LACUNA COIL Singer: 'What We Always Do With Every Album Is That We Don't Think'

Ed MacLaren of Femme Metal Webzine recently conducted an interview with singer Cristina Scabbia of Italian heavy rockers LACUNA COIL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Femme Metal Webzine: I'm signed up to your Facebook page. I noticed that you do a lot of updates on the things that you're doing and you have a lot of fun doing that and fans really like it.

Cristina: That's why I'm doing it. It's not that I have a lot of fun doing it, but I think that it's cool for whoever doesn't know that much about the backstage and about what's going on with the band. I think it's cool to have a direct update from the band because sometimes the official websites are more like portals that can take you to different sites but they're never a close connection to the fans. And in this case, Facebook is really cool because you can get direct feedback from the fans and you can post updates and write when something happens and I think that's cool.

Femme Metal Webzine: After doing two months as a support act and then you have to switch gears and go headline and you have the longer sets. Do you have to change anything musically or get your mindset in order?

Cristina: Your mindset just changes, because, of course, you have to play every night a longer set so it's more tiring for your body, for your voice, so you have to be extra careful about your body, your voice, your fingers, if you play guitar or your energy if you're a drummer. So definitely we're going to be able to take care of ourselves and our bodies during that tour because I know we're going to push the energy to the limit every night. As I said, even if you tried to take it easy once you're up there, it's impossible. It's just impossible. We give everything we have onstage.

Femme Metal Webzine: Are there any benefits to playing more support shows to doing a headline show?

Cristina: When you play a headliner show, you know that the people coming to see you are fans, so they know your music already. When you play as a support band, you have a chance to grab and to win over new people that in the future will come to your headliner shows. So any support tour is useful to spread the word and let more people know about LACUNA COIL. Actually, [this year's Gigantour] really surprised me because we never had problems to fit with any lineup and any band because we have such a special sound ourselves. We have a specific LACUNA COIL thing going on that we pretty much fit with every band we played with from ROB ZOMBIE to ANTHRAX to TYPE O NEGATIVE to P.O.D. Diverse bands and nobody has ever said anything, but on this tour it was more like there's going to be a lot of old-school fans. You know, MOTÖRHEAD and MEGADETH die-hard fans that are going to look at us like, "Oh my God, who's this girl on stage? Why do they even have a female singer? Why aren't they doing this?" And the reaction was magnificent! It was amazing! Everybody was rocking out! They loved the show. We would leave the stage every night with hands up in the air and people cheering us and going for it. It was amazing because when you're the opener, you don't really know. It's like you have to warm up the crowd and you never know how they're going to react most of the time — they will be like having a beer somewhere getting interested in the show. And it wasn't like that. We got the attention of pretty much everybody. And that was amazing. It's a big challenge. It's exciting.

Femme Metal Webzine: Do you think that you've been doing anything different with [the "Dark Adrenaline" album] than the previous stuff or are you just doing what you do well better?

Cristina: I think that it came out different, but without us thinking about making it sound different, because what we always do with every album is that we don't think. We just go with the flow which is let the inspiration go and do everything for us. It's not that we sit around a table and we say, "OK, the last album went this way. Why don't we try to do this?" It's not like that — the process is completely different because we collect the ideas and whatever we like, we keep it. We don't care about clichés, we don't think about what people might think about the album because it's a representation of art so it has to describe who we are. It has to be who we are. It doesn't have to be what fans want from us and I personally think that that's why we kept it — for such a long time — interesting to a lot of people. We might have lost some fans but we won over a lot of people. And then maybe the new people didn't like the album after and the old-school fans came back. I think it's refreshing. It's refreshing to just evolve and not to get stuck in the same thing over and over. And this album definitely the most obscure, the heaviest one we've ever done but it's not that we thought about it before we started songwritin

Femme Metal Webzine: Do you think that the success of LACUNA COIL has had some kind of an impact on opening doors?

Cristina: Absolutely, yes! Well not only opened a lot of doors for territories that are not exactly metal, because we're coming from Italy. We are with an independent label, so we were the first ones to be surprised about our success because, wow, we're having the chance to tour Europe. We're having the chance to be signed by Century Media. And this is actually because we were trying to propose something different from what the other bands from Milan were doing back then. It was more the power metal era — a lot of bands were playing power metal style and we were doing something completely different — we were doing this sort of goth rock that nobody else would have done with a female and a male singer. And that immediately grabbed the attention of Century Media and that's why we got signed. But now that other people can see that we made it to a certain level, a lot of other people can be inspired by that and think that if they made it and they are from Italy — which is not the U.K. and it's not the States which are usually the main places where a success band might come from — then we can make it, too, if we work hard and we put a lot of passion and a lot of sacrifices in our jobs.

Read the entire interview from Femme Metal Webzine.