Ron Thal: Gaffa interview

Gaffa intervew: Why was it just this year that your debut album was re-released?

- Because the record company finally decided it! Shrapnel Records owns all rights to the album and what came after, "Hermit", so I can not just self-publish it. It is entirely up to them what they will do about it, and after I switched companies in 1997, they have never reprinted it so nobody could get it - unless they found it in some obscure shop or at eBay. But then they contacted me last year and said they wanted to republish it and it made me piss happy! It will of course want to one's music is accessible to people, so we started working on new artwork and getting Sega numbers with.

I read that it took you six months to transcribe the entire album to the 200-page book, which also becomes available. Was it harder than you thought?

- It was harder than making the album! Just to make it, so I decided in 1997 to take every single guitar tracks and record them on tape. Then I listened to a few seconds at a time while I tried to think of how I had played it all and wrote it down and stuffed it into the software. This year I went through them so again - put them up neatly and orderly layout - and got them put into PDF files, created artwork and so on, and it took another six months. So it was something of an achievement. It was my personal Mount Everest, which I climbed!More