Ronnie Atkins should be dead by now. Don’t take my word for it. Take his. 4 years since being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, the legendary Pretty Maids singer has soldiered on, fighting “Back to Back” and making the ’20s his most productive decade yet. What was supposed to be a one off solo project with 2021’s One Shot has turned into a full blown creative vehicle, now weeks away from releasing his third solo outing, Trinity. We sat down with Atkins to discuss this new album, his inspirations, and the future of Pretty Maids. Indeed, he came to rock!
Greetings Ronnie and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Ronnie Atkins: I’m good! I’m fine. Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming on here. It’s a rainy day here in Chicago, but you are our heavy metal beam of light!
RA: I’ll tell you what. It’s a rainy day here in Denmark as well, so no difference *laughs*.
First off, and most importantly, how have you been feeling lately?
RA: I’ve been feeling good. I just got scanned two weeks ago and got some good news last week. I got the thumbs up from the doctors. I’m struggling with some sequelae from immunotherapy. I’ve had some chronic asthma and bronchitis issues, and chronic sinusitis. It’s stuff you gotta deal with. Everything comes with a price. If I hadn’t all these treatments and immunotherapy, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you, so I shall not complain. Besides that, I’m good. As long as they can keep the bad shit at ease, I’m fine.
We’re a few weeks away from the release of your third solo album, the aptly titled Trinity. When did work get started on this one and what did you set out to achieve with it?
RA: First of all, I didn’t initially plan to put out an album in 2023. I’ve released two albums in two years. Well now, three albums in three years! I just had a couple of songs last Fall. I guess I wrote half of it there and the rest of it was written around January, February. What are my plans with this album? I don’t know. I just write. As I’ve probably said in previous interviews as well, music is like therapy for me because I’m occupied with something that I love, something that I’ve loved doing since I was a kid, singing and writing music. That’s basically it: Not to get bored to death *laughs*. I just love what I do. As long as people wanna hear it and I’ve got a following and the fans appreciate it, I’m humble and happy. No further plans than that. I take every day as a gift. I just wanna get the best out of it.
It’s really refreshing for the fans considering we’re in a day and age where so many bands, especially the ’70s and ’80s bands, will put out a record, and wait 3 to 5 years to do another. Whereas with you, we’ve got these 3 solo albums and a Nordic Union album. You’ve been very prolific as of late.
RA: Yeah, I have! First of all, it was how my situation changed. It was kind of like there was no time to waste if I wanted to do some solo stuff. I just had a lot of ideas. That’s one thing. The other thing is we had a lockdown and couldn’t really do anything else than write music for that period of a year and a half or something like that. It was natural for me to do. It’s like a never ending well of ideas these years. I don’t know why, but true.
A lot of bands, particularly a lot of the old bands from the ’80s don’t release new material anymore. A lot of people are living on past glories and play their successful albums from that time. For me, it’s important to be relevant and to keep writing if you can. Some people maybe don’t have the ideas anymore. In my case, I’ve still got ideas. I don’t know where they come from, but I have them, so I might as well just write some new music. It’s also nice to play new music when you’re onstage and not just keep playing the old 30-40 year old songs, even though that’s fun too.
What are the key differences between making a solo album and making a Pretty Maids album?
RA: I’m an old school songwriter. I didn’t change really. I basically write the same way as I always wrote songs. What’s important to me is a good song is a good song, no matter how you wrap it up, how you produce it, what direction you want it to take. Of course, these albums lyrically have been a bit more personal than what I would normally do. When you’re in a band, you’re representing the band. You can be personal only to a certain extent. In that way, it’s been difficult. This time, I’m writing the stuff myself. I’m collaborating with Chris Laney, the producer, but I’m writing the songs, ideas. I send them out to him. Of course, I listen to critique if he has something critical to say, but I pretty much know what I want. I don’t have to negotiate with anybody and I don’t have to go into discussions.
I used to write with Ken (Hammer). Sometimes that’s good to get a better sense of what you do. Sometimes that works great. In this case, it’s been a very smooth process during the last 3 albums, it really has. It’s been a great relationship with Chris. Musically, I never intended to do anything else. I’m writing the same way I always did. I’m not trying to make nu metal or modern metal or whatever. I just wanted to do what I always did. That’s what I like. I grew up with the ’70s and ’80s music. That’s what inspired me, so I’ll just continue doing that, as long as people want it.
Whereas One Shot was a pretty straightforward hard rock album and Make it Count emphasized AOR, Trinity comes off as your heaviest solo album to date and closest musically to Pretty Maids. Was this an intentional move or did it occur naturally during the writing process?
RA: It occurred naturally because I wrote more on guitar this time. I’m not a great guitar player, but I’m good enough to make a riff. Anyways, I get the ideas up here in my head and I can either play it on the guitar or the piano. I’m not good at playing any of it actually, but I’ve always played enough to write songs on it. I was just fooling around. I’ve got a piano and I’ve got a Fender guitar and amp in there. It’s a cool little Marshall amp. It’s great.
When you write and you’re sitting there playing with the distorted sound, it inspires you to do some heavy stuff. If you sit by the piano, it normally would inspire you to do something completely different. That’s where I normally write a ballad. It’s mostly done on the piano. Then we talked about it. We said, “Yeah, this is gonna be a bit heavier.” I think it’s cool there’s some sort of development. In a way, it was intentional, yes, because we talked about it at some point like, “This is getting heavier.”, but that’s good.
The same thing happened on the last Nordic Union album. After all, I started out as a metal singer. In a way, I still am. I just like good songs. You can write a song on acoustic guitar, which I also do, or piano, whatever. If it’s a good song and you think you’re on to something, it can be good. It depends on how it develops and how you produce it. There’s gotta be some good melody lines and good riffs and stuff like that. It’s basically the same as it was with Pretty Maids.
Speaking of being a metal singer, your voice on these solo albums remains as powerful and impactful as ever. What is your advice for aspiring metal singers?
RA: My advice would be don’t listen to my advice *laughs*. I was a heavy smoker man, for years. I’m paying the price for it now. I was a pretty heavy drinker when we were touring as well at times. I never took a singing lesson. There were no vocal coaches around when I started out. I’m from the provincial side of Denmark, pretty far from Copenhagen back then. I don’t know. First of all, singing is not a competition. There’s a lot of technically way better singers out there than me. I’ve got my own technique and it’s worked for 40 years. I’m a self-made man. I’m not saying I’m doing the right thing, but these days I’m trying to take care of it.
I think it’s very, very, very important that if you go out on tour or anything like that, you gotta start rehearsing, singing everyday. It’s like a muscle. A sportsman can’t go out and just jump 10 meters or whatever they jump without training first. It’s important to get some sleep and not hang in the bar until 5 in the morning anymore. I don’t do that. I used to! I wouldn’t do that anymore. It depends. Some would say rest your voice for most of the day and don’t speak too much to anyone. A lot of singers have it like that.
Then again, I was touring with Avantasia and Geoff Tate from Queensrÿche was on the tour. He was fucking singing all day man! He could sit in the middle and we’d be sitting having lunch. Suddenly, he would go, “Ahhhhh!” We’d be like, “What the fuck?!” *laughs* It works for him and he still sings great! I think it’s a very individual thing. Some people lose their voice when they’re in their 40s or miss some range or maybe some middle range or whatever.
It’s a very individual question. My advice would be do whatever serves you. Do whatever fits your vocal style the best and you gotta find out yourself. Just believe in it. I also think the mental side of this is important as well. You gotta believe in it. If you’re feeling depressed and stuff like that, nothing really works. If it doesn’t work in your head, it probably won’t work in your cause either.
You’re right about Geoff. He can still belt it out!
RA: Absolutely! I was a big Queensrÿche fan in the ’80s, particularly those first 2 or 3 albums.
I want to talk about the title track of this album, “Trinity”. This is such a heavy, powerful number, both musically and lyrically. How did this one come about?
RA: That was the last song written for the album. It was written…there’s a weird story to this. The chorus, the hook line, was written on the way out of a bar. I was at a 50th birthday reception at a bar. I had to go down there, drink a beer, and deliver 2 bottles of wine. My wife and some friends were gonna pick me up because we were going to see 10cc. I never saw them before. There’s only one original member left, but whatever.
On the way out, I got this idea in my head. I don’t know where I got that idea. I had to call them and say, “You have to wait 10 minutes. I need to find somewhere I can sing this into an iPhone.” That’s how that came about. I had an idea for a verse from another idea and then it just came together very soon when I came back, or the day after. It’s important to record. I do that when I have guests here and we’ve got friends over for dinner. If I’ve got an idea during the dinner I go, “Hey, you gotta pardon me. I gotta go upstairs and nail this one. I’ll be back in 10-15 minutes.” That’s what it is, otherwise you’ll forget it.
Lyrically, we were looking for a good title. Trinity was the title I had written down in my notes. It’s also a little game of word. It fits well with the third album. Also, it is a little religious. My belief in God…I am a born and raised Christian. It’s not that I don’t go to church every Sunday or anything like that, but I always believed in something better after this. It gave me some kind of comfort, particularly in the last 3-4 years. I got a little closure on that issue because you naturally start thinking, “What comes after this?”
When you’ve got a journal saying you’ve got incurable stage 4 cancer that started in the lungs and spread to the bone marrow…I’m well aware we can all die tomorrow or get ran over by a truck or go down with a plane or whatever. When you’ve got it on pen to paper, it’s a little closer. You start watching and reading different, precieving life differently.
How often would these instances happen in terms of thinking up song ideas at the most random places or times?
RA: It happens a lot of times! When you suddenly get an idea, and I have no clue where it comes from, but the best songs are normally the ones where you just get an idea and you finish it off in 5-10 minutes, whether I write it for myself or I wrote with Ken. Then again, there are songs where you go, “This is gonna be great!” You spend fucking weeks or even months finishing them up. Then they turn out not as good as you wanted them to be. In my experience, some of the best songs are the songs that just pop up and are written very fresh.
This year marks the anniversary of Pretty Maids’ classic self titled EP. What are your memories of this release and in what ways did it lay down the foundation for your career?
RA: My memory of that album was when I saw the cover the first time. I was crying huge tears. I was so disappointed. I didn’t get it sent from the record company. We literally had to go to the record store and buy that one. The guy behind the counter showed it to us and said, “This is it.” I said, “This is it? This is fucking awful!” *laughs* It was the first album we did and it was on a little independent label back then called Bullet Records from Stoke-on-Trent in England. It was the first EP we did and with the first couple songs, we spent a lot of time doing it back then. It was our first introduction into recording, fair enough.
The album that I saw as our defining album was our first real album, Red, Hot and Heavy. That came in ’84. That was our artistic breakthrough. To this day, I still think it’s a great album. It sounds a little different because we used Fairlight CMIs and Synclavier keyboards and stuff like that. It sounded a little different from a lot of the other stuff that came out at the time. That’s more the defining album for me, from my perspective. Then there was the Future World album that came in ’87, which was the commercial breakthrough for us. Those two albums are the albums I think that define Pretty Maids, maybe not so much the first one. Then again, I guess it did somehow.
I agree. Red, Hot and Heavy and Future World have always been my favorites. As I look here at the “special thanks” on the back cover of Pretty Maids, listed is “Black Sabbath + Crew”. Did Pretty Maids open for Sabbath around this time?
RA: Yeah, we did! I think we played maybe 2 gigs at a local high school in our hometown and one gig in Sweden with some friends we had. That was back when we shared cassette tapes. You got friends who were into hard rock. It was a cult, kitsch thing back in the early ’80s. It wasn’t mainstream yet, not here anyways. We had our Swedish metal friends. There was a band called Overdrive we were friends with, so we played a gig in Sweden.
After that, I got a call from our back then manager named Ken Anthony, who’s still around doing all that kind of stuff. He said, “I just got a call from the promoter who handles all the concerts in Denmark and Scandinavia. You’ve gotta sit down now.” That was when I was living at my mom and dad’s place. It was before the mobile. I said, “Yeah, I’m sitting down.” “OK, we just got an offer to open for Black Sabbath on 5 gigs in Scandinavia before they play the Reading Festival.” That was with Ian Gillan in the band. It was the Born Again Tour.
So our first gig out was Black Sabbath’s first gig with Ian Gillan in Oslo. I have a lot of funny stories about that. It was our first time out. We had to take a bank loan to hire an old rental bus to travel around Scandinavia. I’m a huge Black Sabbath fan, particularly the first 6 of the Ozzy era, but also Dio is one of my favorite singers. In general, I’m just a big Black Sabbath fan. Actually, I like Born Again too!
I love that album.
RA: I was a huge Purple fan too. What’s not to like? Getting the chance to open for Black Sabbath, meeting those people. Ian Gillan was so kind and nice. Without any of us asking, he introduced us to an English producer named Tony Wilson who did the BBC Friday Rock Show back in the day. We came there later that year playing clubs and pubs for 3 quid a day. He got us on the BBC Friday Rock Show and stuff like that.
Since then, we met a lot of times. We have him singing on one of our songs. We had Roger Glover produce an album. Ian Paice played drums on one of our albums. We had this Purple connection and that’s the first time we met Ian Gillan. Also, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler, nice guys. Bev Bevan from Electric Light Orchestra was the drummer in the band for the time being. I’m an ELO fan too actually *laughs*, so it was fun!
It’s funny you say that because I recall a couple tracks off the last album that reminded me of ELO. I love them too.
RA: I’m just a fan of good music really, but I grew up in the ’70s. First, it was the glam thing. Well first of all, my siblings are between 9 and 13 years old than me, so I grew up with a lot of the stuff they played in the late ’60s and early ’70s. There was a lot of Beatles, Stones, and Bee Gees. The first thing that hit me big time was bands like T-Rex, Sweet, Slade: The whole glam, glitter rock thing. Then I got into ABBA, Queen, a huge inspiration, Electric Light Orchestra, 10cc, all those other bands and so on. It wasn’t actually until I was 15 or 16 that I really got into the metal thing. When I had friends come into my place, I’d quickly remove my ABBA and ELO albums. I’d put them in the back so they couldn’t see them. It had to be Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Ozzy, and so on. So yeah, when I was 15, 16, I was totally into metal.
And the rest is history!
RA: And the rest is history! Today, I’m very open minded to music in general. There’s a few genres I don’t like. I hate rap music, and a lot of other stuff as well, but generally I’m just a fan of a good song, a good hook line, a good riff, a good melody, a good voice. That’s important.
It said in the press release that you’re planning on hitting the road. When can fans expect these shows and would the setlist include Pretty Maids and Nordic Union songs as well?
RA: We’re just gonna do 6 shows here in November. I was planning to do a bigger tour, but there’s 2 reasons for it. One is that the fees and the expenses right now, especially after the corona thing, are simply not proportional. The other thing is my health issues, not cancer, but as I said, this asthmatic bronchitis that I’ve had the last half year. I gotta learn to deal with that, this breathing thing. My voice is perfectly OK, but if you cough all day, it ruins your voice a little bit. It’s better right now. I’m getting the right treatment, I hope. So that’s the other reason.
I’ll basically play songs from my 3 solo albums, probably quite a bit from the new one, and of course I’ll play some Pretty Maids stuff. Maybe some songs that haven’t been played before or rarely has been played. I really haven’t decided yet, and of course a couple of crowd pleasers. I gotta play “Future World”. There’s just songs people expect because that’s part of my legacy as well. They’re part of my history. Those songs weren’t written only by myself, but they’re still a part of my history.
What is the current status of Pretty Maids?
RA: The status is there’s been some issues between us, mainly between me and Ken, over the last couple of years. It actually started before I got sick, but we’re talking now. We’re talking. It’s always been a love-hate relationship I guess. I don’t know. We had an enormously fun time. We had 40 years together that we’ve known each other. We met actually recently at a festival around here. We talked about old days. Currently, we’re considering doing some shows as Pretty Maids again.
I can’t confirm to anything, but we might do some select gigs next year to celebrate that we’re still around. We never had a chance to play live for the last album (2019’s Undress Your Madness) because that was released when I got sick. We owe it to the fans, and probably also ourselves, to do a couple of farewell gigs, or whatever it’s gonna be. You never know. I saw KISS on their farewell tour in 2001 at the Tokyo Dome. 2001!
We saw how that ended up!
RA: Yeah, exactly *laughs*. I’m not gonna say it’s gonna be farewell gigs, but that’s what we talked about. I won’t rule that out. It’s likely we do that.
In closing, it may be too early to ask, but considering you’ve been on a creative tear as of late, do you think we’ll be getting a fourth Ronnie Atkins solo album in the future?
RA: I don’t know! I’ve got plenty of ideas. It’s just a matter of telling myself I wanna do it. If I set a deadline, I know I’ll get it done. This album was not meant to be out in 2023, but as I said, I did it because I had the ideas and I had the songs. Chris said, “Yeah, man! Let’s do it! We’ve got nothing else to do right now, so let’s do it.” So we did it! I’m very happy about it. I won’t rule out a fourth album. We actually have some recorded for a fourth album, but that may lay over another year. What do I know? Yes and no *laughs*. I don’t know. I can’t tell right now. Maybe!
The new Ronnie Atkins album, Trinity, comes out Friday, October 13 on Frontiers Records. For more information on Ronnie Atkins, visit www.facebook.com/RonnieAtkinsOfficial/. For more information on Pretty Maids, visit www.prettymaids.dk.