MOUTHY ISSUE TWO
May 2003
EVERON
interview by Ian C Stewart

Everon is a progressive rock band that formed in 1991 around Krefeld, Dutch-German borderland. Singer, guitarist, keyboardist Oliver Philipps says the band doesn't play much in the local scene now. "My day job is working as a producer, most of the bands coming here came from further away, usually from outside Germany even. Every now and then a local band comes to our studio, but it is very much the exception actually."

Philipps describes his songwriting process. "a song simply happen to be there, I can't really explain how it goes. In my experience, there is no voluntary process in the sense of songwriting. Instead, they just come to mind and I never feel that I contribute much of my own. It's not a craft one can learn. First of all, it takes inspiration, and this thing called inspiration is the little spark of magic still left in music even nowadays. Without it, you're totally lost and unable to come up with anything worth putting on a record. Songs just happen to be there whenever they're in the mood, there's no way to speed up or slow down this process, or to schedule it for a time when it feels more suitable. It's both blessing and curse, it can lift you up and make your life a lot richer, but it can also haunt you, steal your sleep and almost drive you mad every now and then. Obsession and passion are two things very near to each other actually."

What inspires the process? "That's not a question I can answer. Just about anything, not only music, can be a source of inspiration, but I couldn't give you names of artists that had much impact on what I am doing. Or I could give you a hundred names instead, but definitely not only a few. There is plenty of talent around in any musical genre, and many of those musicians may have influenced me in one or another way. Still, after all, the magical thing is the inspiration, and that's not linked to somebody else's music you heard. Intuition and inspiration I trust the most. The first idea is almost always the best one and once you start screwing around with it, trying to make it into something it wasn't meant to be, you kill the song. And, whenever you try to sound like someone else, it will go wrong anyway."

Have you played any large gigs? "I remember an outdoor show at a football-stadium we played in 1993 or 94, with Fish headlining, it was somewhere in the Netherlands. Also I enjoyed playing at Musiccenter Vredenburg, a beautiful indoor-amphitheatre in Utrecht, together with Pendragon. This place has a capacity of about 2500 people. We're going to play in France with the Gathering, there we also expect between 2000 and 3000 people, so we are putting a new setlist together, integrating the songs from the new albums Bridge and Flesh into the show. The first date is in Rotterdam, later we will go to France for a couple of concerts. We have a new promoter in France who is doing a really good job for us, so we will spend some more time there this year. Already at the end of last year we went to Paris for a couple of promotional shows, and it seems to be going quite well over there. Also, there's going to be a single out, containing "Missing From The Chain" and "the River" from the Flesh album."


www.everon.de


Mouthy Magazine home