HELLOWEEN TRIVIA
Trivia
The lead single from Master Of The Rings was a different song in Japan from the one the label had been told to use. In an interview published by Victor Entertainment, the director who handled the band said the instruction from abroad was that the single would be Mr. Ego — but as far as he was concerned there was only Where The Rain Grows. He talked the overseas company round, arguing that Japan wanted to go with that song, and the first single was changed.
The first single from Giants & Monsters was a song called This Is Tokyo. Andi Deris, who wrote both words and music, told Gekirock it is a personal song and one he had wanted to write for a long time. Japan is a special place in his life: it was in Japan that he had the first success of his career, with Pink Cream 69, and Japan has always been extraordinarily good to him. The video depicts a near-future Japan.
The name Helloween came out of an appearance on a compilation. According to the artist profile published by Victor Entertainment, the band's Japanese licensee, the four musicians — Kai Hansen on guitar and vocals, Michael Weikath on guitar, Markus Grosskopf on bass and Ingo Schwichtenberg on drums — were working under the name Iron Fist in 1984. When they were signed up for a compilation album called Death Metal Sampler they changed the name, and Helloween began. The band was formed in Hamburg, Germany.
The second album changed Helloween. As Louder describes it, on Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 Kai Hansen handed over vocal duties to the eighteen-year-old Michael Kiske. Musically it was a huge step up as well: thrash was out, replaced by a newfound sense of musical ambition and a set of powerhouse anthems to match. Nearly forty years on, the magazine reckons, Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 remains the template for power metal.
Kai Hansen is not keen on the label "power metal". Presented with the idea that Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 is the template for the genre, he rolled his eyes at Louder: they had chewed heavy metal down and spat it out their own way, he said, and then someone came up with the idea of calling it power metal — whatever that is. He had always thought power metal was cheesy, and they are not cheesy. Though, he allowed, maybe they can be a little bit cheesy sometimes.
I Want Out was its author's letter of resignation. Discharged after two months in hospital, Kai Hansen came to the conclusion that something had to change. He told Louder he suggested shortening the tours — could they cut it down? — and that the others answered that if management wanted them to play, they would play, because you only get one chance in life. Disillusioned as he was, he did not quit, not yet. He poured the frustration into a song for the next album instead, one whose title barely disguised what it was: I Want Out.
Before the seven-piece could exist, the two singers spent a fortnight together. As Louder tells it, when a double-frontman Pumpkins United tour was mooted in 2017, the management immediately identified the bridges that needed rebuilding — and between Andi Deris and Michael Kiske there had never been one to start with. Nearly twenty-five years after a single awkward introduction, Kiske got on a plane to Deris's home studio in Tenerife. The managers had told them that if the two of them did not get along there was no point talking further, because it would not work. Kiske stayed two weeks and they spent every day together; Deris took him to the places he knew, and they talked about everything. It was almost as though he had known him in a previous life, Kiske says — they connected straight away.
Michael Kiske and Michael Weikath made their peace before any reunion was on the table. Kiske told Louder that in 2013, while he was on tour with Avantasia, he ran into Weikath — who said exactly the right thing: what have I done that you cannot forgive me for? Kiske held his breath, looked inside himself, and noticed the anger was gone. There had been years when it would not have been, but there was nothing like that now, and he answered that he thought he had forgiven him a long time ago. That was 2013, with nobody talking about Pumpkins United or anything of the kind. He needed to go through all of it, he says, as a matter of his own development.
In the 1990s Victor went as far as setting up a paid-membership organisation for hard rock and metal. In the label's own interview, the director describes the Pure Metal Club, which charged an annual fee and put out something like a handmade newspaper every month. Alongside it ran the Pure Metal Seminar, an event series that brought band members to Japan and toured them around the country. Attendance was free and not tied to club membership; places went by lottery. Around The Time Of The Oath the seminars ran in seven cities, and 500 fans turned up to the Osaka one.
Promotion for The Time Of The Oath in Japan extended to terrestrial television. In the Victor interview the director recalls that they would often buy a thirty-minute slot, make a programme and then trail it in magazines and on the radio — and that they did exactly that for Helloween. With the previous album having sold 100,000, the mood was that a bit more budget was acceptable if it sold more.
On New Year's Day 1998, a Japan-only collection of early Helloween material called Pumpkin Box was released. In the Victor interview the director explains that it was a Japanese project built from early recordings, and that former members who had long since left the band cooperated with it. He cannot quite remember how he sold the idea to the management — he suspects he said something vague about it building anticipation for Better Than Raw. In the event Better Than Raw followed it almost immediately.
The last Helloween release the Victor director handled was the compilation Treasure Chest. In the label's interview he recalls that the two-disc version was manufactured domestically, while the three-disc edition was, he thinks, imported stock with a Japanese obi strip added, because there had not been time to produce a domestic pressing. The conversation goes on to note that release information reaching Japan late from abroad is a constant in every era.
In the first half of the 2010s Helloween were in Japan almost every other year. According to Victor Entertainment's profile, after releasing their thirteenth album 7 Sinners in October 2010 they toured Japan in February 2011 with Stratovarius as special guest, and returned in October 2012 for Loud Park 12. In the year they released their fourteenth album, Straight Out Of Hell, in January 2013, they were back again on Hellish Rock Part 2 with Gamma Ray.
In 2015, the thirtieth anniversary of their debut, Helloween released their fifteenth album, My God-Given Right. According to Victor Entertainment's profile they also played Loud Park 15 that year and toured Japan in September with Amaranthe as guests.
In September 2023 Helloween played the Nippon Budokan for the first time. According to Victor Entertainment's profile it came as part of an Osaka and Tokyo tour behind Helloween, the seven-piece line-up's first full album, released in 2021. BARKS reported that a band with nearly forty years behind them described the show as something they had long wanted.
The Japanese leg of Pumpkins United took place in March 2018. In its live report BARKS describes Michael Kiske and Andi Deris singing Halloween as a twin lead, and a triple guitar front line of Michael Weikath, Sascha Gerstner and Kai Hansen — a combination of people who had never previously shared a stage in the band's history.
In 2023, ahead of their first Nippon Budokan show, thirteen Helloween studio albums spanning 1991 to 2021 were reissued together in Japan, in paper sleeves and on SHM-CD for the first time. Gekirock reported the campaign as a celebration of the visit — thirty years of catalogue reissued in one go, with non-album tracks and other material added.
Helloween did not debut with an album but with a five-track mini-album. According to the profile published by Victor Entertainment, in 1985 the band made its debut with a self-titled five-track release on Noise International, a German heavy metal label, and put out its first full album, Walls Of Jericho, in the same year.
Victor Entertainment, Helloween's Japanese licensee, published a long conversation between two of the label's own directors who had handled the band. In February 2013 the fifth of them interviewed the third — the man who took over the account when Andi Deris joined — about the 1990s, the decade when Helloween reached its widest Japanese audience. It covers what the members were like on their Japanese visits, how the records came together, and the Pure Metal Seminar events Victor was running at the time.
Master Of The Rings was the first Helloween album to pass 100,000 copies in Japan. In the Victor Entertainment interview, the director who handled them recalls that the market was in good shape at the time — overseas music in general was selling and metal was selling well with it. That German metal, and Helloween in particular, were selling was obvious to the people working on them; what surprised others in the industry, including people at other labels handling metal, was that the globally famous metal bands were assumed to sell more, and in fact Helloween was outselling them.
Uli Kusch came in on drums alongside Andi Deris for Master Of The Rings. In the Victor interview the director says he knew Kusch already from Gamma Ray, and that at the time Kusch was regarded as the cute one and Deris as the cool one — so on top of the music, the band simply looked better. More women came to the shows as a result. He also puts it in context: the after-effects of the LA metal boom were still around, and metal had widened out to people who did not normally listen to it.
Andi Deris does not drink beer. In the Victor interview the director says neither Deris nor Michael Weikath drank much at all, and that Deris avoided beer entirely — the reason he gave was that he had fallen into a beer barrel as a child and had disliked it ever since. The two of them were already close at that point, and travelled the Pure Metal Seminar dates around Japan together.
The Japanese director first heard The Time Of The Oath in the studio where the band was recording it. According to the Victor interview he went with Hirose, the editor-in-chief of Burrn!, to a studio in Hamburg called Chateau du Pape, and was played tracks including Steel Tormenter. He remembers thinking that it opened with the sound of an engine and that this was a little different from what they had done before. At the time Helloween were with Sanctuary, the same management as Iron Maiden.
The Time Of The Oath sold around 200,000 copies in Japan. In the Victor interview the director says the initial shipment alone was something like 120,000 — double what Master Of The Rings had managed at 100,000. Asked what drove it, his answer was unambiguous: the song Power. At the extreme, he says, it was less about the album than about having that one song on it.
The Japanese tour behind The Time Of The Oath was a substantial one, put together by Udo Artists: thirteen shows in ten cities. In the Victor interview the director says the run included Kanagawa Kenmin Hall, and that the rule of thumb at the time was that a band who could fill the Nippon Budokan could sell out the Kenmin Hall — which they did. The Tokyo date was at Bay NK Hall, and that was packed too; looking back, he reckons the Budokan would have filled as well. Regional dates in places like Akita and Niigata sold out properly too.
One date on that tour was cancelled: Fukuoka. In the Victor interview the director recalls that it came down to Andi Deris being unwell. The tour as a whole, he says, was a great success.
In mid-1990s Japan the whole German metal scene was selling. In the Victor interview the director reels off the numbers: Gamma Ray's Insanity And Genius also reached 100,000; Blind Guardian, whose music was a bit more demanding and whose albums came further apart, still got close to 100,000; and Heaven's Gate managed something like 50,000. Any halfway decent band sold reasonably well, he says — a German metal bubble, in effect.
The Japanese director was taken aback the first time he heard Better Than Raw. In the Victor interview he says the guitar on I Can struck him as sounding like Buck-Tick — like Japanese rock. There were songs leaning towards thrash too, such as Push, and the album as a whole felt different from what had come before. His first reaction was bafflement; listening to it properly, he decided it was a good record. The artwork, which had changed considerably, he remembers as having impact and going down well.
The covers album Metal Jukebox had an advance single, which is unusual for a covers record. In the Victor interview the director confirms what it was: their version of Abba's Lay All Your Love On Me. He adds that the album itself was not a project the band went at with full seriousness.
The Dark Ride landed differently in Japan than it did abroad. In the Victor interview the director says the album — with its gothic-leaning songs, its artwork and its title all stepping away from the received image of Helloween — did not go down well in Europe, his guess being that people felt Helloween did not need to be doing that. In Japan it sold well. He likes it himself: Helloween records often had plenty of good songs but felt a little untidy to him, whereas The Dark Ride hung together as a whole.
The thanks list in the booklet of 2013's Straight Out Of Hell still carries the name of the man who handled Helloween in Japan in the 1990s. When the label's current director pointed this out in their interview, he was surprised that they were still putting him in, and said he was grateful for it. Helloween, he said, was a thoroughly enjoyable job at the most productive point of his working life at a record company. Asked what had changed between the band he handled and the band today, he pointed to the live shows: enormously better, and tighter, more like a metal band in every sense.
Rabbit Don't Come Easy was made without a settled drummer. According to the profile published by Victor Entertainment, after Roland and Uli Kusch left in 2001 and Sascha Gerstner came in on guitar, Helloween finished the album with Mikkey Dee of Motörhead helping out on the drum recording; Stefan Schwarzmann joined as their drummer only after the record was done. On the Japanese tour behind it, two then-new bands opened for them: DragonForce and Twilightning.
Dani Löble, the band's current drummer, joined in the middle of the 2000s. According to the profile published by Victor Entertainment, after Stefan Schwarzmann left over musical differences, Helloween brought in Löble, formerly of Rawhead Rexx, and released Keeper Of The Seven Keys – The Legacy in 2005.
Helloween have toured alongside the band formed by the founder who left them. Victor Entertainment's profile calls the Hellish Rock Tour with Gamma Ray a miraculous pairing: it ran around the world across 2007 and 2008 and was warmly received in Japan. In 2013 they did it again as Hellish Rock Part 2, with Japanese dates once more.
The Pumpkins United World Tour was announced as a limited-run return for Hansen and Kiske. According to Victor Entertainment's profile, the tour began with South American dates in 2017, launched alongside a new song by the seven-piece called Pumpkins United; the Japanese shows came in March 2018 and the world tour ran through to German dates at the end of that year. Live releases compiled from the best takes, United Alive and United Alive In Madrid, followed in October 2019 — and then, in answer to what the fans wanted, Hansen and Kiske stayed. Still a seven-piece, they released the single Skyfall, and their first full album in that form, Helloween, arrived in June 2021.
On A Little Is A Little Too Much, from Giants & Monsters, Andi Deris explains that he wanted to write about the last drop that causes a huge flood. In his comment on the band's official site he says the story itself is a little erotic, drawn from his first experiences as a teenager. The video was made in the style of 1990s MTV; guitarist Sascha Gerstner, whose idea it was, points out that Helloween have been going against the tide of heavy metal cliché since the 1980s, and asks people to think of videos like I Want Out or Where The Rain Grows.
In 2025, forty years after their debut, Helloween first marked the anniversary themselves with a compilation, March Of Time – The Best Of 40 Years, and then released Giants & Monsters in August. According to Victor Entertainment's profile it is the second album by the seven-piece line-up and their seventeenth overall.
Helloween's official site summed up the European run of the 2025 anniversary tour in figures: twenty-one shows, sixteen countries, 14,117 kilometres.
Helloween were part of a groundswell of German metal bands that came out of the first half of the 1980s — Louder places them alongside Kreator, Destruction and Sodom. Kai Hansen formed the group in Hamburg in 1984 with fellow guitarist Michael Weikath, bassist Markus Grosskopf and drummer Ingo Schwichtenberg. Their first album, 1985's Walls Of Jericho, was raw and thrashy, with Hansen doubling up on vocals and guitar.
The success of Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 put Helloween straight onto the road. Kai Hansen told Louder that they toured Europe, America and Japan extensively, and that with no internet in those days the only way to reach the people you loved was a grim phone box. On top of that, they were trying to party as much as they could. At some point, as he puts it, you get the bill — and in his case the bill was an extreme one: he fell ill and spent two months in hospital.
Helloween at that point was not a strong union. Kai Hansen told Louder they had no idea about the band's financial situation: they were paid a little every month and that was it, with no sense of who was being paid for what or how much was coming in and going out. What he wanted was information — who was working for whom. There were tensions between the members too: Hansen and Weikath were chalk and cheese, and the new singer Kiske was strong-minded in a way that belied his youth. Factions and rivalries began to form.
Kai Hansen's wavering commitment showed up in the songwriting credits. As Louder records, he had written or co-written most of Keeper Part 1; on the follow-up, Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 2, Michael Weikath shouldered much of the writing. There was a line running through the band on musical direction too. By Hansen's account, Weikath and Kiske were asking whether they wanted to do this metal stuff forever — Kiske was drawn to singer-songwriter material and Elvis, Weikath thought they had to be like the Beatles — while Ingo, Markus and Hansen himself were the hard-heads who wanted to rock and wanted to play metal.
When he wrote I Want Out, Kai Hansen did not entirely want out. What he could not shake, he told Louder, was a piece of advice an English aunt had once given him: whatever you do, do it with all your heart — love it, change it or leave it. Having finished the song he took his concerns to the rest of the band: something had to change; they would do the tour, and if nothing had changed by the end of it he might quit. The band had been his baby from the start, he says, and he did not want to quit it.
I Want Out was released as a single on Halloween 1988 — three months after Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 2, as Louder notes. Michael Kiske sang it, but the sentiments in it were entirely Kai Hansen's. The message was hard to miss and easy to ignore, and ignoring it is what the rest of the band did. They were indifferent, Hansen says: Weikath was happy, because the two of them were in competition, and Kiske's reaction was that he was stupid to do such a thing. By the start of the following year Hansen was no longer a member of Helloween.
On leaving, Kai Hansen describes two feelings at once. He told Louder he was feeling confident and free — and, on the other hand, that it could have been great.
In November 2016 Helloween announced the return of Kai Hansen and Michael Kiske. As BARKS reported it, the plan was a world tour called Pumpkins United in 2017 with a seven-piece line-up including both of them. Hansen was the band's original guitarist and singer, had left in 1989 and had since been the central figure in Gamma Ray; Kiske had joined in 1986 at the age of eighteen so that Hansen could concentrate on guitar. At the time of the announcement the only confirmed date was São Paulo, Brazil, on 28 October 2017, with South America, Europe, Asia and North America to be added.
The idea behind Pumpkins United came out of a book. Michael Weikath — the guitarist who has been in Helloween from the beginning — said that making the band's thirtieth-anniversary book, Hellbook, was the first time he had really taken in what they had achieved. At the same time it struck him that their story had barely been told. Victor Entertainment, the band's Japanese licensee, carried the same remark in a newsletter.
On rejoining, Michael Kiske drew a distinction between singing Helloween songs with Unisonic and what he was about to do. As BARKS reported him, performing them in Unisonic had been purely a look back, whereas rocking out with the original line-up and the band's current singer, Andi Deris, was going to be something extraordinarily special.
The Budokan show of 16 September 2023 became a release in its own right. As BARKS reported, Live At Budokan came out on 11 December 2024 in three formats — Blu-ray, DVD and double CD — with a bundle including a T-shirt sold exclusively through the Victor Online Store. The release also marked the grand finale of a world tour that had run from 2022 into 2023 across three continents and more than thirty countries. Michael Kiske described the Budokan night as unreal, with the fans' fervent energy creating an almost magical atmosphere.
The track released ahead of Live At Budokan was Best Time. Its writer, guitarist Sascha Gerstner, told BARKS that the song captures the energy of a moment when everything falls perfectly into place and every negative thing has been thrown away. For him it is an anthem for the kind of night on which the listener moves forward into the future — which is exactly why, he says, it belongs on stage.
Andi Deris and Kai Hansen explain the title Giants & Monsters from different angles. In a Greek Metal Hammer television interview reported by Blabbermouth, Deris said the first title says it all — Giants On The Run — and that it is about us as mankind: we are actually giants, with gods inside us. Hansen framed it differently: the giants are the great ideas you might have, your aims and your goals, and then along come the monsters, the demons and the everyday struggle you have to fight. He added that the title leaves a great deal of room for interpretation.
Giants & Monsters, the seven-piece line-up's second album, was made with more time than its predecessor. In the interview reported by Blabbermouth, Andi Deris said everybody had plenty of time to listen to each other's tracks and come up with their own ideas, which made it far easier this time for the others to put small things into his songs. The example he gave was Giants On The Run, into which Kai Hansen added what amounted to a whole new song.
In 2025 the Asian leg of the 40 Years Anniversary Tour was cancelled. According to the band's statement as reported by Blabbermouth, Michael Kiske had contracted acute pharyngolaryngotracheitis and asthmatic dyspnea with bronchitis during the European tour that had just finished, and his doctor had ordered immediate bed rest. The cancelled shows were in Indonesia, Malaysia and Taiwan in early December. The band said it was sorry for those fans, that Kiske's health was its highest priority, and that the step was unavoidable if long-term damage to his voice was to be prevented. The European leg had opened on 17 October at Rockhal in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
Disc two of Keeper Of The Seven Keys: The Legacy contains a duet with a female singer. According to Songfacts, that track — Light The Universe — was written by Andi Deris, runs to around five minutes, and is performed as a duet with Candice Night. It was also released as a single, on 22 November 2005.
The long-standing tension between Michael Kiske and Andi Deris was created without the two of them ever speaking. In a three-way video conversation with Louder, Kiske said that every time he saw Deris's face in a magazine the thought was "the guy took my job", and that it was painful. It ran the other way too: Deris was singing in Helloween while taking fire from Kiske's fans, so seeing Kiske's face was probably much the same for him. But the two of them, Kiske points out, never talked. It was a feeling created purely out of the situation.
Michael Kiske refused for years to listen to anything Helloween made after he left. Saying so in the Louder conversation, he added that when he did hear Master Of The Rings he understood why it had been a success. As he sees it, the band had stopped functioning after Kai Hansen left — not because Hansen is the band, but because the chemistry and the whole balance of it had worked with him there. That, Kiske says, is why his own departure was necessary too; and when Andi Deris joined, he was exactly what the band needed: focused, with songs, and not interested in fooling around. You saved the band, Kiske tells him.
The first album Andi Deris made with Helloween was a gamble for him as well. He told Louder that Michael Weikath had always been a fan of his songs, which gave him a good standing early on — but that if Master Of The Rings had not been a success, the songs he brought in would have been proved wrong. Fortunately, in his reading, people were rather happy that the band was back to metal, and anything else mattered rather less.
Work on Helloween, the seven-piece's first album, began with a session in April 2019 to share new material. Andi Deris told Louder that everybody came out of it relieved: there were already enough ideas that the album looked certain to be good, if not great. Another three months of writing and honing later they were ready for the studio — and still had nothing from either of the two returning members. Michael Kiske admits he had nothing at all, and that he had not even tried to write a song, because he thought there were more important songwriters in the band, Weikath among them. Next time you will, Deris insists.
For Kai Hansen the process was harder. He told Louder that he had no shortage of ideas but found it difficult to feel confident about them: he wanted everything to be super-special and did not want painting-by-numbers, so he was extremely critical of his own material. Go by the rulebook, he says, and you end up with something that is fine — and he did not want fine, he wanted something great.
Helloween burst out of Hamburg in 1984 as a quartet fronted by singer-guitarist Kai Hansen, and, as Louder describes it, quickly won plaudits in the mid-80s underground for their hyper-energised take on epic, melodic heavy metal. After Hansen decided to concentrate on guitar, the two Keeper Of The Seven Keys albums of 1987 and 1988 brought Michael Kiske's voice into the band. Momentum stalled, not helped by changing trends in the 1990s, and Kiske left in 1993; his replacement was Andi Deris, frontman of Pink Cream 69, whose firm hand steadied the ship.