Geoff Tate needs no introduction – the man, the artist, the voice who fronted Queensryche for so many years set out on his own back in 2012 after, shall we say, a rather acrimonious split with his former colleagues. After a release under the name Queensryche – the rather fine ‘Frequency Unknown’ album the courts awarded the name to his ex-band mates and he went on to form the ‘Operation Mindcrime’ project. Not a man to shirk a challenge, as ‘Operation Mindcrime’ he recorded three albums simultaneously to form a grand sprawling trilogy in the the milieu of that classic ‘Operation Mindcrime’ opus. We caught up with Geoff after the release of the final part of the trilogy and just before the 30th Anniversary of Queensryche’s ‘Operation Mindcrime’ album to discuss the album, the tour, his formative influences and of course the meaning of life.
Geoff: Hi Mark, you’re really based down in Australia?
Mark: Yes Sir, representing your many fans down here.
Geoff: That’s great, I certainly won’t hold that against you!
Mark: (laughs) Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to The Rockpit today. You’ve got a lot of fans down-under as you know and we’ve been eagerly awaiting that final installment in the trilogy. Is it great to have that last piece of the suite finally out there?
Geoff: Yeah, it feels really good to have the final album finished and out into the world where it belongs. It was a really long project that was really kind of consuming me for a long period of time and I didn’t realise how consuming it was until I actually handed the record company the last album. I felt this giant wave of peacefulness take over me, it was the strangest feeling I think I’ve ever had.
Mark: It was such a huge project to undertake after parting ways with the guys and the rather swift release of ‘Frequency Unknown’, did you feel you had to throw yourself into something as you said so huge and ‘all consuming’?
Geoff: No I really wasn’t expecting it to happen. I’d been wanting to do a large scale concept piece for a while, actually for many, many years and I thought it would be quite interesting to make it a musical story told in three acts, kind of like a film story is told, you know,but I didn’t really have the subject. And it just sort of came to me as I was walking across Spain with my wife on a hike a few years ago. It wasn’t something that I expected to do, it just kind of hit me you know.
Mark: It’s incredible where inspiration comes and where it takes you.
Geoff: It really is, and when it hits you you kind of have to go with it.
Mark: That’s right. I guess the big thing is for people who have listened to the three albums and followed the story and tried to decipher all the clues in the lyrics, is that, without trying to give things away there are still lots of questions to be asked?
Geoff: Sure.
Mark: How would you sum up that open ending?
Geoff: Well, I wouldn’t.
Mark: (laughs)
Geoff: I guess the whole project to me represents where I feel we are collectively at this really interesting place in the twenty-first century where we’re all so connected and communicating now with everyone in the world and we’re also using that communication as a mirror to look at ourselves through other people’s eyes in the sense that we’re comparing what we have and what we don’t have. In the United States for example we’re wondering why we have this gigantic population and we have all this money but yet we have probably the worst health care system in world. It’s a strange time as lots of things are becoming very apparent and I think we’re questioning why we’re here, why we’re doing things the way we are. So where we are right now is sort of open ended and so is my conclusion to my story. (laughs).
Mark: You’re right I think it’s a very interesting time to be alive, but it’s also a very confusing time with so much information out there and no seeming filters on it, it sometimes gets a bit overwhelming I think.
Geoff: Yes it does.
Mark: Now that the trilogy is out it’s great to see that you’re embarking on a huge tour pretty much in the UK and Europe through February with a short break and then you’re back again in March and April. It’s a huge tour already, are you then looking on taking the show out to the rest of the world?
Geoff: Yeah, I planning on going everywhere possible that we can in 2018. Primarily my goal in life at this point (laughs) is to take it to everywhere I possibly can tour.
Mark: It’s also a big anniversary of course of the original ‘Operation Mindcrime’ album which I see you’ve named the tour after, does it seem inconceivable that you’re sat here now so many years after that album was released with about 18 albums now under your belt?
Geoff: Yeah it does seem strange. I have a real difficult time keeping track of the years, they just seem to fly by. You blink your eye and five years has gone. It’s crazy.
Mark: I think that happens to us all as we get older! As far as the style of the latest suite of albums goes, the press has marked it as very progressive in style and also rather light and complex in structure, I found it myself to be very rich and diverse and I know we’ve touched in the story and the lyrics but what was your feelings about how the project would sound before it started? Is that something that even enters you head?
Geoff: I think I just wrote what was interesting to me in a way that was interesting to me and I never really take it into consideration if it sounds like somebody or doesn’t sound like somebody. You know I just don’t think in those terms. But you know I’m a huge fan of music so I’m definitely influenced by everything that’s come out in the last 50, 60 years of music making, at least that I’ve been aware of (laughs). I think I own like 12,000 albums.
Mark: (laughs) I was hoping you were going to say something like that because it certainly shows – not just the eclecticism but the real understanding of that fact that music doesn’t need to be constrained. I know you’ve said in previous interviews that you’re not quite sure what you are going to do next but I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about that. One of them is do you see any limits to your creativity now that you’ve created something as huge as this project?
Geoff: Yeah, I guess. I’ve never really put too many constraints on myself creatively. If I’m honest I just write what I’m interested in and I don’t try to put it in a box and maybe that’s difficult for somebody who’s trying to sell it,and I guess we all need little slogans and banners to describe what it is. But I think that music is a real personal journey that people really go off on their own and discover, they certainly don’t need other people telling the what it is, or what they’re going to experience, or what they should like or what they shouldn’t like. It’s really up to the individual to do that for themselves.
Mark: I completely agree. I think though sometimes it must get frustrating for an artist to be constrained by their own past, so that when they do something that is a little different or push in a certain direction, or add something unexpected then people might find it hard to open their ears and minds to those new experiences?
Geoff: Yeah, I don’t know why there’s a section of the public that thinks that an artist or a band can only do that one thing, when there’s a plethora of things that people can do, its unending, only constrained by your imagination and interest.
Mark: Talking of imagination my other question about the future was really something rather different. I always imagined that you’d be someone who would write a good novel? Have you ever considered taking what you’ve done with the trilogy or maybe looking back further to ‘Operation Mindcrime’ and writing something in that area of interest? Expending a few ideas?
Geoff: Well that requires a lot more words! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Geoff: That’s a lot of work! So I have a real high regard for novelists and people who write books, there’s like 18 times as many words as you would us in a song (laughs).
Mark: (laughs) That’s a great answer I like your thinking! Musically for a man with such a record collection, and such varied tastes is there a particular artist that you just can’t go without?
Geoff: Yeah I think that there are many, but the man that comes to mind quickly for me is Miles Davis. I just find his compositions to be so unique and different. I’m a big fan of music and I’ve studied music since I was a kid and Miles Davis’ music defies a lot of rules but it does it in a way that is so beautiful that you forget that what he is doing is pointing the finger at any kind of tradition. I study it a lot to try and figure out how he did some of the things he did. Another musician that does that for me is the song-writer Jon Anderson, the singer for Yes for many years, he’s done a few solo albums and to my ears mixing different styles of music from different places in the world that are really uniquely different. I had a lucky exposure to him once at an awards ceremony where I was giving him a trophy award for his progressive rock, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I actually got to sit in a room and talk with him for a while, and I’d never met him before so it was a real treat for me as I got to pin him down on on how he did certain things and I walked away not knowing anything more than I did before (laughs). Because what he said was so confusing, and I still don’t know exactly what he said or what he meant but I’m gonna figure it out one day (laughs).
Mark: I think some people do just operate on a different level to others and I can imagine both Miles and Jon being that sort of character who see the world and music in an entirely different way to the rest of us mere mortals.
Geoff: Yeah, you know what I figure is from my exposure to different musicians over the years and song writers and conversations like that is that it’s simply that they hear it that way. That’s just the way they hear the music in their head, it’s not that they’re trying to do something, it just happens that way, because that’s how they’re thinking, or at least that’s what I surmise.
Mark: I think you’re right. Take it all the way back then for you then Geoff, what was it that started you on the path to becoming a musician? Was it a gradual realisation or was there a defining moment that made you realise that this was going to be your life?
Geoff: Yeah it was kind of a defining moment. I was 9 years old and the alarm clock goes off it was time for school. My parents had given me one of those radio alarm clocks where the alarm was the radio station. So I’m laying there in bed just waking up and I hear just this amazing guitar riff which was the riff to a song called ‘Somebody to Love’ by Jefferson Airplane, and I listened to that song and I sat up in bed and I said “Mom, I want to learn how to play that, I want to be a musician.” And she said “You can do that, you can be a musician, you can be anything you like, you can be an architect you can be a mechanic you can be anything.” She was listing all these different things and I said “No, I want to be a musician.” So she said “Well if you want to be a musician you need to study an instrument and the only instrument to start with is piano. We have a piano and we’ll give you instruction, when would you like to start?” And I said “Today!” (laughs) So she booked me in music lessons right away and I just took to it, I was mesmerized by it and by the time I was ten I’d gone onto trumpet and I was in the school band by the age of ten till the end of high school.
Mark: And what intrigued you about the saxophone? It’s one of my favourite instruments and it adds so much especially to rock songs, there’s so many instances of the sax appearing in great rock tracks. What led you to that, is it purely the sound?
Geoff: A couple of things. They say as of yet that it’s the instrument that’s been invented that is closest to the human voice and I think that’s true, it’s a very expressive instrument and you play it kind of how you sing, you know? At first I got really influenced by certain sax players and the music that they’d written or played to. There’s a famous American sax player called Stan Getz who was really influential to me growing up and then there’s a solo in a song called ‘Crime of the Century’ by Supertramp that I heard years ago that just hit me. Then there’s the saxophone in ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ by Pink Floyd that really got to me.
Mark: That’s crazy they were exactly the two songs I was thinking of when I asked you that question!
Geoff: Oh really! (laughs) It just got to me those two examples really set my mind on fire.
Mark: And to close, an easy one for you: what is the meaning of life?
Geoff: (laughs) the meaning of life? Boy! I wish I knew that, I wish we all knew that , that we had a collective consciousness that might do something really amazing to the human race if we all knew that answer. But I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna keep searching and I’m starting in Ireland on January 11th 2018 on my tour, and I’m gonna go everywhere and search for that OK?
Mark: That’s the first date of many, I hope everyone gets out to see the shows. I hope you find time to get down here again too.As a fan I can’t wait for the next thing that Geoff Tate does,and I’m sure it will be very interesting.
Geoff: Thank you very much for the interview, I really appreciate it.
Mark: Thank you Geoff it’s been great to catch up again, you take care and good luck in the UK, Ireland and Europe next year.
Geoff: Thank you and happy holidays.
Mark: You too.
