ahead of the album. Marquee / Avalon's listing describes it as a mini-album on an enhanced CD: put it in a computer and you get the making-of footage from Hellfire Club. Five tracks: an edit of the title song, New Age Messiah, The Savage Union, Holy Water — and one called Life And Times Of A Bonus Track, which is exactly the kind of joke the band's titles tend to be.
The Japanese edition of their first live release, Burning Down The Opera Live, came out on 21 August 2003 as MICP-90012. Marquee / Avalon's listing shows a two-disc set running from Welcome To The Opera to The Pharaoh on disc one, with Vain Glory Opera, a drum solo and Avantasia among disc two. It is an enhanced CD with one bonus track, a video clip of The Headless Game filmed in the USA, and a computer wallpaper. A second double live release, recorded in São Paulo on the Rocket Ride tour, followed in Japan on 22 April 2009 as MICP-90040.
The Japanese edition of the Superheroes EP appeared on 22 September 2005 as MICP-10537. Marquee / Avalon list it as a six-track mini-album: the title song, Spooks In The Attic, Blessing In Disguise, Judas At The Opera, The Spirit, and finally an epic version of Superheroes. Having the same title track twice, once straight and once epic, is the kind of joke Edguy tend to build into a running order.
The first album came out of their own pockets. According to the biography kept by their Japanese label, Marquee / Avalon, Edguy made two demo tapes — Evil Minded and Children Of Steel — and then paid for the recording of the album Savage Poetry themselves in 1995. Nuclear Blast's page tells the same story, and adds that it was this self-financed record that finally brought the deal they had been waiting for, with AFM Records. The Savage Poetry, released in 2000, is that record re-recorded from scratch by the line-up the band has now.
The five-piece that still stands settled into place immediately after Vain Glory Opera was finished in 1998. The Marquee / Avalon biography records that the drum stool passed from Dominik Storch to Frank Lindenthal around Kingdom Of Madness, and then to Felix Bohnke as soon as Vain Glory Opera was done. At the same time Tobias Sammet, who had been doubling on bass, moved to vocals alone and Tobias Exxel came in as a full-time bassist. Nobody has changed since. Marking the band's 25th year in 2017, Sammet wrote that not many musicians get to look back on a quarter-century of band history in their late thirties — and with no line-up change at all in the last twenty years.
Kingdom Of Madness, from 1997, carries a guest appearance by a veteran of the German metal scene: Grave Digger frontman Chris Boltendahl, who according to Nuclear Blast's official page sings on the epic The Kingdom. The band were still in their late teens and had persuaded an elder of the scene onto one of their songs. The same page describes the album as showing a clear step forward from what came before.
Vain Glory Opera, from 1998, is the record that made the band's name. The Marquee / Avalon biography notes that it was mixed by Timo Tolkki of Stratovarius and carries a guest appearance by Blind Guardian's Hansi Kürsch — serious backing for a band at that stage. It was also the first Edguy album to get a Japanese release, which means Japanese listeners could not buy an Edguy record in a shop here until the band's third album.
Edguy spent years with AFM Records before moving to Nuclear Blast in the 2000s. The Marquee / Avalon biography names 2004's Hellfire Club as the first release under the new deal. Nuclear Blast's own page says the band's career picked up speed after the signing, and rates the King Of Fools EP and the album — both from 2004 — as having set a new standard. In Japan the same period brought Edguy's first headline tour of the country.
Having released the Superheroes EP in the autumn of 2005, Edguy put out the album Rocket Ride almost immediately afterwards. Nuclear Blast's official page introduces the stretch with a line about there being no sweet without sweat, then notes that by Sammet's account it was no strain on the band at all. Within roughly eighteen months of the label move they had delivered two EPs and two albums — a rate that bears out the same page's claim that signing to Nuclear Blast sped their career up.
The first record Tobias Sammet bought with his own money was Kiss's Dressed To Kill. Speaking to Louder, he said the sleeve caught his eye while he was out shopping with his mother: masks worn with suits and ties, which struck him as odd, dangerous and a little like The Rocky Horror Picture Show all at once. He was nine. The music turned out to be lighter than he had hoped and he was faintly disappointed — but he became a Kiss fan anyway, because in those days it took an age to save up for the next record, so you played the one you had until you liked it.
Alongside Edguy, Tobias Sammet runs the metal opera project Avantasia. In a 2020 social media post he set out the order himself: Edguy has always been his love, and at the start of 1999 he began a second one in Avantasia. The Japanese label's biography places the same period in Edguy's own timeline — a pause after The Savage Poetry, during which Sammet made Avantasia – The Metal Opera. The attention Avantasia drew fed straight back into Edguy, and when the band resumed, Mandrake followed in 2001.
Rocket Ride, from 2006, turned into a record the band found hard to place. In a 2008 interview Tobias Sammet called it his favourite Edguy album in terms of playing and production, while admitting that the songs pulled in different directions. His own list of reference points says it all: Sacrifice represented Edguy well, the title track could have been Rainbow's Spotlight Kid, The Matrix sounded very modern, Wasted Time sounded like Firehouse and Asylum like Dio. It came out, he said, like a best-of-the-eighties compilation. The trouble was the conclusion some listeners drew — that Edguy were a comedy band. They are not, he took the trouble to add.
The Superheroes EP, released on 5 September 2005, features a guest appearance by former Helloween singer Michael Kiske. Tobias Sammet explained that one of the tracks had turned into a bombastic up-tempo epic somewhere between heavy Queen, Richard Wagner and Avantasia, and that asking Kiske to sing on it therefore became a must. Music, he said, is about goose bumps, and Kiske gave him plenty. At the band's insistence the EP went into shops at the price of a CD single.
The Superheroes EP and DVD came out on the same day but were built so that nothing except the title track appears on both. In an announcement Tobias Sammet posted on the band's own site, he said that was deliberate: two completely different releases, no rip-off. Writing about the recording in the same message, he noted that where many bands boast about how many months they spent in the studio, Edguy cut the basics live, everyone playing at once — then added third and fourth guitar tracks, repaired the mistakes, and put vocals and keyboards on top.
The Superheroes EP climbed to No.25 on the German singles chart. Speaking in October 2005, Tobias Sammet said it was in its fifth week on the chart at that point, sitting among major acts, while German television and radio were barely playing it — which he put down to the band refusing any pay-to-be-played arrangement. In the same interview he noted that in Sweden the DVD had gone to No.2 and the video was getting airplay.
Age Of The Joker entered the German Media Control chart at No.3 in 2011. The band's response noted that it may have been the strongest chart week of the year, with seven new albums landing in the album Top 10, and put the result down to the fans who had bought an original copy. The news reached them in the rehearsal room, in the middle of preparations for a tour that was to start on 23 September. The album had come out in Europe on 29 August 2011 via Nuclear Blast.
Age Of The Joker was recorded at Peppermint Park studio in Hannover, a room used by the likes of Scorpions and Phil Collins, and one the band themselves described as a recording temple with a tremendously good-sounding room. The album runs to eleven songs and over an hour, and the limited digipack added a bonus disc of six more.
The video for Robin Hood, from Age Of The Joker, is a send-up of the Errol Flynn film The Adventures Of Robin Hood. It was directed by Oliver Sommer, whose credits include Avantasia, Nena and Helloween, and shot in a forest with a large cast of extras — a miniature epic in which the German television comedian Bernhard Hoecker plays two separate leading roles.
The tenth album, Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown, was written straight after a large Avantasia tour. As Tobias Sammet told it, he had been across three continents with a twelve-piece band, and when he came home in August 2013 it felt good to get back into the studio and write something to the point: a fast, heavy metal album with his bandmates, no concept and no guest vocalists. That hunger, he reckons, is what turned the album into the monster it became. He also credits the deliberately tight schedule, which left no time to doubt, second-guess or retouch things that did not need retouching.
For the sleeve of Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown, Tobias Sammet said the label had demanded heavy metal cover art — and he described the result as a checklist: a monster, a daredevil action hero, a fantasy space scape, hand-painted, fire, and the weapon the fire is coming out of. Doing exactly that and getting away with it, he concluded, is what metal is. In the same announcement the band said they believed this would be the strongest and heaviest record they had made, and the one Edguy would be measured against in future.
Track six of Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown, Rock Me Amadeus, is not an Edguy original: it is a power-metalled version of the Falco song. Louder introduced it as one of those rare collisions between power metal and 1980s new wave, and put the question of where the idea came from to Tobias Sammet directly. A cover on an Edguy album is unusual in itself; that the one they picked came from so far outside metal is what made it talked about at the time.
England, on the Space Police bonus disc, is a ballad in which Tobias Sammet — a German — pays tribute to England. Speaking to Classic Rock, he framed it as a love letter to the country that produced Iron Maiden's Steve Harris and Bruce Dickinson, The Beatles, Magnum's Bob Catley (a collaborator in Avantasia), Def Leppard, Shakespeare, Gary Lineker and Mr Bean, complete with a line declaring penalty shootouts to be highly overrated. When word of the song reached his own countrymen the reaction was not warm; some told him to go and live there. He and his wife, he replied, have considered it.
The song that has done most to make people mistake Edguy for a comedy act is probably Lavatory Love Machine, from 2004's Hellfire Club. Louder describes it as a song recorded to celebrate the joys of the Mile High Club. Asked about that streak of humour, Tobias Sammet said some people think the band are too goofy, but that they take the music itself very seriously — they simply do enjoy a laugh. The things he named as his own touchstones were Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, and he is aware that a thoroughly British sense of humour does not always translate.
Besides the standard CD, Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown appeared as a two-disc digibook and, in smaller numbers, as a hardcover earbook edition. The earbook is a 28.5cm square containing both discs plus a photographic history drawn from the band's archive — more than 130 images — along with liner notes and a touring history. The bonus disc holds two songs left off the album, England and Aychim In Hysteria, a progressive version of the title track, and instrumental versions of Space Police, Love Tyger, Defenders Of The Crown and Do Me Like A Caveman.
Monuments, released on 14 July 2017 for the band's 25th year, is not a greatest hits album. The Nuclear Blast package — two CDs and a DVD — puts brand new material and previously unreleased old rarities alongside the best of twenty-five years. The DVD carries an entire show from the 2004 Hellfire Club tour plus the band's complete collection of video clips, and the limited edition adds an extensive coffee-table book drawn from their whole history. Gathering all that picture material, Sammet said, reminded them how proud they are of what they have made.
The anniversary run was billed as 25 Years - The Best Of The Best: Monuments Tour 2017 and drew its set from the whole career. After Masters Of Rock in the Czech Republic in July, the tour crossed the German-speaking countries through September and finished on 3 October at the Wartenberg-Oval in Fulda — the band's home town, closing twenty-five years where they had started. By then they had played in more than forty countries, toured Asia, Australia and America repeatedly, and put out ten studio albums with Top 10 chart entries around the world.
Asked in a 2025 Louder readers' feature whether Edguy helped power metal survive, Tobias Sammet laughed that they did not help — they made the genre survive. He immediately qualified it: there were others, Helloween were always there, so were Gamma Ray and Stratovarius, and then came a third wave like Dragonforce and the thing got bigger. When he started playing, he added, he had never heard the term power metal at all; heavy metal was powerful by nature.
For the man who did as much as anyone to establish the metal opera, Tobias Sammet is oddly cool on actual opera. Speaking to Louder in 2025, he said he loves the stories, the staging, the narrative approach and even the chandeliers, and that he likes classical music — but the moment the singing starts it sounds like sirens to him and he switches off. Asked in the same feature who he would most like at dinner, living or dead, he named Freddie Mercury: the writing, the performing, the things he would have to say, the life story, and a tongue-in-cheek British sense of humour.
Asked what advice he would give young bands, Tobias Sammet answered not with a recipe for success but with a way of choosing your failures. In the 2025 Louder feature he said: do what you feel. You will most likely fail, but failing at something you love beats failing at something somebody else told you to do and you never believed in. Stick to what you believe in and work at it; do what makes you happy, and if you succeed there is a chance you will make someone else happy too. He also passed on something Kiss drummer Eric Singer once told him — that taking one chance in life opens another door, and with it more chances to get further up.
Tobias Sammet has one consistent bias in album covers: blue. Asked in a 2017 Louder feature to name his favourite artwork, he said he likes blue colours — as anyone can see from looking at Avantasia's discography — and laughed. The examples he reached for were the Magnum compilation Mirador and Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell II, in both cases for reasons he cannot explain beyond the colour. Ask him tomorrow, he added, and it might be something else.
Tobias Sammet criticises the modern world in his lyrics but has no interest in playing the admonisher, as he explained in a 2014 interview. He has no fears or worries, he said, and most of his lyrics are personal, spiritual or simply there to entertain. The same holds when he does take aim: even when he goes after music criticism and philistinism, as in Space Police, he tries to tell the little story with a smile from coast to coast and his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Metal is heard differently in America and in Germany, Tobias Sammet said in a 2014 interview. As he sees it, American audiences appreciate blues elements far more than continental Europe does — and the evidence he offered was that even Aerosmith and Van Halen have collected very few gold awards in Germany. American shows, on the other hand, bring a kind of enthusiasm he puts down to European bands rarely touring there. The trade-off is scale: they have to strip down for clubs. His rule for that is simple enough — however small the club, perform the hell out of it and turn it into an arena show.
Told by a reader that Creepshow, the advance track from Avantasia's 2025 album Here Be Dragons, felt very Edguy-ish, Tobias Sammet replied that nothing about it was intentional — most of what he does simply comes the way it comes. In the past, he said, Avantasia was usually about that misunderstood, melancholic kid and there was a great deal he needed to get off his chest; this time he enjoyed just writing a party song and letting it go where it wanted. The band's webmaster told him the new record reminded him of Hellfire Club and Theater Of Salvation. Sammet does not think the songs are alike, but grants that the youthful energy is shared, and that this is probably what reads as Edguy.