WHISPERS IN THE SHADOW Whispers In The Shadow have been around for 25 years, and that should be celebrated. A new compilation is out: ‘GildingThe Lily’,which consists partlyof newrecordings of the best songs from the past quarter of a century.The band has undergone a serious evolution during that period and you can read all about it in the conversation we had with frontman Ashley Dayour. Together, we discussed the entire career of this psychedelic wave rock group, the highs and lows and the permanent search for innovation. Hi Ashley. We’re celebrating 25 years of Whispers In The Shadow this year. So, happy birthday. I suppose you were born out of the goth scene inVienna.Howwas this scene at the time?What attracted you to it? Thanks a lot.Originally, I’m not from Vienna. I grew up in the countryside far from the big city so to speak - if you can call Vienna a big city. So, I wasn’t really part of any scene really. Of course, the music was influenced by the sound of guitar driven wave and goth bands but the little gothic scene we had and have in Vienna had nothing to do with it. I also must add I’m not a big club fanatic,never was. I don’t go out much and I don’t know a lot of people. So, I can’t really say much about the scene back then and the same goes for the goth scene now. It’s small but has always been active.And there’s a few people who really keep it alive and just don’t stop doing so,which is admirable. The first cassettes were released in 1996. It seems that you were Whispers In The Shadow, playing all the instruments. What should we remember from this period? Can you recall howyou startedWhispers In The Shadow? I was also playing in a band called Sanguis Et Cinis at the time but got a little frustrated with how things were moving with them. I just wanted to play the music I was actually listening to. There was no place for that sound with Sanguis Et Cinis, so I decided to record something more or less on my own.The first demos were 4-track-recordings we recorded in my bedroom at my parent’s place when I was still living there. I was very young, it was more than a lifetime ago, actually. I wasn’t really satisfiedwith the first demo but the second one was more to my liking. It was the one that got me a record deal. So within just a couple of months we had a deal and a few months later we were in a professional recording studio. We were lucky. Funnily enough only three songs from that demo made it onto the final album. ‘Face’, ‘Rain’ and ‘Crying Eyes’, the rest were all new songs we wrote afterwards and they sounded very different from the original demo tape. www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 28 - I still remember the confused faces of the label executives when they came into the studio to listen to what we’d recorded thus far.They said something like,‘Hmm that wasn’t on the demo,was it?’.They repeated that sentence after every song and of course I was aware of the slightly more concerned faces after each track.Within a couple of months, we changed a lot. But the record did well enough. On the first two albums of Whispers In The Shadow – ‘Laudanum’ from 1997 and ‘November’ from 1999 – the band grew to become a trio with Richard Lederer, known from Die Verbannten Kinder Evas, Weltenbrand and Sanguis Et Cinis; and Zebo Adam, who has rejoined the band last year and is a well-known producer in Vienna. How did they join the band then and how was is to work with those people? It was clear to me that I wanted to play live. Obviously, I couldn’t play all the instruments at once and what’s the fun in touring alone? I knew Richard from Sanguis Et Cinis, so I just asked him if he wanted to be in the band.And Zebo was and still is a very close friend of mine, he’s been with the band ever since,not always as amember but as a very close adviser and/or producer. I remember these first shows very well. It was good fun, some of them anyway, others not so much. The first albums were very influenced by ‘Pornography’style The Cure. If I’m not mistaken, you also had this ‘big hair’-cut that is often associated with Robert Smith. Did it bother you to be compared with The Cure? At the beginning it did not because that was what I wanted to do. Take on from where The Cure left in 1982 and write songs which had that sort of space and darkness.Thing was, you have to know The Cure was pretty much out of fashion in the mid 90s. They didn’t have the ‘God like’ status they have now. I mean, nowadays their influence can be heard in pretty much every guitar sound from every post punk band around the planet. So back then we created a sound which was totally against what people thought was cool.The same goes for the look. But I didn’t care much to be honest.Later on,with our third (‘A Taste Of Decay’) and especially our fourth album (‘Permanent Illusions’), when we expanded our sound and experimented more, it started to bother me a bit when the press still reduced us to that Cure-ish sound.Today I really don’t care at all. I love The Cure, they are part of my musical DNA, as is David Bowie by the way. I just don’t give a damn anymore.
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