IT AIN’T WHERE YOU’RE FROM,
IT’S WHERE YOU’RE AT

Miland Petrozza stared into space. He dropped his guitar case on the floor and pushed the strap of his duffel bag from his shoulder. Never before had he returned home feeling so useless. He could still feel the back slaps from the show the night before, but the last few hugs and handshakes had felt more like farewells to the best times of his life. The band was in shambles. Metal was on its deathbed. It was late February 2000 and everything Petrozza had lived for over the last fifteen years had ended.

The tour with the young, gothic metal band Moonspell as a headliner had been a painful farce. With all due respect, Kreator opening for Moonspell? Nobody had made any money from the tour. Management, promotion, line-up, producers – nothing fit together anymore. Too much smoke in the air, too many ice cubes in the bong, too many false notes played.

Farewell, youth ofThrash, Altenessen. Welcome, age of tedium, Essen.

One more band dumped, like overburden on the coal mine spoil tip: wrung out, lifeless, worthless. Nothing justifies the existence of a band that doesn’t believe in itself anymore, a band whose audience only loves them for what they used to be in their glorious past. To leave everything behind would be so simple.

But Miland Petrozza doesn’t give up that easily. He thought of his band mates. He thought of Speesy, of Jülle. Mille made a call.

“We need to talk. We have to remember what made us great, what made us something special. We have to go back to our roots and get that old energy back. We need new blood – call the Finn! He fit in well when he toured with us two years ago. We need a fresh start. Fuck writing for the record company! We’ve got to take everything back into our own hands. We have to keep thrashing, blow everyone away and remember how it all started!”

One part of this story was born deep in Calabria in the toe of Italy’s boot, where the sun beats down relentlessly and you had better find yourself shade lest it burn you to a crisp. There, a shoemaker fed his family from film screenings and making prosthetic limbs for soldiers who lost their real ones in the last war. This life sustained his family until the shoemaker passed on, leaving his 12-year-old son to look after his mother. Some years later, the son decided it was time he seek his fortune somewhere far away.

Another part of the story began a bit further north, in L’Aquila, not far from Rome, where the earth threatens – with terrible grinding noises – to swallow up the houses, with no regard for how many hundreds of years they have stood. From there, three brothers went to Germany and one to France in search of happiness.

Finally, the roots of this story also grew in Poland, East Prussia, as well as east of Berlin, in places where hardly anything remained after the World War II commanders and their troops had ravaged the area.

Kowalski, Schimanski, Petrozza, Kokoschinski, Wiesioreck, Kopec, Fioretti, Grzeca or even Trzebiatowski. Whatever name it