War is Hell and QUEENSRYCHE vocalist GEOFF TATE has the interview tapes to prove it, he tells SHAUN NANCARROW.

Interviewing dozens of soldiers and veterans from every war the United States has been involved in since the Second World War is not usually part of the job description for the lead singer of a pioneering progressive metal band from Seattle. But, at a time when – rightly or wrongly – more US soldiers are serving overseas at any time since the Vietnam War, an impromptu chat one afternoon between Queensryche’s Geoff Tate and his veteran father about the latter man’s experiences in Korea led Tate to take up a role to which he was unaccustomed – that of interviewer.

"I walked away from the whole project with a lot more respect for journalism," he tells me with a laugh, "because it is very difficult, as I’m sure you’re probably aware, to ‘get stuff’ from people – to get past the one word answer and dig deeper. And it’s really tough to talk to them about experiences that were traumatic or experiences where they’ve lost a friend or a loved one. I agonised over that part of it and eventually developed a way of doing it where I was able to get a lot of sound bites and info from people – but it took a while."

Thankfully, all this effort has borne impressive results, with the lyrical concepts and samples derived from these interviews mingling with the strongest material the band has released in 15 years to produce American Soldier, an intriguing concept album that is "not political at all," according to Tate, being "very much a statement of the soldiers; it’s where they are at and what they have experienced."

So, given all the time he has spent of late engaging with the topic of armed conflict, I wonder, does Tate ever foresee a world without warfare?

"I dream of that," he says after a pause. "I think any intelligent person can see that war is an extreme situation and is something that you shouldn’t enter into lightly because it effects generations of people on both sides. And I think that we’re probably getting further and further away from it, although it could probably take a thousand years for us all to get to that place, simply because we’re not all created equal – there are always haves and have-nots and people who are trying to push their own agenda and will go to any extreme to do that. And there are people who do not have any sort of global foresight, as well, that get into leadership positions for various reasons and who are pushing their own agenda.

"It seems like it’s always been with us," he continues, "but there is a lot of evidence generations of humans lived in a partnership society as well, without warfare. So I hope one day we can get past that and live in a world that’s a bit more refined."

QUEENSRYCHE play the Hi-Fi Bar on Saturday Aug 29, supported by Darker Half and Arcane. AMERICAN SOLDIER is out now through Atco/Rhino. www.queensryche.com

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