Within Temptation: radiant sounds and visions!

Stunning pyrotechnics, lasers, fireworks, blasts of confetti, sounds that you don’t usually hear at a rock concert - 80 piece orchestra and a choir - the lead singer standing in the middle with her angelic voice and an array of costumes… There are stilt walkers, as well! These are some of the scenes you can find on the bonus live DVD from Within Temptation, recorded at a one-off special Amsterdam show in front of 10,000 out-of-their heads fans.

Within Temptation’s are a million selling Dutch band whose fourth album, ‘The Silent Force’ is reaching Brit-shores [as well as Asia, Japan and Australia] nine months after conquering the continental EU. They certainly are not your average rock band and fronted by Sharon den Adel offer depth with some incredible flights of fancy: it is operatic, it‘s rocktastic, it outdoes Pink Floyd in parts, as well as Iron Maiden in others.

This version of the album, aside the limited edition CD/DVD format, includes a couple of bonus tracks. They are not new tracks but B-sides to introduce us to the other side of the band’s creativity.

Within Temptation were formed almost 10 years ago, in Gouda - yeah, the cheese country. The line-up - Adel, Robert Westerholt (guitar), Ruud Jolie (guitar), Martijin Spierenburg (keyboards), Jeroen Van Veen (bass) and Stephen van Haestregt (drums) - slowly build its reputation by selling loads of records - ‘Mother Earth’ is a platinum certified disc - and playing shows that leave people open-mouthed.

On a brief visit to London we interrupted guitarist Robert’s dinner to ask him about the album they continue promoting so many months after its original release.

“It’s not a problem and it feels new to us, every time: we’ve been doing it this way for a long time because our previous album, ‘Mother Earth’, came out in Germany a whole year later. We find it better to have it released in different stages on a good label than at once on a small one. You can also dedicate your attention to promoting it individually.”

“But, we are not going to be doing this forever - we’ve got to cover Japan and then play some more shows and have it all wrapped up by October. We’ll then start working on the next album and that one will hopefully have a simultaneous release in all these territories.”

It is strange that at this cyber-age you’ve not become an underground faves but the world remained fairly unaware of you?

“It’s one of those things and we can’t complain. The things are going our way, slowly but surely… The main reason that is going by country-by-country is that we come from Holland and people don’t pay attention to you as much as they do to a band from Britain or America. It has its charm…”

“The charm is being an underdog and coming up tops. Every time we play our music live it surprises people. Our music live is something completely different to what you usually hear.”

It is certainly different: recording with an 80-piece orchestra and a choir in Moscow, it’s not your run-of-the-mill session?

“True, and we can afforded it from the record sales. That’s the great thing about it - you don’t need to beg a label for a budget. We wanted to use an orchestra to experiment and then heard about this big choir in Russia and had to go and record there. We searched for a choir for a long-time, we needed an arranger and conductor at the same time, and found them there.”

“We don’t do arranging ourselves, we are not trained to do that, and that’s why we needed someone who can arrange it; we write songs with the basic arrangement but can’t do all the parts. Whatever you imagine it is going to sound like - you always get surprised. It is really exciting to hear the end result.”

What you do can be construed as challenging the notion of contemporary Rock’n’Roll?

“I think not, it is part of it and there have always been bands that wanted to present great shows and not only basic rock gig. There were bands in the 1970s who were doing it, Iron Maiden still do it. We always wanted to present more than just a show. It is also quite expensive and a lot of artists don’t really like to spend so much on presentation.”

You’ll be coming back to the UK for a couple of shows at the beginning of September; will you be bringing the whole show or there may be restrictions?

“We usually travel with the whole lot but it depends whether we can use it all; it is all down to what the local government let us do and we usually employ as much as we can. Sometimes we can’t use pyrotechnics because the ceiling is too-low or there could be a concern about lasers…”

“It can get frustrating but we don’t let it affect our music and performance.”

That, you can almost guarantee; Within Temptation - ‘nuff said.

Tour dates:

03 September - Bloodstock Festival, Derby
04 September - Astoria, London