Rick Interview At Roskilde

One of the highlights of Roskilde for me this year was seeing Manchester electropop dance band Delphic perform at Pavilion, the smallest stage of them all at the festival. A couple hours before their performance on Friday 2nd of July I met up with Rick Boardman (keyboards, synths, backing vocals) backstage to have a chat. The band had arrived literally minutes prior, having driven several hours from an appearance the previous night at the Peace and Love Festival in Borlänge, Sweden. In part one of this candid interview, I learn about the little town they call home, the Manchester music scene and why you haven’t a chance with them if you try flirting with them in a club, and I even briefly act as therapist.

Oh, and if you wondering what is up with the seated pose and banana, Rick insisted on eating a banana while I photographed him to, in his words, ‘promote healthy living’. What a breath of fresh air in the rock ‘n’ roll business!

So…tell me a little about yourself, what instruments you play, and how you contribute to Delphic.
Well, I play…I mean, performance-wise, I play keys and do a bit of singing. And I guess, I dunno, we’re a quite a synth-led, electronic kind of band, so we always have of lot of synthesisers lying about. I guess the main thing about all of us is that we’re kind of all composers, all kind of studio buffs, so that’s the kind of real Delphic. What we do onstage is a means of interpreting that, I guess. In the studio, we’re all writers…so yeah.

Who or what inspired you to start playing music and want to be in a band?
I guess…I dunno, I must have been around 6 or 7, 7 when I started playing piano. And I always played piano. And then about the age of 16, I think my dad gave me a Minidisc recorder. See, that’s what we’re talking about, the time period, it was really big for about 2 years, it was totally going to take off – and yeah, it was ‘Kid A’ by Radiohead, and he gave me a couple of their songs. And I’d never gotten into Radiohead before, and um, we had a few synthesisers lying about. My dad had a few synthesisers, he used to build synthesisers. So I messed about with them, trying to rip off what they’d done with their Warp Records-influenced stuff, and from listening to that I got into loads of experimental kind of prog music and stuff and Godspeed You Black Emperor! stuff and all these big epic post-rock bands and stuff like that. And then from then it just kind of progressed, and I just thought, you know what, if I can somehow get away with this, this is a much more fun job than going to become a lawyer like my dad or anything like that! So I kind of stuck with it.

Same with the other guys really. I’ve always played with Matt (Cocksedge) the guitarist since we were about 16. He’s been in my first band and every band we’ve ever been since and there’ve been five and six of them until this one, as kids. James (Cook, lead singer / bassist) lived down south and moved to Manchester 9 years ago, so I’ve only ever been in this band with James, but he was going for similar thing when he was younger, being in bands with people he knew around the same age I guess.


Yeah, I read in a BBC interview that before Delphic you were in all these other bands. How do those bands compare to what Delphic is now in terms of sound?
I think the main thing is…we talk about them in not the fondest of ways, which we shouldn’t really do, because they’re an important part of our musical life, an important learning curve. It’s an important thing to go through. I think even most artists, even when you look at the greats – my favourite artists, you know, David Bowie, etc., they’ve all gone through this kind of period early on where they just kind of don’t know what they’re doing…and now they’re compared to the ‘Ziggy’ (Stardust) album or whatever. There are all these odd stuffs going on. I think the main problem for us, and what was important to go through to get to this, was just we never felt we were in control of our own music. We were always chasing someone else’s style or scene. So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what style it was. We went through a number of different things. We were, I guess, copying other people with the overall goal, an end goal to try and get somewhere, get a record deal or whatever. Just copying. So okay, we heard Bloc Party‘s first album, let’s be like Bloc Party. We heard ‘Kid A’, let’s be like ‘Kid A’. Or we heard Godspeed You Black Emperor!, let’s be like Godspeed You Black Emperor!

And it was only when we were old enough and mature enough, we’d learned all what we felt we needed to know about being in a band, we quit and filtered out the shit members of the band because there were a load of us in it and some of them didn’t work. Me and Matt carried on and brought in James, and then kind of said, you know what? Let’s do what we want to do, what aren’t we hearing on the radio at the moment, what music do we want to make that we aren’t hearing elsewhere? Let’s just do that! And if everyone likes it or no-one else likes it, it doesn’t matter. And from that point on we felt more in control, and things started happening for us.



Do you have a permanent touring drummer now or is he part of your band, how does this work?
Yeah, he’s kind of an enigma really. It is a mysterious situation. He’s called Dan (Hadley) and he played on the album (‘Acolyte’), on pretty much all the tracks. He started playing with us before we gigged and helped build up the songs live. He doesn’t write with us at the moment, although when it comes to the second album I think we will kind of bring him in more. He joined a year later than us, and we’ve known each other for such a long time, and it’s not easy to bring someone into your group. But we’ve been with him for about a year and half now and we could never do without him. There’s no other drummer I’d feel comfortable with.

Now you guys were originally based in Manchester, is that correct, or outside Manchester…?
Just outside Manchester. Twenty-minute train journey from Manchester. Basically, me and James met at university and James…when he finished university, he was going to go back down south to see his parents, and I said no no no, come on, let’s…we were actually in this other band at the time and he was doing other things. I always thought James had kind of something about him, and I really liked his voice. And it was like, come on, you stay up in Manchester, and I’m sure at some point, we will end up doing something together. He ended up living with me and my family, I was still living with my mum and dad at the time and he moved in. Permanent lodger with my mum and dad, my sister and me. Lived there for a bit. Then we split up the old band and restarted. We wrote a lot of Delphic tunes in that house, my mum and dad’s. We also went away to a cottage in the Lake District for a month or something, and that was kind of throwing ourselves into an uncomfortable situation, spending a lot of time together, going for walks. Really inspiring, really important point, we wrote half the album up there really, conceptualised a lot of it.

But this place called Marple, we always say we’re a Manchester band, we now all live in Manchester, we all still share a flat in Manchester. But Marple’s a little town with some very proud people there. So when they got wind that Delphic was from Marple and doing well, they advertised it everywhere and they changed the Wikipedia page, ‘Delphic come from Marple!’

Is it like a village outside Manchester?
Yeah, it’s a small town, very small. But it looks like a cute little village. But in fact Miss Marple um…I think em…was it Agatha Christie that did Miss Marple?

Yes.
She was on a train from like Sheffield to Manchester and she went through Marple and that’s where she got the inspiration for the character.

Well you know, Stevie Nicks got the inspiration for a Fleetwood Mac song from driving past a sign on the motorway for the town I was born in.
Oh really? The Marple one is a bit better of a story. [laughs] But Marple, it’s actually quite a nice little hub for bands. There’s a few bands out there at the moment. There’s a band called Egyptian Hip Hop, who are originally from Marple. Another one called Dutch Uncles that we are very friendly with…

I didn’t know they were from there. I think the problem is that the media just lumps everyone together and says they’re from Manchester.
Yeah. Don’t really know why Marple gets so many great bands. There was a band called the Maple State, they were like an English version of Minus the Bear. But they’re no longer together, unfortunately. Tony Wilson used to live there, the Smiths wrote ‘This Charming Man’ there. So it’s got quite a heritage for a little place, yeah.

Well, I’m sure in general the Manchester area is very nurturing towards bands.
It is, yeah.

There’s such a big scene. It’s got to be the largest music hub in the North I suppose, right?
No, it is. And the network is really, really strong. I knew that as soon as me and Matt were 16 and started going out and said, okay, we’re going to gig. You know, there were venues to play, there were places we could go. You know, from the age of 16, we didn’t know what we were doing, we were writing a bunch of rubbish experimental prog trosh music or whatever. But it was nice, we could go and make friends with promoters and people were helping us. Within a year, we did this one song with flutes that was quite good, and Guy Garvey from Elbow rang us up and said ‘I really like it. I want to put you on this night, we want to put you on this compilation’, and everyone was trying to help here. Really strong network of people. We quickly made a lot of contacts. Even though none of that early stuff necessarily worked, when it came to Delphic, we had this huge network of people we could depend on, and that really helped us not having to go through the kind of toiling gig circuit, playing every night looking for Mister A&R Bigshot. We knew the people to speak to and we knew the places to play, so we could bypass in a way and I guess get where we wanted to quicker.

Yeah, Manchester has a lot of great venues. I was there a couple years ago…
Yeah, were you?

Yeah, I saw Morrissey on tour there.
Where did you go?

He played three nights in a row – the Manchester Apollo the first night, then the Opera House, then Bridgewater Hall, this small, classical place.
You went to all of them?

Yeah…
Wow. Big Morrissey fan then, yeah?

Yes. [laughs] I’ve been lucky to have been to England 3 out of the last 4 years. For bands.
For bands? Fantastic. Manchester’s great, I mean obviously the Smiths…I’ve actually been to Johnny Marr’s house actually, to do a recording once. Pretty unbelievable because he lives in a very nice house. But he’s another one of them people you know…he’s off with the Cribs now but he’s very supportive of young bands and helping them…Doves, Elbow, they all are really. Except for Oasis who fucked down to London and didn’t care about the rest of us! Just left this big splurging mess on the city and then fucked off. [laughs]

‘Acolyte’, your debut album, was released in January in the UK. When was it released in Europe? Around the same time?
Yeah, some European countries, it was released a couple weeks after. Some, about a month after. In America it’s only just come out (29 June).

Congratulations on its success.
Yeah yeah, thank you.

Are you starting to get recognised on the street or when you’re out in the shops?
We’ve had the odd thing in Manchester, but it’s usually around gig things. I mean, to be honest, we’ve tried to…we’re quite shy, kind of retiring people in one way. At least on this campaign. And when we started out, we were very conscious of putting art and image above ourselves, because we didn’t feel we presented, I guess the three of us…I dunno, we’re just shy, we’re media camera shy, so as you would have noticed in our videos, we made a conscious decision to not be in any of the videos. And all our press pictures and photos that we’ve done they’re slightly distorted or manipulated, we wanted ourselves to look slightly weird so if we walked down the street…I mean, no one would know we were Delphic really…but obviously in Manchester we get the odd kind of thing.

The good thing about Manchester is that it’s not like going down to London. Where it’s like wow, I went to this party with so and so and da da da da da. And I saw this guy…[adopts high-pitched voice] and oh my god, you’re from this? [goes back to normal voice] And in Manchester, it’s like [folds his arms over]…whatever. We just don’t care. Everyone’s so chilled out when they’ve grown up in Manchester. Liam Gallagher could walk across (the street) and everyone would be like, whatever. It’s just cool innit, in Manchester. [laughs] We’re lucky, we can be in a little bubble up there and go around and not worry about being recognised.

I was going to say, since you’ve been on Jools Holland, everyone’s seen you on network telly, you know.
Yeah, that obviously was a huge thing. And um…there’s been a funny thing. James was riding his bike home the other day and he thought he was getting threatened, because someone was shouting ‘you’re fucking Delphic!’ He had his hood up and he’s riding his bike and thinking how the hell does he know who I am? And this guy was shouting ‘you’re fucking Delphic!’ He didn’t know if it was positive or negative.

Usually, to be honest, and we do this a lot of the time, what will happen, we’ll be out at a club, and we’re very, very self-obsessed and involved with each other in quite a bizarre way. We’re very close, and we’ll spend the whole time arguing. We’ll have these discussions, and we’re like brothers you know. And we’ll go to a club, and be there with our crew and there’ll be these two pretty young girls looking over, trying to make eye contact. And during this time me and James will be having a blazing, you know, obnoxious row and totally miss the fact that anyone is trying to flirt with us. And then our crew will be like, ‘what are you doing, you idiots? Those beautiful girls are trying to give you the eyes.’ And we’d say ‘What? Really?’ We didn’t notice, we were so wrapped up in like, I think we should go to this chord for the next album and da da da da da… [laughs]

Now you mentioned you share a flat in Manchester.
Yeah.

So like, uh, do you get into rows over who does the washing up and that sort of thing, or…?
Yeah, we do, actually. To be honest what’s actually happened recently was, it’s been very difficult. We all live in this flat together. And it immediately became apparent that it was a bit too intense. I mean, like, it’s a big enough flat, it’s got two floors. For three people, it’s slightly too small. It’s big enough for two. It’s slightly claustrophobic, and so it started to impact the relationship between the three of us. As you can imagine with three people, often it’s like two will go off, and one is left on their own. And usually it’s me and James will go off, or me and Matt will go off. So I’m always all right, because I’ve always got someone. [both laugh] But it can often leave out the other person. And James started feeling really, really claustrophobic and felt he couldn’t write in the flat, and I kind of…I dunno, somehow I wrangled myself a space on the top floor so I had a little writing deck, and James was stuck downstairs and wasn’t happy with the writing situation. So he moved out into a flat in the Northern Quarter, about a half-hour’s walk away, for about 6 months.

And me and Matt were left there. And then me and Matt started getting really close. And me and James were kind of…I mean, this is deep, deep psychological stuff! This is like a counseling session! [both laugh] But me and James had always been very, very close but then our relationship started to suffer being apart from each other. We like to kind of, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, ‘I got an idea, can we work on this? Get up from your bed!’ And we’ll work on an idea. And we couldn’t do that living there, so James then moved back, back into the flat, a couple months ago. But now Matt has moved out, but Matt is now living in the flat across the corridor, so on the top floor on our block of flats, there are two apartments, me and James are in one and Matt’s in the other. So that’s kind of working out for us now. So um, yeah, there’s less arguments now that it’s just two of us in there, me and James are getting on really well. And the writing’s really helped by the situation, and Matt’s kind of just…

…so he’s close enough in case there’s suddenly a burst of inspiration!
Exactly. So we can just pop across. You know, we like the idea of…we’ve been like this for a month now and we’ll swap around and maybe I’ll live on my own for a while!

Actually, that’s the perfect situation because in case someone’s got a mate who’s coming into town, you have a place for them to crash.
Yes, exactly.


Now as we talked before, ‘Acolyte’ was released in America this past Tuesday (29 June).
Yeah.

And you were just in my country playing a couple shows. So what was that like? What was the reception like over there? Unfortunately, none of the dates were close enough to me so I couldn’t go.
It looks like we’re going back there, but I can’t say too much, because I don’t think it’s been announced. But come October, we will be returning to America, in support of another band that will have heard of, but I’m not allowed to say who. Like a full tour of America, from east to west.

I have a feeling I know who it is. And I’m going to miss it. [frowns]
Who do you reckon you think it is?

Two Door Cinema Club.
No, it’s not Two Door Cinema Club. Although we have played with them before and we do like them.


Yeah, our editor at There Goes the Fear, Phil…
Oh yeah, I remember you guys!

Yeah, we’ve interviewed you guys over email before. Yeah, he saw you guys and Two Door at Southampton Joiners in October, and I guess you guys were on a Kitsune bill?
Yeah yeah.

And I was like nooooooo, I want to go to that! [Rick laughs]

I’ve seen Two Door Cinema Club twice now, supporting Phoenix in Washington DC, and then they didn’t come back for a headlining date so I went up to Philadelphia to see them.

Oh right. So we’re going to Philadelphia, I can tell you that. All I know is that Philadelphia is the first date. I can’t remember the others.

I hope you guys come to DC, because a lot of bands will choose between Philly and DC. But you said October…

Yeah, but they’re not all confirmed. But end of September through the end of October. Quite big for us. Six weeks.

Is it an English band?
No.

Oh no! Then I might not like the headliner if they’re American…
It’s not an American band!

Oh…hmmm…that narrows it down somewhat.
Yeah…

They’re not French, are they? Since you’re with Kitsune?
Nope, not French. [laughs, then nibbles on sandwich] I’ll let you keep guessing.

I’ll have to give this more thought, because really…are they from Europe?
I’m not allowed to say it anyway, so even if you did say it, I couldn’t confirm. [laughs]

When do you think we’ll know?
Um, I think it’s going to be announced pretty soon, I think in the next couple of weeks, but I will get in trouble if I say anything. [laughs]

Ok, I’ll keep an eye on NME.com then. But you told me it isn’t Two Door Cinema Club.
No, it’s not Two Door Cinema Club.

Because they’re coming back to my town to play in my favourite venue the day I have to fly out to California for my day job.
Oh god. That’s awful. [frowns] But they’ll be back I’m sure.

Yeah.
[Note: it has now since been revealed that Delphic will be touring in North America this autumn as support for the Temper Trap. They'd never even crossed my mind!]



So is this (Roskilde Festival) the third Scandinavian festival you’ve played this week?
Yeah, we played Peace and Love in Sweden yesterday, and the day before…or was the day before that? Three days ago we were at Hove Festival in Norway. So yeah, the third one.

So how do those compare with the English festivals you’ve played at this year?
Well, if I’m being honest, we played Glastonbury I guess it was 1 week ago…

Which day did you play?
We played Friday and Saturday. Friday at the Dance Tent and Saturday in the John Peel Tent. And you know what? The dance tent was wicked, because we did a real ravey set for it and the vibe was amazing. But John Peel, it was close to 10,000 people. 8,000 to 9,000, big audience for us. It was brilliant. We’re not normally this kind of band, but after the dance tent, we all were like, ‘that was amazing!’ and we all went out and got pretty drunk that night and then immediately regretted it because it (the John Peel Tent) was probably our biggest show (ever). I was like warming up for 3 hours! But it was amazing. The crowd was unbelievable at Glastonbury, really, really good. I don’t really usually like touring that much but America was one of the only…I mean, festivals are quite good fun.

But I get bored very, very easily, so I want to be writing new stuff all the time. And we do it on the road, but I crave to be back in the studio. All the time, every day. It gets me down a bit. Yeah, it’s exciting to visit all these places but just like anything else, it becomes monotonous because it’s the same thing. It’s the same set, the same band, in a different country. Yeah, wow, I’m in Denmark, but this backstage area doesn’t look that different from where I was in Sweden or wherever, blah blah blah. What I really want to be doing is challenging myself with new songs every day, which I can’t always do. So that gets me down. But America…America was different, because of the huge heritage of bands it’s got, it’s just giving us this immense drive to go and do well over there. You know, to go and do something in America, and we’re desperate to go back there. It’s a really inspiring place, we were wandering around New York, like the Velvet Underground…

Where did you play in New York? Bowery Ballroom? Or Mercury Lounge?(two of the smaller but famous venues in New York City)
Oh god, I don’t remember the venue. You’ll have to check on the internet.

I’m thinking either Bowery Ballroom or Mercury Lounge. (Turns out they played Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn)Was it your own headlining gig?
Yeah.

Kind of like a record release party, even though the album came out 2 weeks later?
It was kinda…it wasn’t a record release party, but it was to coincide with the album being released. So it was New York, San Francisco – we did Popscene there, I can’t remember the venue but the night was Popscene…a really good one…

And then Los Angeles?
And then yeah, LA. Again, I can’t remember the name of the venue, I’m not very perceptive when it comes to things like this. The night was amazing. The reception was brilliant! LA was a bloody weird place. New York was really inspiring…

Every English band I’ve talked to has said the same thing about LA! California is like a separate country, because the vibe is completely different.
It’s very, very different. It’s a very fascinating place to visit. I couldn’t…I mean, I dunno, we didn’t see that much of it, you know, we were staying on the Sunset Strip. And we kind of wandered up into the Hills and stuff and we saw the more commercial side of LA, rather than the kind I dunno, it’s all about finding your little neighbourhoods, innit? And finding your little niches within that, and we didn’t find because we were tourists, you know. We didn’t see out maybe the side of LA that we would have liked but it’s not somewhere I’d want to live. But New York, everyone says this: you go to New York and everyone falls in love with it. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s been to New York and not fallen in love with it immediately. Just that everyone does. We did. We went there and listening to Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, wandering around, thinking, fucking hell, we need to move here, we need to write the second album out here! [laughs] Awesome, awesome place.

So yeah, is that in the game plan for the next 5, 10 years for Delphic, move out to New York?
Hope so. [nibbles on a sandwich] Manchester will always be our home. But we get bored dead easily. We like the idea of just moving around, getting inspired by different things. We’ve made a lot of headway with the second album…we’ve written a lot of stuff.

Oh yeah?
Yeah, it’s very embryonic, we’re trying to take a different approach. For the first record, we wrote ten songs, we knew we wanted a ten-track album. We wrote ten songs. We wrote songs to be a particular order. We wrote ‘Clarion Call’ to be number one (the first track), there was no way there was going to be another number one. That was number one. This one, to mix things up, when we were writing the first album, we said when we write the second album, we pretty much have to break up the band, forget how to write songs and build it up and start from scratch again. So we have a completely different approach. And to be honest, we’ve been through so much emotionally on this record between the three of us, all this moving out and falling out and everything that we have pretty much mentally broken up the band and completely reassessed the way we write songs, which is a good thing because it means we’ll approach it in a different way.

And for this one, we’ve got a name for it, but we can’t say that yet…we’ve got like…it’s a lot more songs. Instead of writing 10 songs for 10 songs, we want to write 50 songs and narrow it down, we’re taking a different approach, and we want to be a lot more experimental in the studio. And we want to leave…I dunno, I’ve been reading a lot about Bowie’s Berlin (album trilogy – ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’, and ‘Lodger’) era, and how a lot of the (Brian) Eno stuff was left up to chance. A lot of that kind of stuff I think…not all as much as that, as Eno provided lyrics and melodies on the spot on something that might end up being an instrumental 5 minutes before the vocals are recorded, not to quite that extent. But in a way we want to leave things up to chance in the studio and stuff. And we’re writing a lot of songs, so we don’t quite how things will turn out, but it’s very liberating and exciting.

How long did it take from the beginning of thinking about and writing the songs for ‘Acolyte’ to when it was released?
Well, I don’t know really…18 months maybe? Quite a long time. I think we pretty much wrote the album in about 8 months to a year. The first 3 months we were just talking about things and writing but not getting anywhere. And then we hit like a peak of writing and all the stuff we’d done in this cottage, we want back to it, and we were just in the zone. I think we’d just discovered Orbital or something, I dunno. And we this absolute creative peak where we got loads of stuff done. And then we got a bit confused and went off on a tangent and started writing loads of shit stuff, and got confused on what we wanted to be again, and wasted a couple months. And then came back, wrote ‘Counterpoint’, finished a lot of stuff, and then that was done.

And then we spent about 6 months, almost a year trying to record it, and that was really difficult. That was what nearly broke up our band, you know. We had such a set idea – this is why we don’t want to do this – a set idea of how we wanted the songs to sound, and we didn’t like the idea of letting anyone else outside the group in terms of producing, because we’re such control freaks. We knew how we wanted it to sound, and we kept experimenting with people, and trying to do it ourselves, and we couldn’t quite get it done. Then we went through these different producers – Tom Rowlands (Chemical Brothers), the Orbital guys helped out, Steve Dub who does the Chemical Brothers, and finally Ewan Pearson got it. But yeah, it was a really difficult process, because we had such a set idea and we couldn’t get it out. It was really touch and go on whether we were going to finish it at all, and luckily we did, and we’re very happy with it.

So when do you think we can get album #2?
Depends, because we’re leaving some of it up to chance. There’s a chance it might be done next year, there’s a chance it will be finished the year after. I mean, we’re making…what’s in our heads is unbelievably exciting. Like I can’t tell you how much. It just shits all over the first record. Yeah, it’s so exciting for us, like really exciting. It’s a different direction slightly. It will still sound like Delphic I think, but I think it’ll shock some people. A lot of people really. There’s a lot more focus on the songs themselves. Slightly more minimal, but in a much more epic way. I dunno, it’s hard to describe, but yeah, we’re really, really excited about it, we just want to get stuck into it, you know. Yeah, but I wouldn’t like to say when it’s done, we’d love to get it out next year, but it depends…
Yeah, that requires you to be in one place, without having to tour…so are you booked through September for festivals? You don’t have a UK tour this summer, do you?
No no, festivals end for us in August. September we’ve got off, October it looks like we’ll be in America. November and December we’ve got off but we’ll probably fit in a UK, you know, victory lap tour so to speak. We’ve done such good work in the UK, we’d kind of like round it off with some kind of shows at the end of the year, so we’ll probably do that. [turns slightly] Oh, there’s James there (coming off the bus). [nibbles more of his sandwich] Yeah, but we’ve got some time, and next year we’re going to try not to book any gigs because we want to be in the studio. We want to be in the studio by January.

For the rest of this year, besides getting in there and getting stuff written and recording, what is the one thing you really want to do?
One thing I want to do this year?

Beyond the recording stuff.
To be honest, we’ve been so lucky, we’ve been everywhere. In the past year, I’ve seen places I’ve never even dreamt of…we’re going to Hong Kong with Two Door Cinema Club (in August) actually. One of the places I really want to go actually, there were some gigs penciled in but they were cancelled and now there’s talk of setting up again, Russia. Which I think would be this unbelievably inspiring place. Such a vast, vast country. And yeah, we’d love to go there.

That’s totally doable, lots of bands go there.
We were putting these gigs together, and I was really worried we would end up doing some party at Putin’s house or something, or someone’s mansion and end up playing there. But yeah, no. I would really, really love to see Russia.

Okay, so I think that’s all the questions I have. Thank you so much Rick.
Thank you very much.

Taken from http://www.theregoesthefear.com/2010/07/interview-rick-boardman-of-delphic-at-roskilde-festival-part-1.php