Almost a decade ago, close to the beginning of the glam-metal babylon that would see the hair-sprayed, spandex-trousered likes of Poison, Bon Jovi, White Lion and Motley Crue ruling the roosts of the Billboard charts, a little known heavy metal band called Queensryche sold a million copies of an elaborate concept album that told the story of a young heroin addict induced by a sinister megalomaniac to assassinate government officials and religious figures so as to destroy a corrupt society and bring about a new world order.

That album, Operation: Mindcrime, seemed to owe more to cyberpunk sci-fi literature than to the motorcycles n' chicks ethic prevalent amongst Queensryche's multi-platinum contemporaries. Vocalist Geoff Tate's operatic range and the band's visceral yet sophisticated musicianship won over the average heavy metal listener, but fans would never have to limit their comments over Queensryche's music to "cool riff" or "great guitar solo." Instead they'd be puzzling over bits of hidden dialogue in songs, or talking about how Sister Mary (a character in Operation: Mindcrime) died - was she strangled, did she commit suicide or was it, as it was once suggested to Geoff Tate to his bemusement, "death by plastic vibrating toys?"

Rage For Order, the album they had released before that in 1986, was perhaps an even more challenging piece of work - a baroquely-stylized set of songs peopled by sentient machines, technology-controlled humans, vampiric lovers and other characters walking a thin line close to the edge of psychosis. In 1990, the band released Empire, and the second single from that album, "Silent Lucidity," became one of the unlikeliest commercial successes of the year. It was a doleful ballad about lucid dreaming, a self-induced process through which we can control our dreams, and it became Billboard's "Most Popular Rock Song" of 1991. Empire went on to sell over three million copies.

With the advent of grunge however, a movement that ironically originated in Queensryche's hometown of Seattle, the band's star began to wane. Their brand of progressive, cerebral music lost favour with a public and "rock intelligentsia" that had come to insist upon atonal, angst-ridden bursts of noise. It didn't help that Promised Land, the album they released in 1994, was unremittingly dark and perhaps slightly over-wrought in areas.

But it's 1997 now and Queensryche 6th studio album, Hear in the Now Frontier, has just been released. While it may seem less striking as an artistic statement than landmark albums like Rage For Order and Operation: Mindcrime, Hear in the Now Frontier is surprisingly enjoyable... languid, eclectic, and loose, but retaining that ever-present edge of thoughtful, thought-provoking intelligence. When I spoke to Geoff Tate, he was nursing his first coffee of the morning, sounding nothing at all like some of the tortured, paranoid personas he has adopted in earlier songs like "Roads to Madness" and "Breaking the Silence," and well, really for all the world just like the very relaxed, very contented man you'll hear singing on Hear in the Now Frontier.


GERALD TAN: Coming after an album as dark as Promised Land, I'm most struck by how Hear in the Now Frontier sounds so optimistic and upbeat. Why is does this album sound so happy?

GEOFF TATE: Well, I think it's a better time in our lives, I suppose... the band, and as individuals. It's been three or four years since we wrote the material for Promised Land and alot has changed in that time. I guess it's definitely reflected in the music and it definitely sounds alot more positive and upbeat.

GER: How's that, though? We're more used to a Queensryche that presents the world as full of paranoia, loneliness and alienation.

GEOFF: I went through a pretty nasty divorce, and that definitely influenced my writing on Promised Land. Since then, I've remarried, and I've had a child, and my outlook's quite abit different now. I'm feeling very good and very positive... very in love with life.

GER: How about the other guys in the band?

GEOFF: Everybody's going through different changes, Chris has had a couple of kids. That's one thing we share a perspective on, having children somehow forces you to look at things differently.

GER: The songs are simpler and more direct than before. Were you consciously wanting to move away from the epically-arranged, dramatically- delivered songs of previous albums?

GEOFF: Yeah, we were... trying to do something diffrerent for this album, really trying to break old habits, in all aspects of writing, and playing and production as well. It was difficult at times... we found ourselves wanting to go to familiar territory and add little trademarks and we had to stop each from doing that, and it was difficult sometimes. We wanted to take a big turn after the last album and redirect our focus on strong structures and tear everything down and start over again.

GER: But you return to Peter Collins for production, instead of James Burton [who produced Promised Land]. Did you want to get back to his sound? He's done two albums for you [Operation: Mindcrime and Empire] both of which have been very successful.

GEOFF: Peter Collins produced those 2 albums as well, he worked with James Burton. James was the engineer, Peter was the producer. And Peter's role as producer... he had no contact with the shaping of the sound or singing, he's sort of an administrative guy, an idea guy, a sounding board. We used a different engineer on this record - Toby Wright - who I think dramatically directed the sound of the band. We recorded the band completely different than what we've done before. For instance, the last album took us six months to do, and this one took six weeks, it was very quick and the whole project was very unreheasrsed. I think we played the songs maybe twice before we went in and recorded them. The whole idea was to keep it fresh, keep it moving a nd not think about what we were doing... capitalize on the moment, capture the band with a kind of live feel to it. That in itself was very different for us. Having a different engineer made recording very different. Our songwriting took a very different direction as well. The only constant was the same band members and we had Peter Collins on board.

GER: Also there are no tape effects or the bits of dialogue we're used to. I think at least some of the fans will be disappointed.

GEOFF: Yeah, well I think we'll probably revisit that in the future... but this album, the material didn't dictate that. There wasn't a reason to do that.

GER: So this was a departure as opposed to a new direction?

GEOFF: I think if one looks at all of our albums, each one of them is a departure (laughs). I think they're quite different from each other, this album is another sort of depature. I don't know if we'll continue moving in this direction or try something else or do a hybrid of different ideas we've done in the past.

GER: Where did you find inspiration for some of the ideas you've used on this album?

GEOFF: Well, I'll try to give you an example of how we think... it's sort of abstract I suppose. On "Sign of the Times" we were mixing the song and there's a line that talks about the senate and politicians taking bribes - "on the senate floor they congregate" - and the song is sort of about the society in which we live, America being incredibly corrupt, burning down, and there was a reference if you're familiar with Roman history, there was an Emperor called Nero who was credited with playing his violin while Rome burned around him. So we thought, hey, senate floor, Rome burning to the ground... and we put a violin there and it's sort of like Rome burning. That's how the violin got there. I don't know if anybody would pick up on it...

GER: I've read that you like "spOOL" on the album?

GEOFF: Somebody told me that I was quoted as saying that I like that song, well I like all the songs really.

GER: I thought it was in a very familiar Queesnryche vein, as was "Hero"... what's that song about?

GEOFF: Well the theme is social-conscious commentary I guess. Looking at how in America we are. Every society has their heroes, icons, people to look up to. In America we have this tendency, if somebody is elevated to hero status, we'll tear them down immediately and burn them at the stake. The song is about that, about how mundane everything is getting, how appalled I sometimes I feel - "I'm in a big machine" - like a cog in the big wheel, I've no significance, I'm not standing out, just a functional part of society, looking for my next hero or inspiration to get me where I want to go.

GER: Did anything specific inspire that?

GEOFF: Other than the line from sitting in a line of traffic like a grain of sand... I think that's where the start of the song came from (laughs). I don't know how the traffic in Singapore is like, but in Seattle it's...

GER: Bad?

GEOFF: (laughs) bad, yeah. You can sit for an hour in one place.

GER: Here we try to avoid that situation by making it very very expensive for people to afford cars. Get rid of the cars - no traffic jams.

GEOFF: That's a great idea! There are people here trying to raise the taxing and licensing of cars... so it becomes more expensive.

GER: Back to the album, though... it's very diverse, stylistically. How much of the composed music was written by Michael (Wilton - guitars), Eddie (Jackson - bass) and Scott (Rockenfield - drums). I know you and Chris (DeGarmo - guitars) wrote the lyrics.

GEOFF: Yeah, I think Chris wrote seven songs and I wrote seven songs. Chris actually wrote the majority of the music. Michael contributed one song, which is "Reach," that I wrote the lyrics for. Eddie wrote two or three with Chris... they co-wrote the music.

GER: So it would seem Chris was responsible for quite abit of how the album sounds?

GEOFF: Very much so.

GER: Yet everybody in the band has a very characteristic and individual style when it comes to playing their instruments. Is everybody at liberty to criticize what somebody else is doing? Does Chris ever come up and suggest you do a vocal part differently?

GEOFF: Oh, all the time. We all critique each other and push each other. It's really a strong point of the band, a reason why we've been able to stay together for 15 years. Everybody has a very open mind about criticism and music in general. I think that's one of our strengths - we listen to each other.

GER: With over 15 years of playing together, has anybody ever drifted into a musical direction the rest of the band couldn't get into?

GEOFF: Yeah, probably. Everybody's a writer, so everybody brings in songs, and we sit around and judge each other's music. Whoever writes the most interesting stuff, that's what we work on, that's where we gravitate to contributing to that person's material. If nobody's interested in somebody's material, we just don't work on it. Heh.. somethings get left out... for example, there's a new song called "Anytime Anywhere." Eddie wrote the music for that, it's a riff that he wrote a couple years ago but we weren't interested in doing anything with it at that time, but this album... it just seemed to fit, and everybody got excited by the riff again and there it is. Somethings just sit around for awhile, and other things get used immediately.

GER: But don't throw anything away?

GEOFF: Yeah, right. We've sort of constructed a song library now where we have lots of different songs in various stages of completion. And "spOOL" was like that. That one actually took a few years to write because it was written at different points and finally put together as a song a couple years later down the road.

GER: Has no one come up and said, let's do something harder... more industrial... like Nine Inch Nails or something?

GEOFF: Well I think we each have kind of a varied record collection, we listen to all kinds of different music and we all bring those influences into what we do, and yeah, Scott has written stuff that has a Nine Inch Nails kind of infleunce, and we bring it in, work on it, assimilate it and make it sort of Queesnryche. So yeah, everything is an infleunce to a point.

GER: And what kind of music has the band been listening to... yourself?

GEOFF: We have very open minds to music. Gosh.. what am I listening to now. I've been listening to old jazz lately, sort of trying to educate myself in that musical area, cos I find it very interesting, puzzling... how it all works, different from pop music which is very structured. Jazz is truly unstructured... well, not comepletely, but has a very loose arrangement, which I find very interesting.

GER: "All I Want" [from the new album] sounds pretty swingy and jazzy...

GEOFF: Chris wrote that. He wrote the lyrics and sang lead vocals on it. He wrote it about his wife perhaps, I know he felt very strong about doing the singing on it.

GER: This is the first time someone else is singing lead vocals on a song, isn't it?

GEOFF: Yeah, it is.

GER: And do you have any non-musical influences?

GEOFF: Yeah... I read alot of different kinds of things. I couldn't name anybody specific, but I read alot. I read like a couple books a week. I've always got my nose in a book.

GER: So is that what you do between touring and making new albums?

GEOFF: Yeah, I read! (laughs) That and try to spend time with my family.

In 1995, Queensryche became one of the few musical artists who have gone further than having their record companies put out enhanced cd versions of their albums, and actually conceived and helped produce a seperate multimedia cd-rom game-cum-documentary named after their 1994 album, Promised Land. Having earlier said that Operation: Mindcrime owed some debt of inspiration to sci-fi literature, and given Queensryche's frequent suggestion in songs of human relationships intruded upon or manipulated by the media and future technology, I took the opportunity of the interview to ask Geoff Tate his opinions on the internet and computers in general, discovering that like many of us, he had mixed feelings, a case of fascination and frustration.

GER: Who came up with the idea for the Promised Land cd-rom?

GEOFF: It started out as an idea from the band to document the making of our record. We were making it under unusual circumstances... a log cabin on this island miles away from where we lived, and we thought it would be a neat experience if we could document that on film. We had started doing that when our management came to us and said, hey, there's a company who's interested in making a cd-rom of you guys, and we were all computer-literated guys in the band and we all jumped at that.. like what an interesting new medium to explore. We worked with a company called Media X on developing the cd-rom, and it was a long involved project, but very enjoyable to do. We basically wrote out of long script for it describing everything we wanted to do with it. We sat around for a few days and brainstormed what we'd like to do with it. And then they took off, back to California and we individually designed and worked on our individual worlds in the cd-rom. Each guy has a different presentation in there. And so that began the story of our involvement with the project. It was very fun to do.

GER: And can we look forward to more?

GEOFF: It's an interesting technologically medium, but it's not for everyone (laughs). Some people really enjoy it... computers, and other people don't at all. I'm sort of in the middle - I enjoy the computer alot but it definitely complicates my life much more than it makes it easy.

GER: How so?

GEOFF: I can never do with it what I want to do intuitively, I have to like follow the proceess of the computer. It's dreamed up by guys who aren't artists, they're techheads who think mathematically, and I don't think mathetmatically at all, I don't want to do that, I don't want to be forced to do that. So the thing is always breaking down, you're always in the shop, on the phone trying to call tech-support trying to figure out why it won't do what you want it to do, what mistake you're making now. The manuals are written so badly and difficult to understand. It's an amazing sell that the computer industry has done on the public - they've created a product and basically convinced everyone that they need one, they have to have it! Everyone gets one, and they spend half the time in frustration trying to work with the damn thing. It's just amazing.

GER: And when you get perfectly content using the one you have, you touch a faster, newer one and all of a sudden you have to have it.

GEOFF: Yeah, it's like planned obsolescence. They keep making this hardware that gets thrown away. The value of a computer drops like 95% in the first two years, so what kind of investment are you talking about here - it's really a stupid way to spend your money (laughs).

GER: But still we use them...

GEOFF: Yeah. I've got a number of computers really... I've got an Apple notebook, a PowerPC Performa at my home office, and another Power PC Performa for my studio where I work.

GER: How about the other guys in the band?

GEOFF: We work on computers everyday. All our computers are linked... e-mail, fax, we share sound files for our studios, we pass sound information around and manipulate it through computers for editing purposes. We're always talking about computers, like hey, guess what I just got today... I just figured how to do X-Y-Z... everybody's comparing notes. In a way it's kind of interesting, but it's also so frustrating sometimes.

GER: And then there's the internet. Are you into that at all?

GEOFF: Oh yeah... that's another thing. There are a couple of interesting sites, but one thing I can't handle is the chat-group thing... that's sort of a waste of time for me. Any kind of chat group, I just stray away from, I find them very frustating. The whole internet thing is very frustrating if you don't have the technology to run and operate on the internet reliably. It's another frustrating aspect if you're trying to get your e-mail through and your server goes down because it can't handle the traffic, your computer won't allow you to send your mail for some unknown reason and you have to spend an hour on the phone with some tech.

GER: This is what the kids of today are growing up in... the internet generation. Some of your earlier albums reflect concern with regard to future technology. Do you see this frontier as being fun and informative, very educational, or do you see dangers ahead?

GEOFF: I think it's a fascinating field, and it's exciting to be involved in it. I see some dangers... the biggest I see is accountability for one's writings or actions, and publishing and copyright infringements. Those two areas, I tell you, are gonna explode in the next few years. I see it already in our business... I see people going onto the internet, pretend they're one of the band members and spread information, telling people the band is going to be playing a show and... they don't know, they're just making it up, and it causes people to become upset, they get their hopes up. Or they go on and start slandering someone and they sign their names as one of the band members... and that's dangerous stuff, there's no accountability, anybody can be anybody on the internet, there's no way to prove it.

GER: Do you see a sociological effect of having so much information, any kind of information, at your fingertips through the internet?

GEOFF: I think it has the effect that desensitizes people to certain situations, and I think that's a danger right there. The film industry also has that kind of huge effect on people. You can watch a movie and be completely emotionally affected by the performance. I think it's that way with current affairs and news. If you're completely bombarded with it all the time, you have to set up some sort of psychic defence system to keep you from emotionally becoming unglued by all the tragedy or happiness.. the extremes of emotional bombardment.

GER: But when there's an ungoverned exchange of opinions and information between people of different nationalities throughout the world, an emotionally desensitized person who isn't accountable for what he's saying could easily indulge in any form of racism or personal bigotry and start electronic hate-wars.

GEOFF: I think the biggest problem around the world is intolerance, the lack of free-thinking. We're all whether we admit or not, very culturally defined by the society we grow up in. We're shaped by our society and it takes alot for an individual to break down all that conditioning within themselves, to sit and figure out... where did I get that idea, why do I feel that way about some situation, and really trace the idea back to the origin of it. Most of the time we find that it's something passed on to us by our family or the society in which we live, and it's difficult to break those chains of influence and until everybody starts doing that, it's going to be a slow evolution. That's kind of what "spOOL" is about - about thinking for oneself, critically asking yourself, why do I think this way... is racism really a logical thought pattern, how can one logically think they're better than somebody just because of what race they are? If you start breaking it down, and thinking about in those terms, it's ridiculous, and any sort of intelligent person will see that. And you can take that thought process to something like, why do I smoke?, and think it all down... follow the pathway.

GER: But all too often, people just don't want to think. Whatever strikes you emotionally and immediately is what works.

GEOFF: Yup, you're right. But I think it should be mandatory (laughs). I think there should be a global rule that forces everybody to think.

GER: That being said, do you think there's a rational reason why Dave Mustaine [of Megadeth] seems to enjoy slagging off Queensryche?

GEOFF: I really don't know. I've only met the guy once and he stayed away from me. He didn't really come up and say Hi or anything, we just saw each other on the way to do this show in Brazil. From what I know of him from other people, he's a very competitive personality and I think if he feels like he's threatened, he tends to lash out and criticize rather than being tolerant or accepting of other peoples' differences or opinions. I think perhaps as he matures... you know, into adulthood... he will have found a different outlook on things.

GER: Hopefully...

GEOFF: The 1st rule I found in my life is if you don't have anything nice to say about an individual, it doesn't serve a purpose to sit there and criticize. Not unless you have valid points of criticism. But when it comes to taste or preference, that's all subjective and everybody's allowed that. Who are we to dictate what people like or don't like?

Gerald Tan 1997