FAIR WARNING Trivia — 57 Entries
57 sourced facts about FAIR WARNING.
Trivia
The first Japanese tour came soon after the 1992 debut. Warner Music Japan describes its high point as the closing show at Club Citta in Kawasaki on 18 April 1993, and that night was filmed in full. The band's own discography records the video release The Call Of The East in the same terms: recorded live at Club Citta, Kawasaki, Japan, on 18 April 1993.
That live album, too, came out in Japan first. Avalon's August 2010 release sheet lists the triple live album Talking Ain't Enough (MICP-90048) as a Japan-first release, with disc two as an enhanced CD and one bonus track added, and describes it as the band's first live album in twelve years — since Live And More. The European edition was announced through Steamhammer/SPV for 19 November in Germany, 22 November across the rest of Europe and 23 November in the USA and Canada.
Sundancer reached Japan a full month ahead of anywhere else. Avalon's April 2013 release sheet gives the Japanese street date as 24 April in two editions: a first-press limited SHM-CD plus CD set (MICP-30040) in special packaging with a sixty-page booklet and a bonus disc, and a standard CD (MICP-11080). The announcement carried by Blabbermouth put Germany on 24 May, the rest of Europe on 27 May and the USA and Canada on 28 May, handled by SPV/Steamhammer everywhere outside Asia.
The Japanese edition came out on 31 August 2016 as the first release of the band's move to King Records — KICP-1760, on SHM-CD, with a campaign entry ticket in first-press copies. On the same day King reissued five catalogue titles in newly remastered budget editions: Go!, Live And More, Four, Brother's Keeper and Aura. The European release followed on 28 October through Steamhammer/SPV.
Tommy Heart described that first Japanese visit in a 2017 interview. For a band from Germany, he said, Japan was like another planet, and they had no way of guessing how an audience there would react. The moment they walked onstage an enormous energy came back at them; the crowd knew the words and sang along. It moved him so much that he found himself in tears onstage.
FAIR WARNING have sung Kyu Sakamoto's "Ue o Muite Arukō" — "Sukiyaki" — ever since their first visit to Japan. In 2017 Tommy Heart said they had been performing it since that first Japanese tour: he cannot speak Japanese, but he likes the sound and the rise and fall of the language, and reckons it matters more to sing it with feeling than to get the pronunciation right. The song appears on the video of the 1993 Club Citta show, and it was played on both nights of the 25th-anniversary concerts in 2017.
The push to reform came from Japan. In METAL HAMMER's February 2006 issue Tommy Heart said that whatever he did in the intervening years, requests kept arriving from Japanese fans for another FAIR WARNING record — which is why he got in touch with his former colleagues Ule Ritgen, Helge Engelke and C.C. Behrens and agreed that such an album would appear in 2006.
Those two Japanese visits produced the next release. The announcement for the live album Talking Ain't Enough – Fair Warning Live In Tokyo explains that after the 2009 Loud Park appearance and a sold-out Japanese tour in 2010, the band decided to put out a live CD and DVD. On the triple CD, discs one and two are the January 2010 Tokyo show and disc three is Loud Park 2009; the double DVD follows the same split, with private footage added.
Pimp Your Past began as a request from Japan. In the announcement carried by Blabbermouth, Ule Ritgen said that when their Japanese record company approached them for this kind of album they were sceptical at first — but once they decided not simply to re-record the material but to give it fresh arrangements, the project gathered momentum and they were gripped by an eagerness to see what was possible.
After the Tōhoku earthquake of March 2011, Tommy Heart initiated a charity EP, Help! For Japan — a cover of the Beatles song, with current and former members of DEEP PURPLE, EDGUY, HELLOWEEN, GOTTHARD, MAGNUM, KROKUS and TNT taking part, and proceeds to go to the Japanese Red Cross. The list of guest lead guitarists includes Helge Engelke alongside Kyoji Yamamoto of BOWWOW.
The debut was produced by Rafe McKenna, whose credits include GIANT, TEN and BAD COMPANY. Ule Ritgen has explained how the band came to produce Rainmaker and everything after it themselves: it was not that they were unhappy with McKenna. When the debut was finished, the record company asked them to remix several tracks because it preferred the sound of the original demos. They did, the label was delighted, and from then on producing themselves simply seemed the logical thing to do.
The early 1990s were a hostile climate for traditional melodic rock, yet the debut sold well in Japan. According to the band's own official biography, FAIR WARNING were voted "Newcomer of the Year" by the readers of the metal magazine BURRN!.
Two different figures circulate for how much Rainmaker sold in Japan. In the official biography Ule Ritgen recalls it selling "something like 140,000 or 150,000 copies" there, and says it gave the band its first hit single in "Burning Heart". King Records, on its own product page, puts the second album at 120,000 copies at the time. Neither says whether the number is shipments or sales, over what period, or from which body.
Rainmaker earned a gold disc in Japan. Two Japanese labels state it independently on their own pages: King Records, describing the 1995 second album, and Warner Music Japan, whose product page for the record notes it as a gold-disc award winner.
Set out in order, FAIR WARNING's best position on Oricon's weekly album chart is number five. Rainmaker and Go! both reached it, charting for six and eight weeks respectively. Then come Brother's Keeper at 11, Four at 12, Aura at 19, Sundancer at 28, Pimp Your Past at 43 and Early Warnings: '92-'95 at 50. Only two of their records reached the top ten.
After Four, the band stopped. The official biography says only that they disbanded in 2000, and gives no reason. Tommy Heart went on to front the hard rock band SOUL DOCTOR, while Helge Engelke resurfaced with C.C. Behrens in DREAMTIDE, who released two albums through Frontiers Records.
In 2009 FAIR WARNING played a Japanese festival for the first time. LOUD PARK 09 ran on 17 and 18 October at Makuhari Messe halls 9, 10 and 11, and the official timetable puts the band on the ULTIMATE STAGE at 16:30 on the second day, with an official signing session scheduled for 18:30 the same evening. King Records' own page likewise records this as their first appearance at a Japanese festival.
The 25th-anniversary shows were built as two nights with different programmes. Billed as CLUB CITTA' PRESENTS Fair Warning – 25th Anniversary Twin Special Japan Tour 2017, Saturday 22 April 2017 was the "1993 CLUB CITTA' COLLECTION" — the set list of the 1993 Club Citta show plus the whole of the debut album — and Sunday the 23rd was the "2017 PIMP YOUR PAST COLLECTION", built around the new arrangements. Both nights were at Club Citta in Kawasaki, doors 16:00 and stage 17:00, all standing, 9,000 yen in advance. bayfm78's "POWER ROCK TODAY" presented, Club Citta promoted and produced, with King Records and Disk Union in support.
Tommy Heart's account is that FAIR WARNING grew out of the dead end ZENO had reached. ZENO were on a demo deal with Geffen and were being told repeatedly to write better songs, until Zeno Roth finally said he was not happy with the situation and no longer wanted to make music. Ule W. Ritgen then proposed starting a new band, and Heart, C.C. Behrens and Ritgen began FAIR WARNING between them. When it came to finding a guitarist, Ritgen put forward Helge Engelke; Heart suggested Andy Malecek, a fellow Berliner he knew well. Engelke was tried first, and became the band's first guitarist.
Reference sources routinely list Helge Engelke as a member of ZENO. Tommy Heart flatly denies it. Engelke never joined ZENO, he says: at the time Engelke had his own band, EMPIRE, and was brought in purely as a live player when ZENO needed a second guitarist for a showcase staged in Hanover for visiting British and American record-company people. Heart puts the number of shows he played alongside him at two or three. Warner Music Japan's official profile, meanwhile, lists Engelke as a ZENO member alongside Ritgen, Heart and Behrens.
On where the name came from, METAL HAMMER's introductory piece at the time of the debut (April 1992 issue) says it was taken from the name of John Jackson's booking agency. The same article notes that guitarist Andy Malecek joined a short time after the band was formed.
Some of the songs on the debut album had been recorded once before FAIR WARNING existed. Tommy Heart says three of them — "Hang On", "The Heat Of Emotion" and "Longing For Love" — had previously been cut as ZENO songs. Warner Music Japan's own product page likewise describes the album as one that includes material written by Zeno Roth.
In Japan the third album, Go!, came out on Zero Corporation. Tommy Heart looked back on the relationship in a 2017 interview as an excellent one, describing the company's former president, Toru Hashimoto, as a good businessman who was also a rock fan and believed in FAIR WARNING's music. He added that he was sorry Zero had left the music business.
The fourth album was supposed to be called Mission Impossible. As METAL HAMMER reported in February 2000, the film title was legally protected and clearance was impossible, so the plan had to go. Ule Ritgen shrugged that they had no option but to look for another title. What they settled on simply followed the chronology of their releases: Four.
Asked what he had been doing since FAIR WARNING stopped, Andy Malecek answered that he needed some time off, that he was taken ill in 2000, and that once he had recovered he wanted to do little but play guitar, see friends and perhaps play with bands very different from FAIR WARNING. One reason he gave was volume: on tour, Helge and Ule preferred a very loud stage set-up, and he could not see why it had to be that loud. They wore earplugs, he says. He did not.
How Engelke came by his Sky Guitar depends on which source you read. In a first-person column he wrote for a German webzine, Engelke recalls Uli Jon Roth showing him the Sky Guitars at the end of the 1980s; when he asked whether Roth would mind him having a similar instrument built, Roth said there was no need — he was working on a seven-string Sky, so Engelke could have one of the six-strings. That guitar became his main instrument for several years. METAL HAMMER, writing in March 1997, tells it differently: of the five Sky Guitars then in existence, Roth still owned three and had sold the other two to his friend Engelke.
Helge Engelke died suddenly on 28 April 2023, aged 61. In its tribute, Young Guitar remembered the man who led Dreamtide and gave FAIR WARNING its distinctive voice as a player of the Sky Guitar and the developer of his own model, the Stratmann NCC-1701. Uli Jon Roth, in his own tribute, said Engelke had been close to his brother Zeno and worked with him a great deal in those years, had been an invaluable help to Roth himself ever since 1987 and assisted him on many things in the studio, and had mixed both of his Scorpions Revisited projects.
The Japanese first-press edition of Sundancer came with a four-track bonus disc: "Here Comes The Rain", "Send Me A Dream (Piano Version)", "Natural High (Freak Flag Mix)" and "Real Love (Extended Version)". "Just As She Smiles", the bonus track on the European digipak, is not among them.
The year the band came together is still unsettled among sources that ought to know. King Records' official artist page says 1989, describing Ritgen, Heart and Behrens leaving ZENO after Zeno Roth's departure and adding Engelke and Malecek. Warner Music Japan's official profile puts the same line-up's formation in 1990. The band's own official biography dates the debut album to 1991, which shifts the arithmetic again. This site takes it no further than what the catalogue supports: it happened before the 1992 debut.
Ule W. Ritgen's career began in Uli Jon Roth's own band. According to Roth's official biography, the live line-up he assembled for Electric Sun's 1983 return after a two-year break ran to seven musicians onstage: Ritgen on bass, two drummers led by former JETHRO TULL man Clive Bunker, two backing singers and keyboards.
On the band's own site, the member profiles give Helge Engelke's home town as Altenhorst and his other bands as "VIP / TOP SECRET / DREAMTIDE". In the same set, Ule Ritgen is from Hanover and lists Electric Sun and Zeno; C.C. Behrens is also from Hanover and lists Silent Circle and the Heinz Rudolf Kunze Band. Only Tommy Heart comes from elsewhere — Berlin, Gropiusstadt — and where the others named bands, his entry says there is not enough space to name them all.
Drummer Jürgen "C.C." Behrens is an endorsed Paiste artist, and the cymbal maker's official artist page carries his career as a list: Silent Circle from 1985 as a founding member, the Paiste endorsement from 1986, the Matthias Reim tour in 1991, FAIR WARNING from 1991 as a founding member with gold records in Japan, Heinz Rudolf Kunze from 1995 to 2001, Trommelfeuer from 2000, Dreamtide from 2001 and Ö-Band from 2018.
The 1993 Club Citta show first appeared as the live CD Live In Japan and on videocassette, then was reissued by Warner Music Japan on 9 November 2005 as the DVD The Call Of The East – Live In Japan +5 (WPBR-95055). For the DVD the live audio was remastered in Germany, and five songs that had been on the CD but were missing from the videocassette — "The Heat Of Emotion", "The Call Of The Heart", "In The Ghetto", "Sukiyaki" and "Mickey's Monkey" — were added as bonus footage.
The band's Japanese home has changed with almost every record. Warner Music Japan's official profile traces it: a 1992 debut on WEA, a change of label before Go! in 1997, then a move to Marquee/Avalon for Four in 2000. In 2016 they moved again, to King Records, where Pimp Your Past was the first release under the new deal.
The year after Go! was finished in 1997, drummer C.C. Behrens left the band just before a Japanese tour. King Records' official artist page records that the shows went ahead with a stand-in drummer, and that the band then went into the next album's recording sessions with no permanent drummer in place.
Brother's Keeper was made the same way: the band shut themselves away in an old manor house. The official biography notes that, as with Rainmaker, Go and Four before it, they withdrew to a mansion and recorded most of the new album there between August 2005 and March 2006.
Andy Malecek did not come back for the reunion. On the band's own discography, every sleeve from the debut through Four credits a five-piece including Malecek; Brother's Keeper in 2006 credits four — Tommy Heart on vocals, Helge Engelke on guitar, Ule W. Ritgen on bass and C.C. Behrens on drums. That single-guitar line-up held for the records that followed.
A headline tour followed the year after LOUD PARK 09. Creativeman's official page lists the FAIR WARNING Japan Tour 2010 as five shows: Hiroshima Club Quattro on 17 January, Osaka Bigcat on the 19th, Nagoya Club Diamond Hall on the 20th and two nights at Wel City Tokyo, the former Tokyo Kosei Nenkin Kaikan, on the 22nd and 23rd. The Tokyo dates were presented by bayfm, with Marquee Inc. in support.
The two nights had a prelude. On Thursday 20 April 2017, at the TIAT Sky Hall in Haneda Airport, the band played an open rehearsal followed by a meet-and-greet with everyone who attended — billed by Club Citta as the first public premium warm-up show in FAIR WARNING's history. Door tickets went on sale at 18:00 at 9,000 yen, and the page was later updated to report that the evening had gone off successfully.
Both nights were recorded and released as Two Nights To Remember on 22 May 2019, Japan first: a four-CD set (KICP-1979~82), a two-DVD set and a two-Blu-ray set, containing the concerts complete. The first announcement, in July 2018, had promised something different — a 26 December 2018 release, as yet untitled, on two CDs plus DVD and Blu-ray. In the end it slipped by about five months and the CD edition doubled from two discs to four.
Later that same year Tommy Heart released his first solo album, Spirit Of Time. King Records' product page gives it a Japan-first release on 21 December 2016 with two bonus tracks, one of them exclusive to the Japanese edition, and Andy Malecek guesting. Helge Engelke is also among the guest soloists.
Any account of Helge Engelke's sound has to include the Sky Guitar. Designed by Uli Jon Roth himself, the instrument dates — according to the official UJR Sky Guitars — from 1983, when the very first one was built in England by master luthier Andreas Demetriou, with the aim of vastly extending the electric guitar's range and its spectrum of tone colours.
Tommy Heart entered this circle through a single night on the road. Singing for V2 on a German tour supporting HELLOWEEN, he played Hanover, and Zeno Roth and Ule W. Ritgen were in the audience. The call that followed came from C.C. Behrens, and Heart assumed someone was playing a joke on him. He was nineteen, and flying from Berlin to the Hanover audition meant getting on an aeroplane for the first time in his life.
ZENO, the band FAIR WARNING grew out of, was formed in 1984 by Zeno Roth — Uli Jon Roth's younger brother — together with Michael Flexig and Ule W. Ritgen, who would later be FAIR WARNING's bassist. The self-titled debut appeared in 1986 and was followed by touring with bands such as BLACK SABBATH, KEEL and KROKUS. Zeno Roth died on 5 February 2018, aged 61.
Ule Ritgen was the band's main writer, but the debut also carries songs by Helge Engelke. Tommy Heart, calling Engelke an outstanding songwriter as well as a guitarist, named "One Step Closer" and "When Love Fails" as his. In the same interview Heart adds that "One Step Closer" was a difficult song for him, sitting awkwardly for his range and his way of singing.
Making that record with McKenna was evidently not a smooth ride. In METAL HAMMER's April 1992 issue, Ule Ritgen says they had a great many battles to fight with their producer, whose view was that their songs had turned out far too hard for radio play.
That 1993 footage did not reach Europe for another thirteen years. In 2006, alongside the reunion album, Frontiers Records announced a region-free NTSC DVD of Call Of The East – Live in Japan, containing the whole Club Citta show of 18 April 1993. The same announcement covered European reissues of the debut and Rainmaker in their original artwork and running order.
Four was not recorded in a studio but in a rented farmhouse. According to METAL HAMMER of February 2000, the thirteen tracks of the European version were cut in a farmhouse at Bissendorf near Hanover, taken specifically for the sessions, and mixed at Hanover's Horus Sound Studio. The same piece notes in passing that Japan, as always, would get bonus tracks.
Just before Four came out, the band changed European labels. METAL HAMMER reported in May 2000 that FAIR WARNING had dissolved their contract with Drakkar Entertainment, an offshoot of G.U.N. Records, and signed instead with the Italian AOR label Frontiers. Helge Engelke said Frontiers had guaranteed them a release in every European country, in South America and in the USA.
Work on the reunion album began in the autumn of 2005. When Frontiers Records announced the details in May 2006, Brother's Keeper was still only a working title. The European release came on 25 August 2006, preceded by European reissues of the debut and Rainmaker and accompanied by the first worldwide release of the DVD The Call Of The East.
Four Japanese dates were set for October 2006 to go with the reunion album. As CDJournal reported that July, they were Hiroshima Club Quattro on the 10th, Nagoya Diamond Hall on the 11th, Osaka Matsushita IMP Hall on the 12th and Tokyo Shibuya Kokaido on the 14th. Tickets were 7,500 yen including tax, with the Tokyo show split into S and A seats at 7,500 and 7,000 yen; enquiries went to Udo Artists.
The writing on Aura was split between Ule Ritgen and Helge Engelke. In an August 2009 interview Ritgen said he had composed nine of the twelve tracks, with Engelke writing "Don't Count On Me", "As Snow White Found Out" and "Walking On Smiles". In the same interview he explained that their deal with Frontiers had come to an end for the time being and the album was going out through Metal Heaven, which had made the better offer — with no hard feelings on either side.
Sundancer was the first FAIR WARNING record to carry songs written by the whole band. According to the 2013 announcement reported by Blabbermouth, several of the fifteen tracks recorded were composed collectively, with the other twelve written by Ritgen and Engelke, and the band produced it themselves as usual. The album's title and sleeve were described as a deliberate nod back to Rainmaker of 1995.
On where the title came from, Avalon describes Sundancer as a record made with the Native American Sun Dance ceremony in mind. Young Guitar's review reads it the same way, suggesting that, as the title and artwork imply, it draws on Native American culture much as Rainmaker did. Tommy Heart, looking back in 2017, called Sundancer a hard, slightly metal-leaning album, and added that he is not a metal singer — if he had to define himself, he said, it would be as a melodic hard rock singer.
There is a monkey on the cover of Pimp Your Past. Asked about it, Helge Engelke first joked that they had run out of dragons — unfortunately, they are extinct — then made the serious point: given the word "pimp", a sleeve full of old cars would have been the logical choice, but honestly, who wants something normal? Besides, he said, monkeys stand for an early stage of human evolution.
Alongside FAIR WARNING, Tommy Heart has worked repeatedly with former EUROPE guitarist Kee Marcello. On 19 May 2017 Frontiers Music Srl announced the signing of Kee Of Hearts, a band project built around the two of them, with Ken Sandin of ALIEN on bass and Marco Di Salvia on drums; work had begun in late 2016. In 2022 the same core reappeared as Out Of This World — Marcello, Heart and Sandin with drummer Darby Todd.
Ule Ritgen has a second career. As BARKS reported in 2009, he is a painter with more than a thousand works behind him: interested in drawing from childhood, he studied various techniques and began working seriously in oils in 1995. Among the artists he names as influences, Hokusai sits alongside the European masters. His paintings have been used on Uli Jon Roth's album Under A Dark Sky and on ZENO's Runway To The Gods, and he has exhibited repeatedly at a gallery in Yokohama.