Bassist Markus Grosskopf is one of only two members who has survived all the member shake-ups Helloween has endured through the years. Through the years, Grosskopf has developed from a melodically strong bassist with a great stage presence to a surprisingly prolific songwriter. And although the regular edition of ‘Giants & Monsters’ doesn’t include any of his compositions, he still actively writes songs for the band.

“I’m used to writing B-sides and bonus tracks, so two of the songs I wrote for these sessions are lying around somewhere waiting to be used for one thing or another”, he smiles. “At the moment, I just don’t know for what yet. I tend to not get involved with that; I just play bass, haha! They will be used somewhere. Japan always wants to have bonus tracks, some streaming platforms too. They will pop up somewhere.

I like to say that I write search songs. You have to search for them. Hidden tracks, haha! When you write the song, you can’t objectively judge them. We recorded two of my songs, but then it’s difficult to go out and say: but my track is better than yours! So I basically withdraw from that part of the process entirely, and I’ll let our producers and management decide.

Andi (Deris, singer) has the tendency to write the singles, because he has this beautiful commercial songwriting style. I tend to write more rock songs. At some point, a decision has been made, and it just happens. Whatever is good for the band is fine by me. Sure, sometimes it can be a tough pill to swallow, but that’s how a band functions. Especially since we have five songwriters in our line-up.”

The Best Possible Teachers

“Michi (singer Michael Kiske) can write songs, but he doesn’t. I really think that is an admirable thing for him to do, to simply say: I’m not writing anything, I’d rather just focus on performing these things the others have written as well as possible. I think that’s a quality as well. When he sings, you will simply get goosebumps. That’s when the songs get their souls, regardless of who has written them. Especially when he sings together with Andi. In the end, that’s what’s most important anyway.”

That approach requires being able to leave your ego at the door. “Sometimes”, Grosskopf says. “And sometimes it hurts, but in that case, it’s usually what’s best for the band. You can’t always win. We’re a good bunch of people, and I think it works. Also, I started writing songs very late. I was over 30. I’ve had the best possible teachers in the band.

I have always rocked with Ingo (Schwichtenberg, former drummer who died in 1995) a lot. Ingo and I were there for the rock ‘n’ roll part of things. We were going out and having parties. But I did think that I wanted to try and write something at some point, just to see how it goes. And I also had the ideas.

The first songs I wrote ended up being obvious B-sides. Stuff like ‘Shit and Lobster’. Those were my first attempts at writing songs, and that’s when I suddenly started having more ideas. I wanted to build from there, and get better at it. So I simply dedicated myself to it, and wrote whatever came to me. And I learned from how the others did it. At some point, I realized that partying alone wasn’t quite enough for me after all, haha!”

Building a Melody

“When my songs are done, the others can do whatever they want with it. They don’t really come to life until Kiske and Andi start singing them. I have a vocal range of half an octave. That’s how I mumble melodies on my demos, with quite a deep voice, and those guys make something amazing out of it. I have also worked with a different singer who has a range of half an octave more than myself, just to show them: this is what I want.

But these guys know what I mean, of course, and they can interpret things however they want. I don’t have a rock voice. I have a child’s voice. But the melodies are there, and they understand what I mean. Whichever singer will sing the song will do so in the octave he needs to do it in. I don’t have the timbre that Andi or Michael have. I can’t sing like Kai (Hansen, singer/guitarist) does either. But these guys just understand what they have to do with any melody I have written.

It usually starts with a melody in my head. A verse or a chorus will come to me. When I have the idea, I think: okay, let’s build a riff around that. That’s usually how I start. If I start with a riff, there often aren’t a lot of places you can go with the vocals. When there are just a few notes, the singer doesn’t have a lot of room, because he only has one or two notes he can use to build a melody. That’s why I tend to start with a melody, and build the guitars around that melody.

That way, the melody becomes more interesting. Or at least I think it does. There are many ways to do it, but this is my way. The hook has to be there. And it has to come from the melody.”

This Ancient Bass

On stage, Grosskopf is commonly seen playing fairly beat-up Fender Precision basses. “You mean broken? Yes, I still play my broken Precision basses at home”, he laughs. “You mean vintage, right? I love playing those. I did record the new album with a new Fender, which has active pickups. The others were all passive. I’ve had the Fender Vintage Custom Shop build me that new one. It’s white and somewhat scratched. In the past, I used to always have a couple of Warwick things with me as well. These days, I play a lot of Sandberg, live as well.

I like that my basses have a history. They have a soul. Many of them are from America as well. I have an old Jazz Bass that was built in September 1965, when I was born. So when I saw this ancient bass from the same month, I had to have it, of course. That one also looks damaged as hell. These old Jazz Basses are very expensive, but they are pieces of my soul. It’s a lot of fun to play them.

On the albums I play with pick a lot. Live, I primarily play with my fingers, because my picks keep slipping from my hands when I get sweaty. But I like doing both. In the studio, I don’t always want to have a fingerstyle sound, so I play a lot of it with picks, very concentrated, because I think the attack is really awesome. I do really love playing with my fingers live.

Playing with a pick probably works great on the relatively straightforward things, like a Cliff Williams in AC/DC downstroke approach. It’s fun to do. Ian Hill from Judas Priest also does a lot of relatively straightforward things with a pick, which fits the music super well. That’s the art of omission. But that’s how that band functions. AC/DC lives off the art of omission. If they played many of the things I do, it wouldn’t really be them. Musicians who mastered the art of playing straightforward are people I deeply admire.”

Not Playing the Harmony to Pieces

Grosskopf can’t go too crazy with his bass parts, as Helloween’s arrangements tend to be quite dense and complex. “You really have to carefully find your place within the music”, he nods. “It often happens that I think of a part that I can play somewhere, and then it turns out that there’s a keyboard and a choir as well, so then you have to be really careful not to play the harmony to pieces. That’s when you have to hold back.

However, I always make sure that my melodies can be found here and there. But really, I think it’s quite easy to do that with the music, because it’s fun to do. That’s where the challenge lies: to make it fit the song regardless. The song asks for something that pushes the song.

That’s the great thing working with Dennis (Ward, producer). He’s also a bassist, and very stylistically assured. He changes three notes in what I play in a chorus or something, and it suddenly sounds much better. Something I wouldn’t have come up with, but he does. And it’s often not very virtuosic at all: just three notes that fit the scale much better.

I never do anything without him, haha! He also knows what I mean when I come up with something. He’ll say something like: oh yeah, now change those two notes like this, and then it’s a perfect fit. Or he says it’s too much or too little. Also, he usually knows better where the vocals will enter than I do, because those often aren’t finished yet by the time I’m recording.

He will be the one to say: there are a lot of vocals here, if you go and play around here as well, the ear won’t know what it needs to listen to first. You have to be careful that the ear can still understand what happens. Of course, the vocals always give direction to the overall thing, and you shouldn’t play a chorus to pieces. But you also have to make sure to find your place in the world, haha! Or in the song, but in the moment you’re playing it, that song is the world for you.”

Building the Skeleton

“I get inspired by Dani (Löble, drummer) as well. When I play with him, we’re building the skeleton, the foundation on which everything can stand. And that has to be solid, otherwise everything will just fall over. That’s why the bass drum and the snare are the pulse, and the bass is the heartbeat. Or the other way around.

That has to sound well together. When that is solid, you can build a house on it. Nothing will collapse on such a strong foundation. If it’s too loose at the bottom, things will start to stagger. That is often what determines what I will be playing there. So Dani really inspires me with his playing.

Both of us are always there when we rehearse for tours. That’s also when I hear what he plays. That’s when we decide whether we will play things exactly like we do on the album or whether we might change some things around a little bit, or simplify some things a little for live. Generally, we take what’s on the record, and make the decisions based on that. And of course, the songwriters also have their ideas of where to take the bass and drums.

Even though I am inspired by the drums, you of course also have to pay attention to the guitars. Everything has to fit together for the live shows. And if it doesn’t, you have to mess around for however long it takes until it does. But that’s fun. It’s a creative process. When I’m in the studio, I usually do two songs per day, listening to every part, wondering what I can do there, what’s going on with the vocals, what the guitars do… It’s a lot of fun!”

A Beautiful Piece of Technology

“I don’t play with an amplifier anymore. At the moment, I have a Kemper. Until recently, I used it with a speaker cabinet, but I don’t use those at all anymore either. Back in the day, I used to play two of these giant Ampegs. Back then, they were built for venues, when there weren’t any PA systems yet. In a way, it is kind of a PA. They were almost too big.

These days, we only have monitors on stage for the guitars, and you don’t really need these giant speakers anymore. I do still have my profiled Ampeg sound on my in-ears. I can have that on a USB stick, if I want, when we go to Japan for example, and I can have the sound that I want anywhere in the world.

Our sound engineers are very grateful about that, because when you don’t make so much noise from the stage, they can make a much more controlled mix than when there are eight Marshall walls and two giant Ampegs. Another issue is that the singer has to sing up against that. ‘Please turn it down!’ ‘No!’ Instead of turning everything down, the singer is nowhere to be heard, because the voice is simply the way it is.

So these days, we do everything with in-ears. I always have a little bit of the audience on my in-ears as well. It’s a beautiful piece of technology. You don’t have to hire stacks of one thing or the other if you have just one piece of equipment that is available just about everywhere, and you can take your own sound with you on a stick.

Back in the day, we just had to work with what we had. When we would play festivals, we wouldn’t have our own mixing consoles, though we would on our European tours. These days, when you play a festival, they usually have digital boards, and we can have our own set-up there as well. I always have the sound I want on my ears.”

Completely Different Characteristics

“What’s interesting for me is that in the beginning, I never know who is going to sing which song. I usually don’t know until we work on the mix. In part, we have versions that Andi sings on, and versions that Michi sings on. And Kai here and there. But we also have parts that both of them sing, or all three of them.

And then we have to decide: this part is for this singer, that part is for that singer. I usually don’t know who’s going to sing the songs when I’m recording my bass parts. Even after I receive the mixes at home, we could still decide to try another singer’s parts, or mix two or three singers’ approaches.

That’s honestly loads of fun. They are totally different singers, but they harmonize together really well. Even when Kai enters as well, with his angry dwarf vocals, haha! He does that really well. It just fits. It’s completely different from Michi or Andi. There are three voices with completely different characteristics, and that’s something you want to emphasize during mixing. It’s lots of fun. To listen to as well. That’s when the soul opens.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll Billy Rhythm Swing

“I have started playing the contrabass a couple of years ago. During the pandemic, I had the chance to do something I had always wanted to do, and that was playing the contrabass. I love music from the fifties – stuff like Chuck Berry and Elvis, so that’s how I started playing contrabass, and I started a combo with a buddy, Jan Eckert, who used to play in Iron Savior. He plays guitar and sings, I play bass, and Dani played drums for us.

It was quite a big transition for me, because I never played fretless bass, but the contrabass is fretless by default, and the notes are quite far apart, so I really had to learn that. I made these small markings on the side to see where my fingers should be. Up until the octave, and then I can work with it. But these days, I don’t really need them that much anymore. I don’t play any virtuosic stuff, just rock ‘n’ roll billy rhythm swing, as we call it.

Our music will be released someday. We’re called the Fireball Monkeys. We wrote the songs ourselves, plus two cover songs. I recorded everything at my place, and you will be slapped around the ears by the Fireball monkeys somehow someday.

Having played electric bass for over forty years, and then switching to contrabass was quite difficult. Like I said: I’m not a mega virtuoso, but I can play the rock ‘n’ roll songs that I write myself. Swing around. It’s fun. I recorded a lot, and it’s been mixed and everything. It won’t become my main activity, but I’m having a lot of fun doing it. And it probably won’t be sold in large quantities, but who cares? It’s just something I like doing.

I have played it to some record companies, but if that doesn’t work out, there are a thousand platforms I can use to release the music. If no one wants to have it, I can still throw it on Bandcamp.

Another thing I taught myself to do during the pandemic is playing cigar box guitars. These small, three-stringed things, with a slide. Also a lot of fun. So now I can play this Mississippi Delta blues type stuff. I went back in time a bit musically. All of this interests me. I simply had the time to do it, and that’s when I decided to learn to do it right. And it hasn’t let me go since.”