Getting to Know… Leper Messiah | Interview 🎤

For our 207^th Q&A on The Musical Hype, we get the inside scoop from ‘glammy’ Norwegian hard rock band, Leper Messiah.  

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ur music is pretty diverse, ranging from punk rock to art rock to heavy metal, but for the most part you’ll find us in a sweet spot somewhere on the glam-to-hard rock spectrum.” What more can you say, Leper Messiah but ROCK 👏 TF 👏 ON 👏 🤘! One of the interesting personnel notes regarding this band is the fact that one member, Per & Per, plays both drums and lead guitar… 🤯! As is always the case, the band, with vocalist 🎙️ Vidar doing interview honors, provides some intriguing info about their musical approach, background, influences, and their current and future endeavors. So, without further ado, The Musical Hype proudly presents 🎤 Getting to Know… Leper Messiah: Interview No. 207!

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Starting things off, for those who may not be familiar with you, what would you say makes you distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off? 

🎤 Hey, Musical Hype, and thanks for having us! Well, we’re Leper Messiah, a glammy hard rock band from Bergen, Norway. We strive for delivering some fun yet reflective shows with both an edge and some spectacle. You don’t wanna be forgettable, right? Our music is pretty diverse, ranging from punk rock to art rock to heavy metal, but for the most part you’ll find us in a sweet spot somewhere on the glam-to-hard rock spectrum.

The band consists of me (🎙️ Vidar) on vocals, 🎙️ Per & Per on drums and main guitar respectively (or was it the other way around? Who knows!?), 🎙️ Øyvind on rhythm guitar, and 🎙️ Iggy on bass. Drop us a thumb and a PM on our FB-page!

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Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did your band form and what were some of the goals or the visions you had as a band early on?

🎤 It started back in the summer of 2011 when I tried to muster some local musicians for a fun little jam project, just covering some sweet blue-eyed soul stuff, but that project never come to pass. (Organizing musicians is like herding cats!).

One of the musicians, Øyvind, then contacted me later that fall to suggest we meet up for a jam & rehearsal. That we did, and it all went swimming! I was majorly into David Bowie at the time (and still am), and I proposed we form a band to tour a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars show in celebration of the (then) 40^th anniversary of Bowie’s seminal glam rock shenanigans. Øyvind brought in Per on drums and soon we discovered the wunderkind guitarist Per… whom we, very cleverly, sat to play bass… yeah, we’re wonderfully clever, we are!

With that lineup, the four of us tour the Ziggy thing through 2012-2013, and then decided to go on as an original music act once that was concluded. We began putting together our own tunes, and little by little it became apparent that guitarist-Per would be much better utilized on main guitar than bass. Eventually, after a long search, (damn, bassists are hard to find!), we discovered the Polish immigrant and bassist, Iggy, and with that, Leper Messiah was complete.

As a new band, you’ve got to have a record, and we worked hard on our debut album – 💿 FELL CREATURES – for a few years, choosing our studio and producer and masterer and everything very carefully. Finally, this year (2021) we released the album, which we are exceedingly proud of! Now we’re firing on all cylinders to tour and promote the album in Norway, and next year we plan to tour it in the UK, Poland, and the Netherlands, too. It’s gonna be brilliant to get this thing out there into the world!

Y’all should go have a listen to FELL CREATURES:

Try it out, yeah? Your gonna like it!

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Let’s talk more about goals.  Have your goals or your perspectives changed since first starting out? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

🎤 Yeah, stuff changes. Starting out, we were happy just to tour the Ziggy Stardust material; and it was a blast of an experience, too! Now, though, with a record out and something to prove, we’re aiming for the top. It’s hard, of course, with rock not being the cultural pillar it once was, but we’re certain we have what it takes.

Our short-term goals are to tour the UK, Poland, and the Netherlands next year, as I mentioned, but we’re also eying Florida and other US locations where a following is building. That, and I’d love to take my band to Berlin and play the Nuke Club (have you been?), or to Egypt and play the Cairo Jazz Club (I used to live in Cairo for a spell – great place!). Of course, we’d also love to land a big ass music industry contract or two, but those are scarce these days; we’ll see. Small steps, and eventually the worlds shall be conquered.

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Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Who would you consider some of your biggest musical influences and how are they influential?

🎤 Naturally, seeing as we started out as a Ziggy Stardust tribute act, David Bowie is a pretty big influence on Leper Messiah. Apart from him, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Foo Fighters are all important to us, as is Kiss, whose groovy rock n roll fun is a big inspiration for guitarist-Per.

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Ah, the fun stuff.  What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance?  Feel free to be creative.

🎤 Hm… I saw a grown-ass man, big and heavy and with a mighty beard, sobbing his eyes out during a not-particularly-sad song of ours once; sweet stuff! At another show, there was this super-shy girl in the back who just suddenly let loose in front of the stage midway through; awesome! And then there was that time, during the Ziggy thing, when a guy on the front row stole my feather boa, put it down his pants, and handed it back to me; lovely! I’ve probably got neck-syphilis now…

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Up until this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?  

🎤 For me it’s got to be 🎵 “Dance with the Devil (Alcohol)”, a soulful rocker that I wrote when battling an unhealthy drinking habit. That’s the song that feels to me like I’ve contributed something important to the world; perhaps someone out there will find kinship and some self-deprecating fun with that track.

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Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left of center the world should know about you? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

🎤 Hm… let’s see. I (Vidar) am also an aspiring fiction author, writing epic Bronze Age mythic fantasy, or some such (genres are hard to define). With a little luck, I’ll get an agent to bite shortly, and it’s all uphill from there, right? Look out for my debut murder-mystery novel, 📚 3 ½ Murders to War, which will hopefully be published at some point in before the closing of the century! 😉

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Closing things out, what is your band currently working on, promoting that you can share with us or want us to know about? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure.   

🎤 As mentioned above, we’ve just released our debut album (seriously, do check it out). With that out of the bag, we’ve begun crafting new tracks that will eventually end up on that difficult-to-get-right follow-up record, but that’s years in the future. Right now, we want to tour what we’ve got and test out the new tracks as they develop, and then we’ll get back into the studio when the time is right.

At the moment, we’re working on a new tune called 🎵 “The Crossroad Man”, a classic rocker about the bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil for guitar virtuosity and the creation of Rock ‘n Roll, so that’s fun! We’ll try it out on the audience at shows this coming fall.

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Thank you so much for sharing taking the time to answer these questions, and best of luck moving forward. 

🎤 No, thank you, Musical Hype, for inviting us over for a chat! It’s been fun, so let’s do it again, yeah? In the meantime, we would love for you to feature and review our album, too, mate, and I’m sure your audience would appreciate it as well. FELL CREATURES has something for everyone, and a special something just for you 😉

We’re looking forward to talk to y’all again soon, and to hopefully see a lot of you at our upcoming shows. Come say hi!

Leper Messiah out. Cheers!

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Getting to Know… Leper Messiah: Interview No. 207 🎤 [📷: Agnieszka Iwanska, Leper Messiah, Brent Faulkner, The Musical Hype] 

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