MANOWAR TRIVIA
Trivia
The second disc of the 2009 EP Thunder in the Sky holds fifteen versions of the power ballad "Father" in other languages, and the ninth of them is the Japanese version. The rest are in Bulgarian, Croatian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish, while the English original sits on the first disc. The band's own biography calls it a first in heavy metal history and speaks of the song being recorded in 18 languages. Singing in other languages was not new for Manowar. The 1988 single Herz aus Stahl was, as laut.de puts it, "Heart of Steel" with German lyrics, and in 2023 the band released a single with a German title, Laut und hart, stark und schnell.
Four Manowar albums have gone gold in Germany. The certification database of the BVMI, the German music industry association, lists gold awards for Fighting the World and Kings of Metal in 1994, and for The Triumph of Steel and Warriors of the World in 2003; the first three are Atlantic Records releases, the last came out on Nuclear Blast. The video release Fire and Blood followed with a gold award in the music video category in 2007. An announcement reported by Blabbermouth.net in 2005 added that Warriors of the World had reached No. 2 on Germany's Media Control chart.
Manowar's highest placing on the German albums chart is No. 2, reached by both Warriors of the World in 2002 and Gods of War in 2007. GfK's official chart records show Warriors of the World spending 31 weeks on the chart and Gods of War 19. The earliest entry in those records is Kings of Metal, which charted in December 1988 and peaked at No. 37. The Triumph of Steel made No. 8 in 1992, going straight in at that position as laut.de notes, and Louder Than Hell No. 7 in 1996. Among the singles, "Warriors of the World United" reached No. 15 in 2002, while "The Dawn of Battle", which charted at the end of the same year, peaked at No. 31 but stayed on the chart for 17 weeks. The live albums charted too, Hell on Wheels at No. 37 in 1997 and Hell on Stage Live at No. 18 in 1999.
Christopher Lee took over the narration Orson Welles had left on Manowar's debut. In February 2005 the band announced that Lee would speak Welles's parts in "Dark Avenger" and "Defender" live at Earthshaker Fest 2005; according to laut.de, he called it off by a message on the video screen. Five years later Manowar re-recorded the whole debut for its 30th anniversary as Battle Hymns MMXI (2010), and when it came to revisiting Welles's narration, the band says, no one else was ever in question. Lee recorded his own interpretation for "Dark Avenger" at Abbey Road Studios in London, in tribute to Welles. He was no stranger to the band's circle: he had narrated the then-new album of Rhapsody, now Rhapsody of Fire, who were Manowar's special guests on their 2005 North American tour. Battle Hymns MMXI also added two live recordings from Texas in the summer of 1982, "Fast Taker" from Abilene on 31 July and "Death Tone" from the Reunion Arena in Dallas on 1 August.
Manowar have left their mark on the British charts as well. The Official Charts Company's records show Hail to England entering the albums chart in February 1984 and peaking at No. 83, and Sign of the Hammer reaching No. 73 in October of the same year. Gods of War made No. 7 on the Official Rock & Metal Albums Chart in 2007. In 2019 a release titled "March of the Heroes into Valhalla", the name of the opening track of The Final Battle I, climbed to No. 11 on the Official Physical Singles Chart and stayed on it for ten weeks, and in 2023 Laut und hart, stark und schnell reached No. 21 on the same chart.
The painter most closely tied to Manowar's covers is the fantasy artist Ken Kelly. Known for Kiss's Destroyer and Love Gun and Rainbow's Rising, he painted the covers of six Manowar albums between 1987 and 2007, Ultimate Classic Rock noted. The partnership carried on after that: the retail edition of The Lord of Steel in 2012 had new art by him, and so did Kings of Metal MMXIV in 2014. In 2015 the band called him a longtime friend and collaborator, and Kelly spoke of a two-way relationship in which the music shapes his paintings and the paintings, in turn, spur the music on. The band's own site lists being the first metal band to bring sword-and-sorcery imagery into both its lyrics and its album covers among its achievements.
Manowar was born on Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell tour. Ross the Boss was then the guitarist of Shakin' Street, who were opening for Sabbath in England, and as he told it in 2022, it was Ronnie James Dio who made the introduction. After a soundcheck Ross got talking to Dio at the side of the stage, and Dio praised his playing and told him there was a bassist on his crew he simply had to meet. That bassist was Joey DeMaio. As the tour went on, the two took to jamming in Black Sabbath's dressing room through the practice amps, DeMaio on a spare bass borrowed from Geezer Butler, loud enough for Sabbath to hear them between songs from the stage. Ross played his last show with Shakin' Street at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii, then started writing songs with DeMaio at his home in Mount Vernon, New York. A friend at EMI, Bob Currie, came to watch the two of them play without a drummer and found them the money for a demo. Louder dates their first meeting to 1980, at a Black Sabbath show at Newcastle City Hall.
It was not a band member who came up with the name. Ross the Boss told the Italian site truemetal.it in 2021 that finding one took a while: ideas came and went, ICBM, for intercontinental ballistic missile, among them, until John Stillwell, the technician everyone called Dawk, asked why not Manowar. Ross and Joey DeMaio looked at each other open-mouthed. That was the one. Stillwell was a wizard with Marshall amplifiers, and according to Ross he had modified an amp head for Tony Iommi, which is why the guitars on Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell sound so different from what came before. Nearly all of Manowar's own gear was built or reworked by him, and the booklet of the debut, Battle Hymns, calls the band's equipment its weapons and credits Dawk Sound with building and maintaining them. When the EMI deal came through, Ross bought seven amp heads from him. The swords, he added, were real ones too, ordered for the band.
Eric Adams turned Manowar down twice. On an episode of Joey DeMaio's Words of Power podcast, Adams recalled DeMaio arriving at his house in 1980 to say he had met a guitarist on the Black Sabbath tour and wanted Adams to sing in a band with him. Adams, done with the music business as he saw it, said no, and agreed only to sing on a demo as a favour to a friend he had known since childhood. They worked up three or four songs in somebody's living room in their hometown, which is where he first met Ross the Boss, and recorded them in another city with a hired drummer, Carl Canedy of the Rods in Ross's memory. A week later DeMaio was back with news of a record deal, and Adams refused again, until his wife told him that with a voice like his he would spend his whole life wondering what if. His real name is Louis Marullo; Ross, recalling the period in 2021, said he told the singer that name would never do and suggested one made from the names of his two sons, Eric and Adam. Before Manowar, Adams had sung with the Kids, Looks and Harlequin.
The voice in the middle of "Dark Avenger", on the debut album Battle Hymns, belongs to Orson Welles, and the band's own site lists being the only band ever to record with him among Manowar's achievements. Ross the Boss told the story on a Vintage Vinyl News podcast, as Wellesnet reported in 2017. He had written the six-minute song himself and felt it needed a narrator, and not just any voice but a real one. James Earl Jones and Vincent Price were discussed before someone suggested Welles, and that settled it. Executive producer Bob Currie approached Welles's management, who were open to the idea; Welles liked the text he was sent, and he recorded the narrations for both "Dark Avenger" and "Defender" in a single session at a studio on 57th Street in Manhattan. Ross also remembered the scene outside, where people in the street crowded around Welles as he stepped out of his limousine. It was like Frank Sinatra in the forties, he said. "Defender" itself had to wait until 1987, when it appeared on Fighting the World.
Manowar went through several labels in the eighties. The first deal was with EMI, won, as Ross the Boss tells it, by the first demo the four of them recorded. After Battle Hymns came out in 1982, according to the German music site laut.de, the band made a short tour of the American south-east opening for Ted Nugent, and EMI soon let them go. Moving to Megaforce Records for Into Glory Ride, they signed the new contract in their own blood. After another spell without a label they signed to Atlantic Records, and Fighting the World followed the next year, in 1987.
The title of the third album was a thank-you. Ross the Boss told Metal Hammer in 2020 that plenty of English critics tore into the band at the time, but writers such as Malcolm Dome stood up for them, and that is why the record was called Hail to England. Louder's own account adds that while Manowar were struggling with label trouble and indifference at home in the United States, Britain was the first to answer their call. According to laut.de, the album was recorded within a week for 20,000 dollars. It entered the UK albums chart in February 1984 and peaked at No. 83 during a two-week run. That year's Spectacle of Might tour played a handful of shows on the Continent before taking in eleven English dates, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough and St Albans among them.
Manowar once held the Guinness record for the world's loudest performance. Ultimate Classic Rock tells the story: the Who had set the mark at 126 decibels at an open-air stadium in Charlton, London, in 1976; Manowar overtook it in 1984 and then beat their own figure twice, with 129.5 dB in 1994 and 139 dB in 2008, although the last reading was taken at a soundcheck. By the time of the 1994 show Guinness had already stopped recognising loudness as an achievement, for fear of encouraging bands to damage their audiences' hearing. According to Louder, the 1984 entry was earned with the band's brand-new rig, which they called the Wall of Voodoo. Ross the Boss put their normal onstage volume at around 135 dB, a sound they named the Divine Wind, and said the monitors carried only vocals and drums, since the guitars and bass were far too loud to go through them. The band's own site lists the record, broken on three occasions, among its achievements, along with being the first band to design and build its own speaker cabinets.
Between the end of the eighties and the mid-nineties the line-up turned over almost completely. According to laut.de's biography, Ross the Boss left after Kings of Metal and guitarist David Shankle took his place. Drummer Scott Columbus also left at the end of the decade, but it was Columbus himself who brought in his successor, Rhino. That line-up made The Triumph of Steel in 1992 and toured Europe with Skyclad that autumn. Shankle left in the summer of 1994 to start his own band, and Karl Logan took over on guitar; Logan's first album with Manowar, Louder Than Hell in 1996, also saw Columbus back behind the kit. Ultimate Guitar gives Ross the Boss's years in the band as 1980 to 1989.
"Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts", on The Triumph of Steel, runs for more than 28 minutes and takes its inspiration from Homer's Iliad. Thirty years on, in 2022, Manowar turned to Homer again, this time to the Odyssey. As Blabbermouth.net put it, the project marked the album's anniversary and thanked the band's Greek fans for their steadfast support, telling of Odysseus and his long, perilous journey home to his wife and son. The song, "The Revenge of Odysseus", was announced as recorded in November 2021. Joey DeMaio told a Greek television show that he had pictured a long but ordinary song of perhaps ten minutes, and that it kept growing, from English to Greek and from Greek to ancient Greek, until it had got completely out of hand. A five-track set of highlights, including the new anthem "Immortal", followed in 2022.
From 21 to 23 July 2005, Manowar held the first Manowar Mega Fan Convention in Geiselwind, Germany, closing it with a headline set at Earthshaker Fest 2005. Twenty-seven cameras filmed the three days, and the result came out in November 2006 as the double DVD The Day the Earth Shook – The Absolute Power, with almost seven hours of footage. As Blabbermouth.net's description of the release has it, the high point was the closing "Battle Hymn", played by a once-only line-up of every member past and present; laut.de adds that three drum kits stood on the stage for it. The film was directed by Neil Johnson, who had also made Hell on Earth Part IV, and the DVD reached No. 86 on the German albums chart.
Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar were linked through a label and a management team. In March 2003, when they were still called Rhapsody, the Italians signed to SPV's own label, Steamhammer, through what Blabbermouth.net described as a special arrangement with Manowar's Magic Circle Music imprint, and SPV managing director Manfred Schütz mentioned that Rhapsody's new management team also represented Manowar. When Manowar opened a North American tour at the House of Blues in Cleveland on 2 June 2005, Rhapsody came along as special guests and played their first ever show in the United States, a full hour including two encores, after an opening set by HolyHell, Magic Circle Music's newest signing. Rhapsody's latest album at the time, Symphony of Enchanted Lands II - The Dark Secret, featured Christopher Lee as its narrator.
In March 2005 Manowar's own label, Magic Circle Music, signed an exclusive worldwide distribution deal for the band with SPV. Hinrich Stuerken, Magic Circle Music's spokesman and a member of Manowar's management, said the negotiations had taken more than a year. Joey DeMaio was proud, he said, that the band's time with Nuclear Blast had brought that label its first gold record in its home country of Germany, but now that Manowar had a label of their own they needed a partner that could fit its structure. For SPV president Manfred Schütz the deal fulfilled a wish twenty years old: in 1985 SPV had been Roadrunner Records' exclusive distributor in Germany, and in that role it had marketed Hail to England there. In January 2006 the band announced that its next album would come out on Magic Circle Music.
Manowar have run their own festival, too. The first Magic Circle Festival took place in Bad Arolsen, Germany, on 6 and 7 July 2007; Blabbermouth.net reported that Manowar played a different set each day, with Gamma Ray and HolyHell among the other acts, and that some 25,000 people came. In 2008 it grew to four days, 9 to 12 July, and more than 35,000 fans braved cold wind and rain. Manowar headlined the Friday and the Saturday and played their first six albums back to back, with a twenty-man choir on stage to mark twenty years of Kings of Metal. Twenty thousand copies of the new single "Die With Honor" were handed out, along with 20,000 free beers and four custom choppers owned by members of the band. Alice Cooper headlined the Thursday, and the band's autograph sessions ran to twelve hours over two days. The band's site says fans from more than forty countries travelled to the festival.
On 5 July 2008, the opening night of the Kaliakra Rock Festival in Kavarna, the town billed as Bulgaria's rock capital, Manowar played for five hours and one minute. Blabbermouth.net, passing on a report from SofiaEcho.com, explained that the band was trying to break the world record for the longest heavy metal concert, a record they had set themselves at the previous year's festival with three hours on stage. They had promised their Bulgarian fans to go beyond that and had invited representatives of the Guinness book to witness it. In front of 20,000 people at the Kaliakra Stadium they worked through more than forty songs drawn from every one of their studio albums, the new "Die With Honor" among them. Fans had been gathering outside since ten in the morning.
"El Gringo", from 2012's The Lord of Steel, was the first song Manowar ever wrote specifically for a film. As the announcement reported by Blabbermouth.net explained, it served as the theme of El Gringo, an action western in the After Dark Action series starring Scott Adkins, Christian Slater and Yvette Yates. The song follows a hero torn between his own moral code and the lure of money, and the struggle to stay true to yourself and to what really matters in life is a theme that keeps coming back in Manowar's music. For Joey DeMaio, the appeal lay in seeing the band's music come to life on screen, alongside the action and the story.
The Lord of Steel came out in two different forms. First, in June 2012, came The Lord of Steel – Hammer Edition: according to the announcement Blabbermouth.net carried, it went on sale digitally through the band's web store on 16 June and then, on 26 June, as a limited Steel Edition of Metal Hammer issue 233, available only from the magazine's UK edition. The retail edition, on Magic Circle Entertainment, was moved back from 28 September to 19 October and arrived on CD, picture-disc vinyl and as a download, with different mixes and mastering, an extra song and new cover art by Ken Kelly. Joey DeMaio asked fans to think of the two versions as they would a film released in alternative cuts, a director's cut or one with a different ending. The album reached No. 19 in Germany.
Kings of Metal MMXIV (2014) is a complete re-recording of the 1988 album. Announcing it, as Blabbermouth.net reported, the band said it marked 25 years since Kings of Metal and the world tour that followed in 1989, and it came with nine main tracks plus nine bonus tracks adding up to more than forty minutes. For the spoken-word piece "The Warrior's Prayer MMXIV" they brought in the British actor Brian Blessed, a celebrated Shakespearean whose films include Henry V, Alexander and King Lear and who played Prince Vultan in the cult film Flash Gordon. The sound effects on the same track came from Hamilton Sterling, a Hollywood specialist whose credits include Men in Black 3 and War of the Worlds. The double CD came with two 24-page booklets and new art by Ken Kelly; the band's site calls this version the Silver Edition. In Germany it reached No. 55.
Manowar have also revisited their old records in their own studios. The tenth-anniversary edition of Warriors of the World in 2013, Blabbermouth.net reported, was remastered by Joey DeMaio personally, together with the band's in-house engineer Dirk Kloiber, at Manowar's own studios, Hell and Haus Wahnfried; the album had originally been mixed by Ronald Prent at Galaxy Studios. In 2019 came the Imperial Editions of Hail to England and Into Glory Ride. According to the band's site, the original analogue multitrack masters were transferred to digital at 96 kHz and remixed by Prent at the band's Valhalla Studios in New York, with mastering by the four-time Grammy winner Darcy Proper. DeMaio said that year that the songs finally sounded the way the band had always imagined them. The Final Battle I, released the same year, was written, recorded and mixed at Valhalla Studios as well.
In the 2010s Manowar were still reaching places they had never played. Their show at the O2 Academy in Birmingham on 27 March 2011, on the Battle Hymns MMXI Tour, was their first in Britain for sixteen years. On 21 May 2014 they played Israel for the first time, at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv. And on the first leg of The Final Battle World Tour in 2019, Joey DeMaio said that May, they played for the first time in Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara and Rostov-on-Don in Russia, in Kyiv in Ukraine, and in Longyearbyen, Norway, inside the Arctic Circle, as near to the North Pole as a band can play, with fans from more than 34 countries in the audience. Looking back in 2022, DeMaio again counted playing near the Arctic Circle and in Mexico for the first time among the band's unforgettable memories.
In May 2016 Manowar announced on Facebook that a tour called The Final Battle would be their farewell. Loudwire reported the band's reasoning: the Gods and Kings tour had been such a high that the next one had to be bigger still, and that would be the moment to say thank you and goodbye. The tour began in November 2017 with dates in Sweden and Norway before moving on to Germany, and Eric Adams told an interviewer that this was it, one last tour. In May 2019, though, after the first leg of The Final Battle World Tour 2019, Joey DeMaio set the record straight: the band had never announced the end of Manowar, nor had it planned never to tour again; what they had said was that it was time for a break. In 2022 they announced the Crushing the Enemies of Metal Anniversary Tour, marking 40 years of Battle Hymns, 35 of Fighting the World, 30 of The Triumph of Steel and 20 of Warriors of the World.
Two of Manowar's recent players came to the band from a Manowar tribute act. Drummer Marcus Castellani, born in Brazil, made his live debut with Manowar in Norrköping, Sweden, on 15 November 2017, taking over from original drummer Donnie Hamzik, who had returned in 2010. He had played in Kings of Steel, a Brazilian Manowar tribute band, and named Scott Columbus as his greatest inspiration. On 1 January 2019 guitarist E.V. Martel was announced for that year's leg of The Final Battle World Tour. The band introduced him as a musician since the age of eight who had spent years in the only official Manowar tribute band in the world and was proud to know every Manowar song ever recorded; Blabbermouth.net later identified that band as Kings of Steel too. Dave Chedrick, the drummer who came in for the 2022 tour after playing with Raven and Kill Ritual, also named Columbus as his biggest influence.
The Final Battle I, the 2019 EP, was sold first at the shows. According to Blabbermouth.net, it went on exclusive pre-sale at the merchandise booth of The Final Battle World Tour 2019 from 29 March, with 30 May given as the date for shops and online stores. The drums are played by Anders Johansson, formerly of HammerFall, who had made his live debut with Manowar only days before, in Brno, Czech Republic, on 25 March. The EP has four songs, and on the last of them, "You Shall Die Before I Die", the lead vocal is sung, as the band's site points out, by Joey DeMaio himself. It reached No. 36 on the German albums chart.
The narration on "The Revenge of Odysseus" is in ancient Greek. Blabbermouth.net reported that Joey DeMaio travelled to Athens to record a father and son, Kostas Kazakos, celebrated in Greece as a film and stage actor and as a writer, and his son Konstantinos, also an actor, speaking a dialogue between Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Out of respect for the source, the English text was translated into ancient Greek by Sakis Tolis of the Greek band Rotting Christ. DeMaio described how the idea kept growing until it called for one of the most famous actors in Greece, with his son as Telemachus. On the five-track set of highlights released in 2022, "Telemachus, Pt. 1" credits Konstantinos Kazakos and Tolis, "Odysseus and Calypso" credits Kostas Kazakos, and "Where Eagles Fly" features Chiara Tricarico.
Gods of War (2007) was presented as the first in a cycle of concept albums, each paying tribute to a different god of war. This one, as the announcement carried by Blabbermouth.net explained, honours Odin, the all-father of the Norse gods: it opens with "Overture to the Hymn of the Immortal Warriors" and traces his history and deeds through songs such as "The Sons of Odin", the title track and "The Blood of Odin". According to laut.de, every song from the EP The Sons of Odin, released the previous October, reappeared on the album, and the booklet was printed entirely in runes. The limited edition was announced in an embossed metal slipcase holding a leather-bound mediabook and a bonus DVD on the making of the album. Gods of War reached No. 2 in Germany. Its studio successor, The Lord of Steel, was introduced in 2012 as not a concept album, unlike Gods of War.