Transcript of the original liner notes:
First of all, I hope you will enjoy this music as much as I still do today.
Even though the music is not as raw and heavy as Mercyful Fate and King Diamond, it's still very aggressive in its own way and quite complex at times. It blows my mind that back then I never really acknowledged how good the musicianship of the band was.
Our live-set mostly consisted of our own songs, with a few Deep Purple songs added. Apart from songs like “Black Night,” “Highway Star” and “Child in Time,” we would also play some of the more obscure Purple songs, such as “Fools” and “Living Wreck.”
Our stage show was quite controversial for the time, but I will get to that a little later.
I don’t know why, but listening to this music always makes me crave a beer. Could it be that the old wounds never quite healed from rehearsing 4 times a week in a storage room under a bar? A storage room loaded with cases and cases of beer. We could drink as many as we wanted, as long as we paid the owner at the end of each month. And we did! How often Jesper and I got stuck upstairs after rehearsals.
Oh well, we were young and crazy then. I have never really gotten rid of the crazy part.
The following is a translation of an article in the biggest Danish rock magazine of the time:
The headline read: “Black Rose: Violently Insane Musicians???”
The photo showed me in full makeup holding a human skull, while being stabbed by the drummer. The 3 other band members looked as if they didn’t know that anything wrong was going on.
Under the photo it said: “Black Rose when they live as human beings. When they are on stage they are so much worse, and pure insanity seems to invade them.”
The article itself read: “Black Rose is insane, nerve-wrecking, exciting, fantastic, vomitingly wonderful. There are many opinions and descriptions of the great new Danish rock band ‘Black Rose,’ which even before having gone completely through here in Denmark, has shown promise of a great career abroad. The band’s manager, Robert Meinertz, has no doubt, that they are the biggest thing that has happened for Danish music, and that they are the first Danish band with a real chance to make it in the USA. Black Rose plays REAL DEMANDING ROCK!! Violent rock if you will. They have a stage show that would have Kiss and Alice Cooper envy them. They shock and hypnotize their audience with effects such as bombs, chopped up pig’s heads, decapitated babies, axes and knives, and pig’s blood and pig’s eyes en masse, plus a certain brutality which could only come from real psychopathic minds, and, on top of that, they are extremely skillful musicians. There is no doubt that Robert Meinertz has struck gold. Black Rose belongs among the best on the international music scene.”
Pretty bold statement!!! Exaggerated? Probably. All of it? No. We did have a crazy show, but I don’t think Kiss or Alice Cooper would have felt threatened by us at the time. To this day, none of them know that this band ever existed. Not too many people do.
