Audrey Horne interview: "I believe we deserve more, but we are working on that"

I hope everybody is aware of Audrey Horne by now. Maybe you heard of them when they entered the Top 30 list of our site for 2010. If not, then I guess you’ll find out about them soon. Their music consists all the elements someone should love about hard rock music and they have a unique style to tell their stories. See for yourself all these nice things, their singer Toschie has to say below.

Hi Toschie, it’s Chris from Greek site Rocking.gr. As we didn’t have a chance to speak before, I have to congratulate you for your latest album that was released in 2010. I am still listening to it and it sounds fresh and dynamic...
Thanks man, glad you liked it, and nice to hear that it still rocks your world.

"Audrey Horne" made it to the top list of the editors’ choices in our site and it draw attention of people with a diverse taste in rock music. What was the feedback overall?
It was amazing. We got so much great feedback on it, and it has gotten great reviews almost everywhere.

As I mentioned, people with diverse taste really tend to like your music and I’d say that this is a characteristic of yours. You blend so many influences in there that in the end you sound only like yourselves. How would you describe your music and your sound?
It is very much like you said, it takes influences from all over the place. All the guys in the band listen to all kinds of music, and we are personally quite diverse in our taste. This makes for many good fights in the band, but also some amazing combinations when it comes to songwriting. All in all, I would just say that we write hard rock, but like I said, it has all kinds of influences, which just makes it stronger.

Norway is not famous for the music you represent, but for more extreme metal bands, but members of Audrey Horne have participated in more metal oriented bands. Would you say that you belong to the rock scene or the metal scene?
Oh, we are definetly a rock band. Or as we like to say ourselves: True Norwegian Soft Rock !

"Audrey Horne" was full of hits, but none of them managed to get its own video clip, although you’ve made some of them in the past. "Circus", "Charon", but mostly "Down Like Suicide" or "Sail Away" could easily become successful hits. Why was there limited support?
Well, we set out to make a video for "Down Like Suicide", but we ended up not using it for different reasons, after that we just concentrated on other stuff, and we never made a new one.

So, why was it named "Audrey Horne"?
Basically, because we thought we had reached a point where we had found the true core of what Audrey Horne is, and so we named it that to sort of make a statement. Besides, every good band should have a self titled album. It’s a tradition.

I loved the limited edition with the bonus 'acoustic' CD. It revealed another -equally good- side of yours. How come you came up with this decision?
We decided to record some bonus tracks, and during the writing sessions for that album, me, Thomas and Ice Dale moved into a house far away out in the great nothing. It was a nice house by the sea. We bought a lot of food, beer and wine, and brought guitars and an old tape recorder. There we wrote a bunch of the songs on the album, plus a whole lot of extras. These wrer mainly written on acoustic guitars, and so we decided to record the extras as well. Pluss some cover songs too .A bunch of these were later recorded live in Ice`s studio, and some of them made the bonus disc. We also recorded cover versions by Rolling Stones, Ozzy and U2... but they were never released.

And covering Beyonce! Wow, that was something out of the box! How did you end up doing such a cover?
It was a joke in the beginning. Herbrand, who produced it used to say 'do a version of that one', every time a song came on the radio. No matter what song it was. So when Beyonce came on, I said 'hell yeah, let's do that one'. We started talking about how good the song really was, and decided to give it a try, we ended up doing the funeral-version, just me and Herbrand. I like it... Thomas hates it. Ha ha.

Now from a safe distance, which album would you suggest to someone that has never heard of Audrey Horne before? "Le Fol" or "Audrey Horne"?
Definitely "Audrey Horne", it is far stronger than "Le Fol", although that is a good album too. But the songs, and the production is so much better on "Audrey Horne".

You've mentioned bands like Soundgarden and Alice In Chains among your influences. Were these bands misjudged in the 90s from the metal fans? What other bands have influenced the sound of "Audrey Horne"?
No, I think they got the credit they deserved ...but maybe a little later on. We are influenced by everything from Tom Waits, Kiss, Van Halen to Michael Jackson and Slayer. If it is good music, we’ll steal from it...

So, as far as I am concerned you are about to play for the first time in the U.S.A and you’ve started working on your new album. How much have you proceeded and when should we expect to hear new music? What’s your future plans in general?
Yeah, we just came back from America. It was great, and we made a good impression on them I guess, like one guy said to us: 'Thanks for being awesome dudes!' HA HA. We are currently writing new songs, and have a bunch lined up already; in fact, we played 5 new songs over there. We will start recording the album early this summer, and hopefully have it out during the fall. Then it’s out to promote it by playing live through Europe.

One thing I always wanted to ask you is why Audrey Horne? Why not Benjamin Horne? Or Agent Cooper? Are you all fans of "Twin Peaks"? It’s on of the best series I’ve ever seen...
Have you seen Audrey, Benjamin and mr. Cooper ? She is slightly more sexy than those two other guys... It was an easy decision. And yeah, we are fans of Lynch and Twin Peaks, in fact, all of his work. But Twin Peaks made us all a little fucked up, so that's a favorite. But we also chose that name because it forces you to be open minded about the band before you listen to us, as opposed to say... Slayer, which gives away what they are about right away, if you see my point.

I guess you’re the responsible one for the lyrics, so I’d like to ask you what you draw inspiration from? With your lyrics I get the feeling that I get with bands like Soundgarden. I’m not always sure what you talk about, but then I strongly connect with them... especially with quotes...
That is good to hear, cause that is what I aim for. I try to write lyrics that are more like pictures. They always continue outside the canvas, and that is where it starts to live its own life. So whatever you read out of them is fine, as long as you get something out of them. And yes, I do like to use the sea as an image... anchors, ships, sharks...

Except from England where you seem to be pretty famous, I don’t think you got the attention you deserved with your last two albums. Do you also believe you deserve more recognition or are you happy with what you’ve achieved?
We are proud of what we have made out of this band, but always hungry for more. And to be less humble, I too believe we deserve more, but we are working on that.

Do we stand any chance of seeing you live in Greece?
Oh, of course, we would love to play there, and I’m sure we will get the chance.

Thanks for your time. Add anything you’d like.
Thank you for the kind words, and hopefully you will like our new album when it is released. It will be by far our most rocking album from what it looks like by now. Take care and greetings to all rockers in Greece.