Marco Concoreggi first made a name for himself as vocalist for Greek Power Metal outfit Battleroar. Before leaving the band in 2010 he had already recorded three albums with the band. The reason for his departure is easily identified as Mr. Concoreggi and his former brother in arms from Battleroar, guitarist Manolis Karazeris, had founded a new band calld DEXTER WARD shortly before that. In the years between 2010 and 2016 DEXTER WARD recorded one EP and two full lenghts before things became more quiet for the band. In 2020, DEXTER WARD finally return to the limelight with their new album called „III“ and so it is high time to sit down with Mr. Concoreggi and talkt about things to come.
Hi and thanks a lot for taking time for this interview! How are you doing?
Thank you and you’re more than welcome! Feels good to be asked for an interview! We really appreciate your interest in our music.
As a fan of H.P. Lovecraft myself I absolutely love your band name. Why did you choose this
particular character as your namesake?
I could pull out a cooler background story but the simple truth is, that’s the first Lovecraft story I had read as a teenager and to this day it’s still my favourite. I remember I was reading a Dylan Dog comic book in 1991 (it’s an italian character, some kind of “detective of the occult”, dealing with all kinds of monsters, mysteries and nightmares), it was a special issue named “Almanacco della Paura” and they presented a small dossier on H.P.L. , that’s how I got hooked and started hunting for books, which wasn’t as easy as it is today, being pre-internet. However there can be a symbolic “fil rouge” that connects the story to our band, that being, something that comes back from the past into the present, brought back from its essential salts, that can be us as musicians but on a wider spectrum, classic heavy metal itself (of the 80’s).
About four years have passed since the release of your last album “Rendezvous With Destiny”. What have you been up to since?
We’ve been playing a few shows in Europe for a couple years after the album was released but, for the most part, we concentrated on family, jobs, private life in general and other outlets for our creativity. As you probably know our guitarist Manolis organizes the “Up the Hammers” festival in Athens, and Akis (lead guitar), Stelios (drums) and John (bass guitar) have been playing also in other bands and projects. Personally, I needed some time to pause and refocus, and we “froze” the band for some months between late 2018 and early 2019 in order to “light again the right spark”.
With “III” your third album is about to be released. How would you describe the record, also with regard to differences to its predecessor?
I honestly think it’s a killer collection of songs, the best, more vital and tightest thing we ever did as a band, both music and lyrics. Akis engineered and produced the album and every decision was taken within the band, so all that you hear is 100% Dexter Ward. Our debut “Neon Lights” has very good songs and a feeling of raw energy, that I believe it’s the reason for its relative “success”, but the sound could have been much better (it was our fault, not the producer’s). The following
“Rendezvous With Destiny” on the other hand has a very clear, powerful, relatively more “modern” power metal production but in hindsight it lacks “unity”, cohesion between songs, lyrically most of them go in different directions and we could have chosen different songs and made it more up-tempo. I’m still very proud of the album but If I could go back in time I would do it rather differently. The new one, “III” we are so confident about the songs that even the title was chosen so that it would not distract from the music itself, it’s like a new beginning.
How did songwriting and recording sessions for “III” go down?
It all went down in a quite unusual, quick, and I could say, unexpected way. Out of the 8 songs on “III”, only two were written prior to Spring 2019, “The Dragon of the Mist” and “In the Days of Epic Metal”, that existed in demo form since Summer 2017. The other six songs have been written in a period of around 3 months one after the other in fast succession. After our last live show in October 2018, i was at a point in my life where, on my 43th birthday, I couldn’t find the motivation to write or play anymore, I had grown sad and melancholic about the old times when I started around 20 years before, and my first trips abroad and most of people I knew now are all married with kids and very different life dynamic and interests, outside and “inside” let’s say, whereas for me at least inside nothing really changed, I just became a little more hardened, you could say bitter in a way but that would be too extreme, disilluded I think sums it up adequately. It’s my opinion that heavy metal music can be experienced fully and in the end is made by and for, young people in their teenage years and twenties, when their vision is not yet spoiled by the compromises life forces upon most of us, when their energies, their time and their resources are free to be directed towards this great passion. I started questioning the metal “scene”, what is considered metal nowadays, just an example to make my point clearer, just yesterday I saw this review from a sold out show with bands called Amaranthe / Apocalyptica / Sabaton, filling an italian venue where several years ago I saw DIO, and I said to myself what are we talking about? I have nothing to do with such a “scene”, nothing to share with those guys, and furthermore how can I relate with a world that gets the hots for such bands and calls them heavy metal? So those were the feelings I had one year ago and I was so pissed off I even stopped listening to heavy metal for some months and in the car I only had Italo Disco from the 80s / synthwave (Lost Years) and a bunch of Miles Davis albums. Then around February/March 2019 I surrounded myself with my favorite heavy metal albums, picked up the guitar again to exercise and the riffs were coming, and melodies and lyrics, and I felt as pure as I was in my mind in my 20s again, and that’s when I called up Manolis and the guys and we decided to reawaken the band, but since the drive was different and the energy was all renewed, I thought we needed a new powerful logo and cover art, so one morning in my kitchen I sketched out quickly a basic logo idea on a small piece of paper, that later was elaborated from a professional artist (Alexandros Vasilopoulos) who drew and painted both the logo and the cover art of our new album. Of those six newer songs, the first I wrote was “The Eyes of Merlin”, the last one completed at the beginning of June 2019 was “Return of the Blades”. Akis, who is a producer/recording engineer, he did the first “Battleroar” album, recorded in his own studio in 2002 when me and Manolis were still in the band. For “III” he engineered the recording of all instruments in Athens, except for my vocals I did on my own here in Italy, he put a whole lot of heart and time on arrangements during pre-production and ultimately produced the album on his own, he did a fantastic job in my opinion and this is our strongest and best sounding album to date. The album recordings started in September 2019 and we had the masters ready in November.
Does the work of H.P. Lovecraft also influence your lyrics? What are your songs about?
From a band called Dexter Ward one would expect explicit references to H.P.L. in our lyrics but actually this is not the case. We had a quote from Lovecraft at the end of our very first song “Antarctic Dream” and some indirect references here and there but I find it difficult to recreate the feeling I get from Lovecraft’s stories in the context of our music. His visions in my opinion can hardly be represented through a triumphing, uplifting blend of NWOBHM and U.S. Metal. R.E. Howard’s stories are much more in tune with the feeling of our music and influenced both our new songs “Return of the Blades” and “Conan the Barbarian”. “Return of the Blades” is a reference to the song “Hyrkanian Blades” me and Manolis wrote for the third Battleroar album “To Death and Beyond”, and “Conan the Barbarian” outro is a reprise from a melody of “Sword of Crom” a song I had written around 2002 that ended up on the second Battleroar album “Age of Chaos”. “The Eyes of Merlin” was inspired from the movie Excalibur, but at the time I wrote the song I hadn’t watched it for around 15 years, as a matter of fact I watched it again one month ago and I urge all the youngest readers to watch the movie in case they’re not familiar with it. “Soldiers of Light” has a “U.S. White Metal” theme that is common to our older songs “Youngblood” and “Evil Nightmares”, a tribute to bands like Bloodgood / Zion / the american Emerald and all those great other bands featured on the “California Metal” compilation LP. The lyrics of “Reign of the White Knight” and “The Dragon of the Mist” are in the sword and sorcery genre but there are no specific references, whereas “The Demonslayer” is based on a small original concept of my own and is a variation of the “good versus evil” battle between heaven and hell. I don’t want to elaborate further because I prefer people to build their own visions and sceneries from music and lyrics, even if sometimes they might differ from the original idea of the writer. Last but not least, “In the Days of Epic Metal” features Viking / Norse Mythology images but it’s actually a song about the feelings I had when in 2002 I first went to Greece and felt part of a scene that was absolutely pure and in full bloom, and everything seemed to be possible, and in a way it was possible, because our hearts were young and all we had in our mind was heavy metal.
Dexter Ward were founded more than ten years ago – that’s a decade of band history. How does that feel?
It feels like I’m getting old and the older you get the slower you do things and all kinds of physical health / family committments / economical issues get in between what your heart wants to do and what can actually be done without destroying everything else, but other than that nowadays I don’t feel much different. We have a strong new album and other 2 full lenghts under our belt, a single, two EPs, many shows throughout Europe, few but very dedicated fans and we really enjoy being together as individuals in the band, we’re friends and we’re looking forward to the future because we feel like the bands has just started again fresh!
Once your new album is released, what’s the next step? Any chance to catch you guys in Germany?
There’s no “announced” German shows yet but I’m confident we’ll manage to be there sometime later this year and in 2021. As for now, we’ll play the second day of the “Up the Hammers” festival on March 14th in Athens Greece, another Greek show at Trikala “Horns Up Festival” on March 20th, Madrid on May 9th at “Pounding Metal Fest XIV”, Bree (Belgium) on October 9th and Dijon (France) the next day, October 10th, at “Rising Fest IX”. Stay tuned for new show announcements in the next months! And of course we already started writing for a fourth album that will not take other 4 years to be made this time!
Having been around for ten years, what’s your take on the current state of the metal scene?
I do not keep myself up to date as much as I did, for instance, 20 or 25 years ago, when I was buying all the records, all the magazines, etc.; not because I don’t like it, of course I still do, but there’s just too many bands, too much music these days, especially in what is nowadays called “New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal”. I’m flattered to be part of this, but having done this for almost 18 years, 3 records with Battleroar and other 3 with Dexter Ward, I don’t feel much likem anything “New Wave” anymore. I think there’s a lot of great players, with good technique, a whole generation of musicians/producers, accomplished multi-instrumentalists that, with nowadays relatively affordable software/technology, can make good sounding records on their own, but when I put on the Heathen’s Rage demo of “Dark Storm” with all sorts of noises or Aceium’s “Cold Steel” or Commander’s “The High’n’Mighty” (the bootleg because I can’t afford the original although in my defense I did possess a copy of the original MC tape with the lion head cover many years ago) it is clear that we are not speaking of the same “school”. Better one album like those per month than the 20 albums per month of today. I am aware I’m releasing music today also, so our album is one of those 20 per month, and if everybody were thinking the way I do we wouldn’t stand a chance, but the thing is, for the young listeners of today, those 20 albums today perhaps are as important as that one album 25 years ago for me, it’s all a matter of age and perspective I guess.
Thank you for the interview! Please let us do a short brainstorming in the end of this interview. What comes in your mind first reading the following terms:
Herbert West: Reanimator, VHS, a t-shirt I often wear at shows!
Frontiers Music: John Wayne, because the label doesn’t release heavy metal.
False Metal: Manowar, not because they are false metal, but because they’re the ones talking about it all the time, but as we say here in Venice “The first rooster to sing has laid the egg”.
Pay To Play: Bullshit.
Underground: Rules.
King Diamond in 10 years: King Diamond!
Once again thanks for your time. The last words are yours – is there anything left you want to tell our readers?
I really appreciate you getting in touch with us for this interview and I’d like to thank you and your readers for keeping the flame alive and giving underground bands such as ourselves a spotlight and a chance to be noticed! Bang your heads and, as Judas Priest used to say, “Always remember to Defend the Faith”! All the best and see you in Germany!
20. März 2020 Thomas Meyns
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