Q+A / Story (1/2): QNTAL: “We like bad weather.”

3 facts:

– 30 years ago Qntal released their first album “I.” 2022 comes “IX – Time Stands Still” .
– In 1603, John Dowland wrote “Time Stands Still” “for a nobleman serving time in the Tower of London”, Michael Pop explains.
– And that’s kind of what Covid-19 period felt like for Qntal , hence the album title.

In keeping with the season, “Time Stands Still” begins with the old Irish poem “Winterly Waves.” For the correct pronunciation, an expert was consulted via video call, “and there appeared on the monitor a picture-perfect gentleman with a mighty mustache in a wing chair and a whiskey glass in his hand, reciting the poem to us in a thunderous voice,” Syrah recalls. Laughing, Michael adds, when asked what he associates with winter, “We like bad weather. What could be better than a windy, rainy, cold November day…”.

Cover from cover?

We would already think of something. But let’s stay with the “nice” things. The cover version of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” for example. Michael was not referring to the original version of Blue Öyster Cult (1976), but to that of Unto Ashes (2003): “I thought the Unto Ashes version was brilliant, which is not necessarily true of the original. So we recorded a cover version of a cover version … a bit curious, isn’t it?”

In the next part, we talk with Qntal, among others, about the root of Goth in unexpected places.

(Interview: Claudia Zinn-Zinnenburg)

The album “IX – Time Stands Still” at Amazon.