We Wish You A Merry Christmas

Candice: We Wish You A Merry Christmas. We got the twins involved, too. And it’s again one of these feel good songs where everyone just sings around and enjoys himself. It is probably the easiest one for everybody to sing in the whole world in any language. You just can sing along with that one.

21. Do you now also think about special Christmas concerts with Blackmore’s Night?

Candice: What we really want to do also is hopefully come back here and maybe go to some of the Christkindl markets. We just came from Rothenburg o.d.T. and we always wanted to go there for Christmas. And maybe do some of the television shows. We would love to come back to Germany for holiday time.

22. Do you remember the first time you two met?

Ritchie: We met the first time when I was playing soccer. It was a charity game. It was Deep Purple versus a radio station. And Candice was working for the radio station. And I met her later. She came for an autograph. And then we were talking. And then we went back to some sort of a private party from the radio station. And that’s how we met.

Candice: Sixteen years ago…

23. What was the first impression about each other?

Ritchie: She was very angelic. Obviously very pretty. And seemed very innocent. Very sincere. Qualities that not many people have today.

Candice: Ritchie was the complete opposite!

24. There is this funny story about Candice’s first car drive with Ritchie...

Candice: Actually a funny story… When I first met him… You know most people when they first meet and first talk, they are very nervous and they really don’t know how to break the ice. He actually asked me to meet him at a pub afterwards on the soccer field. I said I would come and then I was driving with a friend of mine in his car. I was sitting in the back and Ritchie was sitting in the front. He just came from the soccer field and took off his soccer boots and socks while we were talking. And at one point as we were talking he just took off the dirty sweaty socks, turned around and just hit me with them right in my face. And after that… There’s no better way to break the silence!!! So ever since then it’s just been history. Once you realize that someone has such a sense of humor you can relax and know that nothing is taboo. The way that we are even sixteen years later is a kind of ying-yang-equality and balance that goes on. Whether it’s physically – me being the light-one and he being the dark-one. And I’m always smiling and he never smiles. There’s lots of things that go on there.

25. Ritchie: it has been told you never really smile...

Ritchie: There was a time apparently someone caught me smirking. It was ‘79. I did smirk once. That was enough!

Candice: He tried it out. Wasn’t crazy about it. Moved on! But I think what I remarked about him at first was this abounding mystery that surrounds him. But when we sat down at a table we ended up talking for hours and hours and hours. We had so much in common. Ritchie and I on paper: nothing should work out at all. But it’s the kind of thing that in real life it works out really well. Because a lot of his strengths are his weaknesses and vice versa. So when we ended up talking we found out that we have so many things in common. One of our favorites were supernatural and paranormal things. Ghosts, other dimensions and other worlds. On that alone you can spend lifetimes talking about it. So we tended to really click as friends and kept in contact for a couple of years. We would always see each other when he would come to the island where I live. And things really progressed very very naturally. First we were friends, then I went on the road with him and we started writing together. Everything has been a very natural evolution. I think that’s probably the healthiest way that relationships go.

26. Candice: It has been told that you were already singing when you were 6 months old...

Candice: My parents are very musical. They’ve always been musical. They both play the piano and they both sing. So that was the famous story when I grew up. Ever since I was very very young – a few months old – I was always singing around something. Apparently I knew all the words to American Pie by Don McLean when I was a year and half old. That was driving everyone crazy because I just kept on singing and singing and singing. I think a lot of that came from the fact that I was the first born. When you are the first born your parents aren’t really quite sure what to do with you. So my parents actually enrolled me in singing and acting lessons. Because they were listening to my singing or making my own songs all the time. When I was four they put me into singing lessons. And I stayed there until the age of twelve. And then I went to a choir. Music has always been somewhere in me. Even going through high school when people are starting to experiment – to smoke and to drink beer, to do these kinds of escapes and rebellious things teenagers do – my biggest escape was to put on a headset and to write down lyrics that other people were singing. All my school books were covered with lyrics of other singers that really hit me in my heart. And then I started to become a poet. I would write by myself in the dark and get out all of these feelings into poems for many years. The first time I met Ritchie, I was talking to him about it. But I would never show my work to anyone. It was too personal. Your deepest, darkest fears and your hopes, ideas and dreams were included. The whole scan of all of my emotions. That was actually what inspired him to ask me to write some of the lyrics on the 1995 Rainbow album. At one point he called me up and asked me to come up on a ferry. That took about an hour and fifteen minutes. There he played me a backing track of one of their songs because their singer had a difficult time to come up with lyrics. And of course on a boat you don’t have much more left to do so I wrote down about fourteen verses and by the time the ferry arrived at the other side I showed him what I came up with. I fully expected him to take the paper and throw it into the garbage. But he just looked at it and said: “we take this, this and this, circle that one, half of it is a chorus and there you go! Here is the song!” I guess once I proved myself in that round it went on and on. They called me up every time they had some problems with coming up with lyrics. They just played me the backing tracks and I ended up co-writing four of the songs on that Rainbow album. There was the creative flow and we could write together. Once he knew that, he also knew that he can rely on me in that way as well.

27. Candice: You worked as a model years ago. How are your memories on that?

Candice: I’m glad that I did the modeling for as long as I did. Because I think it taught me a lot in what I am doing now. I always think that when your life makes a left turn properly or a right turn properly there is a reason for that. I don’t really believe in co-incidence. A lot of the skills that I have learned in modeling – whether it is being in front of a camera, doing trade shows or interacting with people in certain ways – I’ve found that it’s really helping and reflecting on my stage performance now. So it’s not as scary or paralyzing to go out on stage and dealing with a crowd of four thousand people. Because I was dealing with things like that in modeling for such a long time. But there were definitely downsides about the modeling thing as well. The good thing is that I don’t need a hair or make-up person because I can do it myself. But one of the bad things about modeling I think is that I always have to portrait a character that someone else wants me to portrait. The guy behind the camera or the head of the modeling agency. They always wanted you to get across and to fit in with the products they want you to sell. Whatever product it was. Clothes, make-up, jewelry or whatever it might have been. And now it’s incredibly freeing what I am doing. Just because I can be me. And – love it or hate it – I can give it my all and be very honest. I simply don’t feel so comfortable in being someone else and doing that salesman pitch. Ritchie would call it the sandwich-board. I just don’t see it’s very natural to fit in at all if it’s not honest. When I sing, play and write these words it all comes from within. In modeling I kinda had to wear a mask that someone else expected me to wear. Now I just can be honest and be myself.

28. Candice: Could you imagine playing in a movie or in a TV-play or maybe in a theatre?

Candice: Yeah! I would actually love to do something like that! The closest I got recently to that is that I have been pulled on stage at Broadway. I was there with my friends, one of them being my background singer Nancy from the Sisters of the Moon. We went to see The Boy From Oz. Just after the actor in that won the Tony award. For some reasons – because we enjoyed the music so much – we were dancing in our seats and he stopped the whole show and got a big spotlight on us. He asked us what I do for living and all of my friends said that I am a singer. So he got us two microphones and we were able to get on a Broadway stage and sing Ghost Of A Rose and Past Times with good company and he – the actor Hugh Jackman – he was dancing.

29. Candice: You are the crowned Princess Candice Of Magiquest. Please tell us a little bit more about this ground breaking new adventure park.

Candice: The other thing that I am dealing with right now is called Magiquest. Which is an interactive game park. They filmed me as Princess Candice. The woman behind it used to work for Disney and now she has started a company called Creative Kingdoms. She came to see our show and saw the interaction that Ritchie and I have on stage: the dark and the light. She called me the Princess of Light. And he is a sort of dragon-like kind of a creature. She calls him the shadow-creature actually or the shadow figure or the trickster. And she had this brilliant idea. She thinks when people walk through Disneyland parks and when they finish going through all the rides they are exhausted and drained of energy. Because she thinks Disney made them a box of fun that Disney stamps as fun, but not so much the people. So her idea was to energize people and bring in their own personality and really make them enjoy this so much more. And she patented this technology. It’s a magic wand. And in the end of the magic wand is a computer chip, so when you go through this Magiquest-kingdom it has Stonehenges in it and woodland creatures and you can fight the dragon. Basically it is a videogame but you can go through the videogame. It’s you. And you can take the magic wand and go on these different quests and adventures. And as you point your magic Wand to different things they come alive and they talk to you. So I’m on an interactive video screen, in my own chamber in a castle pacing back and forth because the storyline is that the goblins have stolen my voice and I have to sing to the creatures of the forest and I have to awake the unicorns. It has all the magical nuances to it. So basically when you come to my chamber and if you wave your magical wand toward me I come alive and tell you what you’d need to do in order to complete this quest and bring the rune stones back to return my voice to me. It’s amazing: it really winds up most of all the little children. The five-year-olds. They are amazed by the fact that when they point their magic wand something comes alive. They have real magic and they are so excited. And the teenagers and their parents they understand the concept of the game so they go through the five different levels of quests and the different adventures which are more difficult. It’s a great experience for the whole family. That was also the last time I was filmed to be actually on screen.

30. Candice: In Blackmore’s Night you started to play Renaissance instruments. How many of them can you play now?

Candice: At this point… How many can I play well, you mean? I used to play the piano but I lost favor with that. But now with the Renaissance instruments, I can play probably six or seven of them…. So I’ve ended up playing two different types of chawms, pennywhistles and the recorders… It’s great because it is incorporating a whole new sound to the band. Actually I played hurdy gurdy too but now Ritchie has taken over my part as the hurdy gurdy player. I’m very happy with that. Because otherwise I would have even more things to do on stage besides singing which is difficult. It’s great because around the house he is often playing the hurdy gurdy and I am playing the shawm. At two o’clock in the morning he plugs the amplifier in and just starts to play the hurdy gurdy over the water where we live. But we still have neighbors close to our home. But nobody can find out what the heck this sound is all about… We love to scare our neighbors. They think we’re the Addams Family at the end of the road anyway.

31. Candice: Tell us about your progress as a songwriter.

Candice: For the past almost ten years we’re doing Blackmore’s Night, I started out with the thinking that my main contribution will be as a poet, lyricist or philosopher or something in that kind… To me the singing thing was a little bit frightening at first. It was the first time I was singing on the center of a stage in front of many people. I didn’t grow up thinking about being the lead singer. So I never formed or joined a band and did the bar-circuit or the clubs. The very first time I really sang on stage was in front of five thousand people in Tokyo. And I was kinda pushed on stage holding the microphone and shaking all over my body. I was very nervous and more or less in denial until someone pushed me out there. I thought this must a dream. This cannot really be happening to me. So my first real idea of contribution for this project was lyrical. I felt that was really coming from me. And I still try to work on my voice and learn my levels and try to push these boundaries back… Whenever I feel that I’ve hit the ceiling I try to push it a little bit further. It’s actually teaching me more about myself. That actually gets very introspective when you try to learn about your instrument. But then as the years went on and we started writing different songs we realized that as a Renaissance band we should really start involving more Renaissance instruments. And I think that’s what really sets us apart from a “normal” five-piece band. From a drums-bass-keyboards-guitars-vocals-band. Because instead of a guitar solo there might be a bagpipe chanter that I’m playing or it could be any instrument that we have in our house. So it is giving us a whole new dimension to the sound. And in that we are really able to have a great creative freedom in the songs. We keep it organic as well as integrating modern day instruments. It opens your mind to what you could possibly do…

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14