Wolf Hoffmann notes Accept cranking out five albums in ten years is “pretty damn good for nowadays”
Wolf Hoffmann notes Accept cranking out five albums in ten years is “pretty damn good for nowadays”
Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffmann was recently interviewed by Lee Vickers for UK’s Velvet Thunder.
Hoffmann was promoting Accept‘s new studio album Too Mean To Die, which was released via Nuclear Blast Records last month. Since reforming the band with Mark Tornillo on lead vocals, Accept have released the following audio albums — Blood of The Nations (2010), Stalingrad (2012), Blind Rage (2014), The Rise of Chaos (2017) and Too Mean To Die (2021).
In terms of what keeps him going after 45 years in Accept, Hoffmann indicated (with slight edits): ““Crazy isn’t it? Part of it is still the sheer fun of playing in front of people. That motivates me and I’m going slightly crazy that I can’t do that at the moment, I haven’t performed live for almost a year now. That’s definitely my main motivation in playing live but also creating songs in the studio is a lot of fun when you see it taking shape, improving and at the end you have something that you’re really proud of. I mean, an album for musicians like us is like a notch…it’s almost like in the westerns when they put a notch in their gun [laughs] or on the bomber planes there is a symbol for how many enemies that they shot down, it’s another big achievement, I should get a tattoo for every album I make. It feels like a big milestone, when I look back at my life, I think 1984’s Balls To The Wall, 1985’s Metal Heart, 1986’s Russian Roulette, they were the building blocks of my life. To make another album is…”. Hoffmann added: “That was something else as to the discography: 1984, 1985, 1986 it was so quick back then and now it’s two or three years between records.”
Considering the change and development of technology, Hoffmann was asked why he thought that it was so different now to which he replied: “I have no idea [laughs]! The other day I was reading up about Uriah Heep because Ken Hensley just passed away, I was looking at their discography and I see that they were making two albums per year in the early 1970s and I think how did they do that; they were always on the road and did two albums? I recognise that we did one per year back then which was the norm and now it has shifted slightly to more like two or three years and some bands even do five years between albums, we cranked out five albums in ten years which is pretty damn good for nowadays. Another reason why it takes longer these days is because I have at the back of my mind that when I write songs you always think about everything that you have already done previously. There is a bunch of stuff that you put away and when you start afresh, everything is new and everything is allowed but when you sit with the discography you always compare and start eliminating straight away and it becomes harder to come up with material that is new and exciting. You’re more limited when you already have so many songs.”
You can read the rest of the interview with Wolf Hoffmann at Velvet Thunder‘s website.
Accept‘s “Teutonic Terror” video (from Blood of The Nations album):
Accept‘s “The Undertaker” video (from Too Mean To Die album):