Innocent Victim

MICK BOX
Nov. 26, 1977

It's a question of attitude, the band's a lot more open to anything, we played a lot on safe ground for a few years and now we're not prepared to do that. Anything we play is Uriah Heep regardless.

KEN HENSLEY
Nov. 26, 1977

For a long time we've tried to sound like a different band because for too long we went round in circles and the time was definitely right for us to make some changes in our approach to our music. Although I should stress that that's not deliberate, we didn't sit down and say - 'right, now we're going to be really different' - this is just the culmination of the changes in personnel and the desire in the band to really make some progress instead of standing still.

...I wrote it (Free Me) quite a while ago and it was one of those songs that was just left in the book. Two years ago it was one of those songs that I could never have suggested to the band because we had the kind of attitude within the band that would never have even entertained a song like that, it was so uncharacteristic. But now the atmosphere in the band is so completely different that I can take virtually anything to them.

There was definitely a need for our approach to be more commercial, especially with what's happening in the music business, our kind of rock and roll was leading the field for such a long time that it's easy to fall into the trap and think that it would go on like that. But there's so many other things, we've got to be competitive and we've got to be contemporary so I think it's a good thing although it wasn't deliberate.

We're still a rock and roll band and we always will be for as long as we carry on. What we're doing is we're adopting a more mature approach to it, we're not just crash, bang, wallop for the sake of it. I think the reason that heavy metal has taken a back seat of late is because everybody had stopped thinking about what they were doing. I know we did it for two years, we went on thinking that everything we were doing was right, and it wasn't, while we were doing that there were all these other developments taking place and we suddenly found ourselves a bit old fashioned, I think that's really what the key to the whole thing was, a change in attitude rather than style, our style is still basically the same, it's just our attitude has changed.

...I think that's an important point because from where we stand we can see the change in audiences, we can see the generation change and one of the most important things for us to do now is make sure that our music stays contemporary and up to date simply because there's so much competition about, we've got to make sure our music fits in with the general atmosphere of the business at the moment. As it was, there was no chance, if we'd have kept going the way we were going we would have died a relatively dishonorable death. What we've done now is adjusted, and listened, and looked at what's going on, and thought about what we are doing, that's really all that we've done.

I think the most important point about that is really that we are confident in what we're doing now where as not so very long ago we were doubtful, we weren't too sure about what we were doing. We have this kind of self confidence now which is helped a lot by the confidence amongst the record company and the people in the business, the fact that the single's being played. For the first time we've managed to get some degree of confidence being expressed by DJ's. This does a lot for our moral and this must come across in our overall performance. In America it's a completely different thing, we've got a lot of ground to catch up there, we lost a lot of ground in the States after being immensely popular there and it's more or less like starting from the beginning but I think we're all pretty confident that we can get it together over there.

MICK BOX
1990

MICK BOX
Rostov/Don Russia, February 1997

KEN HENSLEY
St. Louis, Missouri, May 1997