While waiting before the live show of Rhapsody Reunion at Orion in Ciampino on February 19th, we had the opportunity to set an extemporaneous interview with Scarlet Aura, an emergent band from a difficult musical scene, to get to know them better.
It’s nice to meet you guys, it’s the first time for us attending one of your live shows, would you tell us about you? Who are you and how long have you been playing together?
Mihai: We are Scarlet Aura and we come from Romania, from Bucharest, we have been playing for three years now and… That’s it!
Catalin: And we play rock‘n’roll!
How was the band born? How did you decide to start this adventure?
Aura: We all were involved in different projects and we decided to start this one together, so this is how our band was born. We were named “Aura” at first, then after our first international deal we renamed the band into “Scarlet Aura” for an international uniqueness; we made our first album “The Rock Chick” signed with Universal Music, then our second album entitled “Falling sky” was released by the German label Pure Rock Records and then we published our single “The Beast Within Me”, which was released by the Finnish company Outlanders Productions, so in a bit more than three years we had done a lot and got a lot of activities, we also played with some bigs like Tarja Turunen. Now we are touring and we are honored to share the stage with Rhapsody Reunion and of course with our friends from Beast in Black, so I can say our dream is coming true and now we have got a lot of plans, because if we did in three years what other bands do in ten years… Now we’ll see what’s coming during next year/couple of years because we really have got a lot of plans. We are working on another album and it we will be released soon, we will announce it.
During the previous show you made a tribute to Dolores O’ Riordan, what do you think about this artist and why did you decide to tribute her?
A: Well, actually the album “Memories” is a tribute album and it contains “Zombie” from The Cranberries, “Breaking the Law” from Judas Priest, “The Final Countdown” from Europe and another bunch of songs.
M: Actually it’s not a tribute album, it’s our way of playing their music, it’s different because it’s not the same to cover music and to make our own music.
A: The idea was that we had been playing those songs separately during our live shows for many years and we did it for so long, we thought “okay, let’s make an album” since we felt those songs as ours. So when we recorded and made the album “Memories” Dolores was still alive, unfortunately she passed away and we thought that we should have thanked her for that song which was not ours, but that we played our own way so we felt it as ours.
What are your future projects? Have you already got any idea or material?
A: Yeah, we have got four albums released and now in two weeks is going to be released a live DVD album with also some bonus tracks from this concert and of course there’s the new album we’re working on. We were also thinking about some videos from the tour but we will talk about it, after all the concerts and festivals and all the various activities we have planned, we will see.
M: We are also going to publish a DVD from this tour.
How do you feel about this experience touring with Rhapsody Reunion and Beast in Black?
Sorin: It’s fantastic!
C: They’re really amazing guys, it’s awesome, we joke, we have fun together and they’re amazing musicians and people.
A: We learned a lot, we’re all professionals here and this is our job, we do our best and we have got the chance to learn a lot watching the shows of the two bands that are playing with us. Another interesting thing I can tell you, we are one of the first two female fronted bands who are getting out of Romania, we are actually the first one and this opens to us a lot of possibilities.
This is actually very curious, how did it happen? Why there are only two female fronted bands coming out of Romania?
M: There aren’t many female fronted bands in Romania in general.
A: This happened because the Rock scene in Romania developed very slowly, there has been a revolution and the social situation is not so good there actually. The guys are focusing on studying and nothing else, so basically we haven’t got a history in female fronted metal bands because it was impossible for us to have one, since there was no rock/metal music history at all. There are a few bands who left Romania to Germany or America or any other place where they could live and play freely; we are proud to be the first who reached the goal but it’s difficult at the same time, because there are a lot of prejudices and we have got a lot of great artists in Romania, but the landscape of the music industry is different in our country. We didn’t have choices. You know that in Romania the revolution started in 1989 and the biggest problem was that if you had a certain style, you would have been sent to jail; rock music wasn’t encouraged at all and CDs were sold from the black market, but we still have got time to recover and reach the international scene and we really want to encourage other artists to do what we did, to follow their passion and put the maximum effort in it. We suggest to anyone to always try being the best version of themselves, we’re humans and we need it.
