Sound Generator - Interview

Your guys are...really young! Tell us a bit about how you got to this point?
Bill: Tom and I have been doing music for a really really long time. We started out at about 7 writing our own songs and stuff. It really went very fast, going to our own stages and playing parties, private parties and weddings, little city parties and stuff like like that. We met the other two about seven years ago in the main club that we always used to play, and they knew each other from music school. When we got together we needed a bass played and a drummer and it all worked out really good. We got along really well, had the same vision and then we took off.

Was it tough adjusting to all this attention?
Tom: Sure, that was a deep cut into this world, and a big experience. You have to imagine that our first single went from nowhere straight to number one in the German charts. As soon as we came out with 'Durch den Monsun' everything changed for us. All of a sudden we were on big stages and we actually didn't know a lot or have a lot of experience. We had to get used to a lot of situations and a lot of stuff. We had bad experiences and good experiences and we really needed time to grow into it. We will never get used to paparazzi and stuff like that, that's something we will never adjust to. At the moment we enjoy everything about it. We're traveling the world. We just came back from our first European tour, which was really our highlight both career wise and as musicians, it was the biggest thing for us ever. We're not getting used to it anymore, we're living it finally and we're enjoying every second.

This album, Scream, was your first recorded in English. Was that tough?
Bill: I suppose I have to answer this as the others didn't have any problem with an English album, haha. Honestly it was a big challenge for me, and for the guys as well, it was emotionally a big step doing an album in English because we a lways did music in German, I always wrote lyrics in German, I always sang in German, so it was a big big step for me and a weird feeling to go over to singing in English. We made the decision because lyrics are really important for us and we really wanted people to get what we were singing everywhere because you can't expect in every country for your fans to sit down and translate your lyrics. I'm a big perfectionist, so it took me some time in the studio because I really wanted to soun d good. I didn't want to sound like some German who's trying to sing English, I wanted to sound native. I'm really really proud of it, we're all really proud of it. It's a mixture of the first and second German albums
Tom: It's like writing a new song. It's tough to get that one-to-one translations of the songs and you have to work really hard on them.

So what's coming next for you?
Bill: Well it's touring, touring, touring. We're going to a lot of countries that we haven't been to yet and doing promotion over there, but at the moment our main spot is really the UK, because we're releasing 'Ready, Set, Go' on the 27th August and this is a really really big step for a German band to set up here, so that's what we're concentrating on.
Tom: The second big thing for us is that the European tour is being continued, we've got extra bookings from countries we haven't been to yet like Holland, France and Russia. That all starts in October.

What are you guys listening to at the moment then?
Tom: Well, I'm listening to German hip-hop all the time, which is very far away from our style, and when I listen to bands I listen to ours, hahaha.
Gustav: I listen more to the harder stuff: Metalica, System of a Down and that sort of stuff.
Bill: A little bit of everything. I really like Placebo and Coldplay, depending on whatever mood I'm in.
George: I'm listening to Sum 41's Underclass Hero a lot.