As ever, we’re going to try and cover every single Jäger, New Blood and SOPHIE stage band before Bloodstock kicks off on August 10th. Your chance to check them out and start planning which bands to get there early for!
Trust us when we tell you that this is bound to result in some frustrating clashes because, as ever, there are some great bands on these three stages.
Our thanks to all the bands for taking the time out to answer our questions!
Dakesis – Hobgoblin New Blood Stage, Saturday
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
We are incredibly proud to come from the home of heavy metal, Birmingham UK. Our city has a rich heritage of heavy metal bands and some of the most exciting sounds the underground scene has to offer!
How long have you been playing together as a band?
We’ve been going in our current incarnation for around eight years, but Amie and Gemma have a musical friendship that long out-dates the band!
Where does the name of the band come from?
The name was actually in place before we all joined the band. We were told it loosely translates to “illusion” in Ancient Greek but we haven’t been able to find any solid evidence of this. Whatever it originally meant, it’s become our word for all we stand for!
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
We can be tied in with a lot of genres – power metal, progressive metal, symphonic metal etc, in our own words though it would be epic orchestral progressive-power metal!
What a mouthful! What makes us unique? Probably our vast and contrasting array of influences, plus we’ve got three very different vocalists in the band and an orchestra in a box meaning we’re never limited in the sort of soundscapes we want to create!
What’s your live show like? Why are people going to watch you instead of another band?
We have been known to lean towards the more theatrical and bombastic sort of live performances – we like to add as much production value as the venue will allow! Anyone who’s been to our album launches, especially for The New Dawn last year will be able to tell you that we tend to pull out all the stops. Bloodstock will be no exception and we are planning a twist on our current live show with a few extras that have never been done before. Obviously we can’t give too much of the game away because that would ruin the surprise for our fans!
Have you been to Bloodstock before? What did you think?
Our bass player Amie has been attending since the festival was at its very early stages and was still Bloodstock Indoor in Derby, but we are all old time Bloodstock veterans and ensure we book time out of our busy touring and gigging schedule to go every single year. We absolutely love the vibe of the festival, the community atmosphere and of course the incredible line-up year after year. It’s the one place we can catch up with all the friends we make all over the country and beyond!
Did you enter M2TM thinking you could win it? Which region did you win?
We’re great supporters of Metal to the Masses, but neither of our BOA bookings have come from participating in the competition (we were also approached to play the Jager stage in 2012) We are very excited to be back though and have been supporting the M2TM competition within Birmingham over the past few months!
What sort of setlist can we expect?
We’re going for a high-energy no holds barred set – mostly drawn from our latest album The New Dawn, but you can expect some flashes of older fan-favourites!
Which main stage band do you most hope you’re not squished up next to so you can see them play?
We’d prefer not to clash with Annihilator or Wintersun because they are the bands we are most excited to see – but if we clashed with Hanowar it would literally be the end of the world!
What are you working on at the moment?
We have quite an interesting time ahead of us. Bass player Amie is (rather heavily!) pregnant with the newest Dakesian, she’s due mid-September which means she will be 8 ½ months at our BOA set! She’s going by the mantra “Party till you drop” and will be continuing with all Dakesis activities throughout pregnancy and beyond!
We will be taking some time off in September and October whilst we welcome our newest team member into the world, but as we’ve just taken over our own commercial recording studio (CapsaArx Studios in Birmingham, UK – got to get a cheeky plug in!) we will be using that downtime to work on pre-production for album three.
In November we will be hitting the road for a huge joint headline UK tour with Fury, and I suppose at some point we’d better get on with organising Quest Fest 2 for 2018!
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
We’re great friends with Captain Horizon, their front man Witty once sang whilst hanging upside down by only his legs from the rafters of a 30 foot high barn at Sonic Rock Solstice Festival. We’re not quite that acrobatic!
Jager, Hobgoblin Ale, Kraken, Kingstone Press Cider, Kaltenberg Beer or Bulleit Bourbon? And, yes, we’ll be counting all the votes!
Definitely some conflicting thoughts in camp Dakesis as we can’t pick just one. We are more Hobgoblin and Jager fans.