GAMMA RAY TRIVIA
Trivia
The band's very first tour drew its strongest response in Japan. The history on their site singles the country out — the tour was a big success "especially in Japan" — and records that a live video, Heading for the East, was shot at the Tokyo show as a document of it. The first Gamma Ray concert ever committed to film, in other words, was not in Germany or anywhere else in Europe but in Tokyo.
The Japanese dates of May 2024 were a bill assembled for Japan alone. Gamma Ray played EX THEATER ROPPONGI in Tokyo on 7 May and namba Hatch in Osaka on the 8th, and the special guest was Induction — the band in which Kai Hansen's son Tim plays. Mikiki reported that pairing the two acts was an arrangement made specifically for these shows, and noted that Hansen had been in Japan only the previous September, that time as a member of Helloween.
Gamma Ray did not set out to be a band at all. The history on the group's own site records that Kai Hansen left Helloween in 1988 after four years, the reason given publicly being the sheer weight of the band's touring. What he assembled afterwards was a recording project with people he already knew — Ralf Scheepers on vocals, Uwe Wessel on bass, Mathias Burchard on drums — and at that point he had no intention of forming anything permanent. The sessions with those studio musicians went so easily, and in such a relaxed atmosphere, that it became obvious to everyone involved that a band was what this was.
The unbroken heaviness of the lyrics on Sigh No More is explained on the band's own site as a consequence of the Gulf War, which was being fought as the record was made. The distance from the brightness of Heading for Tomorrow is considerable, and the same page says the style of the album differs vastly from its predecessor's. It stands as a record of a band known for fast, ornate songs being pulled into a different colour by events outside it.
Kai Hansen did not decide to become Gamma Ray's singer so much as inherit the job. As plans for the fourth album took shape, he and Dirk Schlächter had run up against the fact that Ralf Scheepers lived a long way from Hamburg, which confined rehearsals to weekends. Scheepers had meanwhile auditioned to front Judas Priest and, according to the history on the band's site, had made their final three. Hansen asked him outright whether staying with Gamma Ray was really the right thing, and the two agreed to part — with no hard feelings on either side. Guitar and lead vocals both fell to Hansen from then on. Scheepers went on to lead Primal Fear.
Michael Kiske, Hansen's colleague from the Helloween years, appears as a guest on 1995's Land of the Free. He sings one song outright — "Time to Break Free" — and the chorus of the title track. It makes for a particular arrangement: the first Gamma Ray album on which Hansen himself carried the lead vocals is also the one that brought his former singer in.
By the end of 1996 Gamma Ray consisted of two people: Kai Hansen and Dirk Schlächter. They began writing the next album in that state, and it was February 1997 before the vacancies were filled — Daniel Zimmermann on drums and, on guitar, Henjo Richter, who had already deputised on the Spanish shows the year before. The line-up that would hold for years was settled at that point.
When the time came for a best-of, Kai Hansen declined to do the usual thing and line up the existing recordings. The band went back into the studio and re-recorded the old songs instead, and the result was Blast from the Past. The choosing was not theirs either: according to earMUSIC's 2023 announcement, fans were asked to pick three songs from each album, and what came back became the running order. The albums drawn on span 1990 to 1999, and there are twenty songs. The sleeve is by Derek Riggs, the artist behind Iron Maiden's covers.
The concert marking the band's thirtieth anniversary was played at the ISS Dome in Düsseldorf on 27 August 2020, with no audience in the building. It was staged to be streamed, and Ralf Scheepers and Corvin Bahn appeared as guests. When the band came to turn it into a live album, in March 2021, they asked their audience for something unusual: put on a favourite Gamma Ray song, record yourself cheering and whistling on a phone or anything else to hand, and email the audio file in. The plan was to mix what came back into the gaps between the songs. The deadline given was 31 March.
The drummer on the first album, Mathias Burchard, left as soon as it was recorded: he wanted to give his studies his full attention. That left the band with a finished record and no way to play it, and the gap lasted a while. Uli Kusch, who had come through Holy Moses, filled it, and with him the first touring line-up was finally complete — Ralf Scheepers on vocals, Dirk Schlächter on guitar, Uwe Wessel on bass, Kusch on drums and Kai Hansen. Kusch would later join Helloween, and after that Masterplan.
The Heaven Can Wait EP of September 1990 was largely assembled from material that already existed. Its title track was a re-recording of a song from the debut album, and only one piece, "Who Do You Think You Are?", was genuinely new; the remaining three were left over from the debut sessions and had not made the album. The EP had to be ready in time for the band's first tour, which accounts for the shape of it.
The groundwork for the second album, Sigh No More, was not laid in a studio but in a small, remote house in Denmark. The band shut themselves in there in February 1991 with a batch of new songs, rehearsed, and only then went in to record with Tommy Newton producing. The finished album appeared that September and a fifty-date world tour followed it.
Immediately after the Japanese tour at the start of 1992 the band lost both halves of its rhythm section at once. The history on the band's site gives personal disagreements as the reason Uli Kusch and Uwe Wessel went. Their replacements came out of Anesthesia, a demo band from Hamburg: Jan Rubach on bass and Thomas Nack on drums, both of them still very young at the time.
The third album did not appear until 1993, and the reason was not a shortage of songs: the band were building a studio of their own. The history on their site says the work took a considerable while and that recording could not begin until 1993 because of it. Insanity and Genius came out that June, and its style moved back towards the debut rather than the album before it.
Insanity and Genius was presented to audiences through a run called Melodic Metal Strikes Back — four shows on which Helicon, Conception, Rage and Gamma Ray shared headline billing. The Hamburg night was filmed and became the band's second live video, Lust for Live, and the same recording was issued that December as a live CD titled The Power of Metal.
The Silent Miracles EP, four ballads and nothing else, was recorded in August 1995 with Kai Hansen and Dirk Schlächter shut in the studio — but it did not reach shops until February 1996. The reason was plain enough: the final mix could not be finished before the tour that was about to begin.
When Jan Rubach gave up the bass in 1996, the immediate cause was that Dirk Schlächter wanted the instrument back — he had been a bass player originally, and was set on returning to it. There was talk of moving Rubach to guitar, something he had always wanted to do in a band, but he could not bring himself to make the jump and left instead. Thomas Nack decided to go at much the same time, in order to concentrate on another musical project he had been running for a while. Nack did play the Spanish shows before departing; Rubach's place was taken by a guitarist, Henjo Richter.
The point at which Gamma Ray's lyrics turned towards space is Somewhere Out in Space, released at the end of August 1997. The band's own history states plainly that this record began their fascination with space, and places the following album, Power Plant, in the same lyrical line. Musically, though, the same page calls Power Plant a new direction — so the subject matter carried over while the sound did not.
Blast from the Past had been out of print for a long time before its reissue in May 2023. Producer Eike Freese remastered it, and the British journalist Dave Everley wrote extensive new liner notes built on an interview with Kai Hansen. A limited three-CD digipak added the Skeletons & Majesties mini-album as a bonus, and the reissue marked the first time the record had ever appeared on vinyl.
The setlist for the Skeletons in the Closet tour was not chosen by the band but voted for by fans on their website. The idea was to play songs that had rarely or never been performed live, and only a handful of shows were staged — but two of them, Barcelona and Strasbourg, were recorded and became the live album of the same name. Axel Mackenrott of Masterplan was brought in on keyboards for the run.
Gamma Ray once opened for Iron Maiden on the European leg of a tour, taking the first ten dates of it. The band gave that stretch a name of their own: Rayzin' Hell With The Beast. Their history notes that the run put them in front of a great many new listeners.
Daniel Zimmermann left the drum stool in January 2011, fourteen years after taking it, and the band's site records that he went on friendly terms. Michael Ehré, who had played with Firewind and Love.Might.Kill, replaced him. Zimmermann had been in place continuously since February 1997, which makes this one of the few times that long-settled line-up moved at all.
Skeletons & Majesties Live is not the record of a single night. The main programme is the two-hour show played at Z7 in Pratteln, Switzerland on 29 April 2011, but the six bonus tracks on the DVD and Blu-ray are alternative versions taped the previous day at the Zeche in Bochum, Germany. Michael Kiske sings on three songs: "Time to Break Free", "A While in Dreamland" and "Future World", the Helloween song Hansen wrote.
Neither Henjo Richter nor Michael Ehré could travel for the Latin American tour of April 2024. The band's announcement explained that Richter had been badly hit by a car some three months earlier, breaking ribs and other bones; he was recovering, but his doctors had told him not to fly until he had healed properly. Ehré had come through an appendix operation that had not settled correctly, and faced a second one followed by six weeks off. Kasperi Heikkinen took the guitar and Michele Sanna, an Italian session drummer and drum tech, took the drums. It was the second time Heikkinen had covered for Richter, the first having been more than a decade earlier.