For the first time ever the musical phenomena known as Trans-Siberian Orchestra is heading over to tour Europe. To celebrate this, they are officially releasing 'Night Castle', their 5^th studio album, over here in the UK.  This is an album, which has a whopping 28 tracks on it, the first 22 of these telling a bewitching story that crosses history as well as spiritual plains.

Uber Rock met up with Paul O'Neill, the creative force behind the monster of a band that is Trans-Siberian Orchestra and an all round nice guy when he popped over to London recently to talk about the new album, 'Night Castle', the upcoming tour, Vietnam, Stalin, Charles Dickens, Nazis and pretty much everything in-between.

Firstly, welcome to London:

PON: It's great to be back, I used to live here over in Marble Arch in the 70's, I love London and it's not raining and the weather is nice, it's great.

To start off with, for those that are in the dark, can you put in to your own words who Trans-Siberian Orchestra are and how you came to create 'Night Castle'?

PON: Basically it fits into the whole concept of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, when Atlantic Records first approached me in the early 90's, they said "Paul, instead of writing stuff for other bands, why don't you start your own?" I said "I want to give you something completely different, I want to take a full progressive rock band a full hard rock band and a symphony in the studio but not the whole symphony on the road, Pink Floyd-like production when we do tour and 24 lead singers" and they were like "why?" so I said "Because I want to take all the bands I worshiped and build on it like the marriage of classical and rock, with bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer and Queen". The rock opera, which is the story part, comes directly from The Who, and the budget for the dammed production from Pink Floyd. Originally the first album that was supposed to come out was 'Romanov: What Kings Must Whisper' but when we were just about to start the masters a lot of very credible people heard it and said this should go direct to Broadway, it's too good to be a rock album and paid a fortune for the Broadway option rights but I stopped it because what Broadway considers a great production and what Rock considers a great production are two different things.

The first album came out in 1996 and then 'Beethoven's Last Night' was done and we started to tour in 1999 and then it just exploded. The whole idea was to push the envelope of what a rock band can do both on an album and in concert and to make the best album possible and make it for the least amount of money for the fans and break all the rules! Basically Atlantic Records rolled their eyes but they wrote a blank cheque and 'Night Castle' is the newest album, and because it is such a big band we need large stories but ones that are easy to follow. When I first heard 'Tommy' it blew my mind and then 'Superstar', but 'Superstar' was genius because Webber and Rice just had to write the songs because everybody already knows the story. Then over the decades a lot of other bands put out rock operas but even when bands explained the story to me I was like "huh?" so we decided that every rock opera I would write is like a short story so that anyone could easily follow it. This one starts when a young child meeting a stranger on the beach who takes the child all the way around the world all through time and then gently gets the child back home. I wanted it to be fun reading if you were a 13-year-old kid and I wanted it to be fun reading if you were a 45-year-old college professor.

We try to make the story always have unpredictable turns and angles and the same with the music, it was supposed to come out in 2005 but with TSO we never release an album until it is perfect, I would rather wait 20 years until it's right, and part of the problem is we had the two main advisories, General Tran-Do who is a real life character, and Lieutenant Cozier. I wrote the role of Tran-Do around Rob Evan, who I saw in Les Miserables on Broadway, but once I recorded his songs, even though we had 24 lead singers, every one who was trying to do Cozier was getting run over by Rob like a tank. Then Al Pitrelli, who is the band's lead guitarist, said "Paul, why don't you try Jeff Scott Soto from Yngwie Malmsteen, the guy who took Steve Perry's place in Journey?" and I was like, "Al, Journey is as high a tenor band I could imagine, Cozier is a Baritone" then Al said "Jeff's a baritone" and I was like "really?" and Jeff was kind enough to fly in and he was a monster and once we recorded his 5 songs the album was done, and they were like two battle ships just pounding away at each other, like two old dreadnoughts.  The outcome of the story is in doubt until the very end, we just wanted to keep bringing in the surprises, the different voices, the different angles and also Al Pitrelli, I have to say, did a phenomenal job of guitar playing, especially on songs like 'Toccata' where the Specter gunship is combing through the jungle in one last ditch effort to go back for that one guy and all those sound effects of the guns going off at the same time as the turbo engine of the Specter revving up, that's all Al on guitar, I have to say, every time I think Al can't impress me anymore, he does and as a guitar player he is quite a monster.

Basically I wanted to design the album so that you have a couple of hours, you pick up the album, turn on the stereo, read the beginning, listen to the songs, follow the story and if we have done our job right then in a short while you should not be in your living room, you should be in a castle on some coast in Europe or in the jungles of Cambodia and eventually deposited safely back in your sofa at home or wherever you are. 'Night Castle' is already gold and on it's way to platinum in the US and we're psyched that its coming out here right now and we are also really psyched to be touring Europe because so many of this band's influences are Eurocentric. It's ridiculous that the band started touring in 1999 and it's now 2011 and it's the first time we are coming over here. We know how big the band is in North America, we were number 12 of the top touring bands of North America of the last decade, and the last tour in 2010 we were the only band in America to do all our own tickets, and we did it in 8 weeks. But it's time to hop the pond and to return to the motherland and start breaking Europe and we don't expect to be at the level we are in North America, we realise we are going to have to earn it one fan at a time, and basically we are just psyched. Sunday I fly back to New York for the bands rehearsal for a couple of weeks in New York City then we fly to Berlin and start rehearsing there, and we wanted the last show to be in London, besides the obvious influences of Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Who, Yes, Pink Floyd, Paul Rogers, Queen, the list goes on and on, there's a lot of English writers like Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde.

'Beethoven's Last Night', which is going to be the first half of the live show, is being re-released with the missing 90 pages of poetry. And that reminds me, another way we have been lucky is to get Greg Hildebrandt to be the bands artist, Greg did all the drawings for "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit", he did all those designs and, this is my opinion, he did the most iconic painting of the last century - the most iconic painting of the renaissance was the Mona Lisa, for the 20^th century, arguably, it's the original poster for Star Wars because you show that to anyone from 1977 from Asia to Africa, show it to a penguin in Antarctica, they see that poster and they go "Star Wars". Greg has a way of just capturing the image that is in my head so I think it's great when you are paging through the 'Night Castle' book and you see Cassandra in her Falcon form. We try to design each album and concert like a medieval castle, castles if you are 7 or 77 they are cool, they are cool from a distance, the closer you get the cooler they are and depending on your age and your mood it tells you where to go when you cross the drawbridge, if you are a kid you are going to run around on the ramparts and if you are in the middle of your career you may go to the library, you may go to the highest tower to look at the setting and what I hope is that in the album the listener finds what they needs to find and they find in the concert what they need to find.

Also as you get older your favourite songs may change and again I got that from The Who, 'Who's Next' when I first heard it blew my mind but my favourite songs from that album have changed as I have gotten older or depending on my mood. The main thing is not to let the fans down. The other thing is that the band keeps growing, in the last 2 years, I designed Trans-Siberian Orchestra to be a musically driven band as opposed to a celebrity driven band, I don't know how that started, but I think it might have been in the 1980's with MTV. Over the decades I think Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been unbelievably lucky on multiple levels. Number one, I think we were the last band to have old fashioned artist development, I bet your average reader thinks that bands like Pink Floyd, Queen, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Genesis were hits out of the box, they weren't, they were nurtured by artist development in the labels.  We're on Atlantic, which was founded by Ahmet Ertegun. This is the guy that literally signed Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Emerson Lake and Palmer. You pull the bands he discovered when they were nothing un-nurtured and broke from the legacy of rock and roll and the hole left by that legacy would be humongous.

Interestingly, when TSO's first album came out in 1996 it didn't do well and if that had been 2006, we would have been dropped. But Atlantic were like "Paul, you are on to something, keep going", so by the time we finished 'Beethoven's Last Night' and started touring the US, everything just exploded.  Then by 2004/2005 we were one of the top ten touring bands of the world, and one of the promoters in the mid west who was a numbers nut, he always had to know who his biggest bands audience was, so he called me one day and said "Paul, you're not going to believe your demographics, you're 51% female, 49% male which is the exact breakdown of North America, you have every economic class from the ultra wealthy to the poor but here's the weird part, your average age is 21" I said "21? That's impossible" he goes "No, you're like the Lord of the Rings movie". That one I pondered for a little bit, my own theory is that I think we were able to jump the generation gap because in 1950 when Les Paul invented the electric guitar there was a great schism in music, you either grew up on Perry Como and Dean Martin before the electric guitar or you grew up with Chuck Berry and Elvis Pressley after the electric guitar. But now it's 60 years later, if you grew up in the 1950's you had Bill Hailey and the Comets, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry. If you grew up in the 60's The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, The Four Tops. In the 70's you grew up with Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Earth Wind and Fire. So for the first time every generation has rock in common, so that gives us a little bit of an advantage and because we are a prog rock band which has so many different styles. Like depending on the album, the first song could be majestic orchestral piece and the next song could be a straight ahead rocker which cuts that much deeper because it comes after this majestic sounding symphony and then when you think it can not get any more intense you have the rock and orchestra play together and it takes it to a whole new level, and it becomes this juggernaut and then you go down to this single gospel voice and a piano but that voice is that much more haunting because it has just come after this juggernaut. The other thing is you induce such a good story, whether you are a student or you are working and you are late for school or work but if there is a great movie on the TV and has 15 minutes to go, you have to find out what happens at the end.

The first thing we do with every album is the story and then we write the verses and choruses to move the story ahead and the story is usually the easiest thing to do, it takes 5 minutes to sketch out and maybe a week to be written. The songs take a month or two, the hardest thing to do is get the right vocalist for the right songs, 'Dream On' from Aerosmith is a masterpiece, Steve Tyler is a great singer, put them together and you have a masterpiece song. 'Still Loving You' from The Scorpions is a great song, Klaus Meine is a great singer, put them together and you have a masterpiece but if you had Klaus Meine singing 'Dream On' and Steven singing 'Still Loving You' it might be a totally different outcome, which is why we have so many singers and is especially important live because when we tour no singer has to sing more than five songs a night, so you will never have any of our singers blowing up their vocal chords.

A lot of bands I worshipped that had the choral parts on the albums but when you saw them live the choral parts were dropped but since we carry so many singers the choral parts are in.  Basically, we just want to keep pushing the envelope, the thing has already got bigger than we could have ever imagined and the only thing we regret is that we have not got over to Europe earlier. It has also made us re-think the band because when we just did the tour in America in 2009 the show was so big that when we played Baltimore we had to leave about a third of it in the truck, I think we are up to 36 trucks with trailers, 45 tour buses, 323 people on the crew, so when we booked the tour in 2010 I said skip Baltimore because the show won't fit in the Horizon Arena and then I just got told "Paul, when you want me to skip a small town in Idaho I can deal with it but when you tell me we can't fit into the Horizon Arena in Baltimore, it's time to re-think, you may want to re-think the production so we don't have to skip minor cities like Berlin", I got the point. We have basically re-designed it so we can fit into some of the smaller venues because in America and Canada we are really lucky because Basketball and Hockey being such big national sports every city has a great arena but Europe is more soccer orientated and there's only about 10 to 15 arenas that can support the full weight of a full TSO show without having the ceiling fall. So, we decided to make it fit into the venues but eventually we have to play the O2 and eventually we have to play outdoors just because then we can really take the production over the top because then we don't have to deal with those pesky roofs.

Last year the band was spending nearly a million dollars a week on explosives but it looks killer (laughs) but it just keeps growing, and our biggest fear is just not to drop the ball and because of the death of the label system, I don't think it can be done again. When I started in the mid 70's there were 45 major labels in America, releasing 37,000 albums a year, each had a ton of money, ton of clout and in 2009 there was only 4 labels left and when Captol Virgin EMI went bankrupt this year, now there's only 3. Back in the 70's you used to say a band is a coliseum band when they sold out coliseums five years in a row, no band has done that in this millennium and I don't think it's because the kids have less talent, I think it's that without the label system to write the tour support cheques as you develop your sound, develop your audience, constantly keep touring, unless your dad is David Rockefeller you can't do it. With the whole record industry crashing, the good thing the kids have these days is that for five thousand dollars and Pro Tools they have a better recording studio than The Beatles ever had but that the bad thing is that Pro Tools, even though it is an incredible instrument, will never tell you that your new song stinks and you need to re-write the chorus. We keep having new members join, actually the newest members, one of them was born in 1992 a young lady named Georgia, who is actually from London, she has a full octave range, she's amazing, she can't wait to play her home town and the other one is a young lady named Kayla who was born in 1993.

That's making me feel old.

PON: Oh it's killing me because when I was busy putting the band together she was busy being born. The majority of the band is between 25 and 45, I'm the oldest in my 50's, and it's bad enough when you can be old enough to be their parent but it's really bad when you can be their grandparent. The great thing about the kids is, and we call anyone between 17 and 25 "the kids", is they don't allow you to become jaded, that youthful enthusiasm, they are so young that they don't even realise they were born in the worst depression and with the record industry in meltdown. A new model will emerge eventually, the bad thing, especially for prog rock or coliseum rock is that bands like Emerson Lake Palmer did tours in America with a full symphony where they lost millions even though they sold out, Pink Floyd's first tour of 'The Wall' lost a small fortune but it didn't matter because the record sales made up for it. But with the record sales removed, huge production shows are a lot chanceier and there's a lot less room for error.

We certainly live in interesting times. I kind of had a warning as when I came home when my daughter was 6, she had every song that I had ever written, produced, managed or whatever on her computer and I'm like "Ireland, where did you get all of daddy's music?" she said "Daddy, you are not going to believe this but all your music is on the internet and guess what, it's free!" Then there was an article a little while later in the Wall Street Journal, which is not a music paper but the reporter said at the end "Musicians, before Edison invented motion pictures and the record player, all artists, actors and musicians made their living by live touring. Actors and musicians are going to have to learn that corporate technology giveth, the corporate technology taketh away" I'm like "Ow, did not want to hear that" but he had a point and we can stick our heads in the sand, which is pretty much what the record industry did but time moves on. It also gives a lot of opportunities like the tour we just did, there were some points during the show where we had literally 3,000 lighting changes in 60 seconds and without computers that would have been impossible, so one door opens another door closes. 

I want to go back to the album, 'Night Castle'. You have mentioned earlier about General Tran-Do being an integral character in the story - was it important to have someone who in real life publicly went back on what he believed in and any reason for setting it in Cambodia during the Pol Pot era?

PON: Basically, a lot of it came from real life experiences, all kind of mixed together. Tran-Do is an interesting character, I mean the South-East Asian war started in 1953 when Vietnam, under Ho Chi Min invaded Laos and Eisenhower very famously said that if communists manage to take over one more country in South East Asia they are all going to fall like dominos because they have an MO. Communism took over Russia and Stalin killed 36 million people in his own country, Mao took over China and killed 70 million, Kim Jong Il's father killed 50 million and North Korea is not a big country. Eisenhower said if one country falls, they will all fall like dominos and it's not the question of if there will be a genocide it's just a matter of when. When the French pulled out the Americans went in, and actually won every single battle, without exception, in the South East Asian war. But Nixon was having economic trouble in America and he sent Kissinger to meet with the Vietnamese saying that if Mao would meet with Nixon, America would pull out of South East Asia and they were stunned as the Tet offensive had just occurred, where North Vietnam went for it, they sent the entire army into South Vietnam and even outnumbered the Marines, the US military would kill 80% of them and there was nothing between them and Hanoi and when they asked for permission to finish the war and end it the politicians in Washington said "no". Meanwhile, Tran-Do was a front line General. 

They used to say Hitler killed his enemies and Stalin killed his enemies and their friends and in the purges of the 1930's he just wiped out the entire officer corps of the Russian army but Marshall Zhukof saved Russia, rallied the army and took Berlin and normally Stalin would have had him killed, just like he had Trotsky killed and anyone that became famous killed, but he couldn't kill Zhukov because he was a frontline General and he was afraid the army would turn on him. When the US pulled out of South East Asia, the same would happen. In America they had the horse and the doves, the doves were like 'no nothing is going to happen'. Right away Laos fell, Cambodia fell and in a year Pol Pot had killed 3 million women and children and Cambodia is not a big country and I have some friends that have gone "But Paul, it was only 2 million" and I say "And your point?"

When they had all of South East Asia, Tran-Do realised communism was a lie that the peasants were worse off, more people were starving and he wrote a very famous letter saying don't even talk about the Americans, South East Asia was run ten times better by the French and normally they would have killed him but they couldn't as he was a very famous front line General. He died a couple of years ago so I decided to incorporate him in the story. Also in the 1980's, I was in Germany with a friend of mine from my old band days who told me he knew a gentleman who was an original Bolshevik, he knew Stalin, he knew Lenin personally, but was part of the purges in the 1930's and was put up in a line with everyone else but when the firing line fired, everyone got hit in the head but he didn't, he got covered in blood but was smart enough to fall down and crawl out and basically spent the rest of his life in Europe. So we arranged to have dinner together and I'm talking to this guy and he speaks fluent German, fluent Russian, fluent English it's getting time for dessert and I have this question that I am dying to ask him but I did not want to be disrespectful so I say "Sir, I have a question I want to ask but I am afraid that you might take it disrespectfully" and he goes "I'm an old man, Paul ask me anything you want" so I ask "Sir, you seem unbelievably kind, educated, compassionate, how could someone like yourself fight to put someone like Lenin in power, not to mention Stalin?" I saw his face scrunch up a little bit and he said "Paul, Lenin had convinced us that we had to kill 100,000 people, not just the aristocrats but their children as well, then Russia would be a utopia for all of humanity for all time. By 1920 we had killed millions and not only was it not utopia for all mankind it was ten times worse than what it was under the Tsar but by that point we had so much of our lives invested in the lie, our entire youth, all these deaths that we couldn't admit to ourselves that it was a lie, so we just closed our eyes and kept going forward. I defended Stalin with every breath in my body up until the moment and including the moment he was running a razor across my throat." You could see the regret in the old man's eyes. It's like I tell my daughter, words count, deeds count more, and the results of those deeds count the most. Chamberlain wanted peace in Europe and he wanted to believe that Hitler was telling the truth, he wasn't. Those that don't study history are bound to repeat it and at such a cost.

The Tran-Do character was a little mixture of all of that. The dedications on the back are to the six people I syndicated to the role like that. As I tell my daughter, it does not matter who you are, it's what you do. Like one of the people the album is dedicated to is John Rabe and when I turned in the album the management were like who is this person, what do they do? I explained he was the Nazi ambassador to China during World War 2 and they were like "WHAT!!!! You are dedicating your album to a Nazi? Paul you can't do this." So I asked them to check him out and if you guys don't want me to do it, I won't do it. They called back and said they had got it. He was the Nazi ambassador to China, for most of Europe and Americans, World War 2 started when Hitler invaded Poland but for the Asians it started in the mid 1930's when Tojo invaded China and Mongolia. When he took Nanking (which is now Beijing), his generals killed 350,000 men, women and children with bayonets in a week and when John Rabe was there he went out and got every man, woman and child he could get his hands on and rammed them into the German Embassy, so when the generals came up to him and said give us all those men, women and children he pointed to the swastika on his arm and said "See this? I am the Nazi ambassador to China. Nazi Germany and Japan, we are allies, you touch one of these individuals I will personally be there with Hitler and Tojo when they hang you." He was bluffing but it worked. A German film maker actually filmed some of it, he then flew back to Berlin, arranged to get it to Hitler, the next day the Gestapo was knocking on the door, it wasn't with a humanitarian award and suddenly he was no longer the Nazi ambassador to China, he was the Nazi ambassador to Afghanistan. For those that are geographically challenged, that is a demotion. Then after the war, the allies came down very hard on him because of his rank all the Nazis in Germany hated him because they considered him a traitor and he lived the rest of his life in poverty. But ten years ago, a woman went to Nanking and wrote a book called 'The Rape of Nanking' because she wanted to get the facts before the last survivor died. The first survivor she interviewed she asked how did you survive and he said the Nazi ambassador to China got me and my family in and saved us. She ignored it as she thought he was nuts, the next person she interviews it's the same story and by the time she finishes she thinks 'who the hell is this guy?' so she went to Germany to seek him out. Unfortunately, he died in the 1950's but she found his granddaughter who had his diaries and when he gave them to her he said, "Never let anyone see these as all they will do will bring you heartache."

I figured a few kids would look up and see who they are but the main thing is to entertain but then again I learnt that the power of the arts, and I am going a little off subject here, it blows my mind. Prior to the 1850's child labour was legal all over the world, politicians religiously spoke out against it but those who had the power to change it were those that had the children to work. Then Charles Dickens wrote 'David Copperfield', 'Oliver Twist' and he writes 'A Christmas Carol' and all of a sudden that little kid in the textile factory is not a stranger he is little Oliver and within ten years it is outlawed within Great Britain and 15 years within the Empire and Western Civilisation. Prior to the 1800's the poor didn't exist, if you were rich you would get away with anything, if you were poor you get killed for anything but then Victor Hugo writes 'Les Miserables', which on the surface is about a policeman chasing a prisoner, with the girls it is a love story with Cosette but the underlying theme is injustice. Then he writes 'Hunchback of Notre Dame', which for the guys is a monster story, to girls it's a love story with Esmeralda, but the underlying theme is injustice and slowly you see justice systems changing more. But just as arts can change things, they can do incredible damage. Leni Riefenstahl, 1930's director, 50 years ahead of her time, the greatest director of her decade, even Lucas admits that he steals shots from her for 'Star Wars', but she only made two major pictures, one was the '1936 Olympiad' that made Nazism seem acceptable to the world and the other was 'Triumph Of The Will', which I don't care if you are a acidic Rabi, it makes Nazism seem acceptable to the Germans and she romanticised evil.

The great thing about the arts is that you can entertain but you can slip a little message in there, Dickens was so great at doing it. Like Andrew Carnegie, he came from Scotland when he was 12 with something like 3 cents in his pocket and became America's first billionaire, he invented US steel. Basically his whole life it was his money, he built the industry, he paid his workers what he wanted, he owned the coal mines, occasionally there would be strikes, one time there was a massive strike and lots of coal miners got killed by some police but he was just a businessman. Then he read 'A Christmas Carol' and I read somewhere that he was particularly hit hard by Marley's ghost appearing to Scrooge. After reading that book Carnegie ponders a while and became a changed man, he sold US steel to JP Morgan and built a library, concert hall and a bath house in every city he did business in and died broke. He wrote that very famous letter that any man that dies rich does so ashamed. It still reads true to this day.  About ten years ago I had a heated argument with a chap from Sony who made a Rap video that made it look cool to go to jail and anyone that has been to jail knows that jail sucks, your toilet is five inches from your head, the best thing you are going to see is a guy named Big Michael who weighs 500lbs and if you want to go to McDonald's in the middle of the night to get a burger, you can't. But for some kid, who is just 16 and got drunk for the first time, he may do something stupid. I told him your kids are in a gated community and go to private schools and he goes I get your point but we have already made the video so we are releasing it, luckily it didn't take off.

I believe you can entertain, inspire, make it fun and slip a little history in it. So many kids get their history through the movies, like Oliver Stone's 'JFK' when he has that scene when all the coroner's are saying "This wasn't what it was like when we put it in, someone's messed with it" but Oliver Stone didn't know that some of the coroner's were still alive and they threw a news conference saying this is completely not true and when they asked Oliver Stone for his response he goes "oh this isn't a historical fact, it's a fiction fairy tale, a make believe movie." But for the kids watching that movie, they don't know that. Too many kids get their facts today through the movies. It's just the power of the arts.

Moving on to happier thoughts, on the album you have six bonus tracks, two of the tracks caught our eye, 'Nutrocker' with Greg Lake playing on it and Carl Orff's 'Carmina Burana' - we assume you had fun with both of these:

PON: (Laughs) We did 'Nutrocker' as ELP were such an influence on me and Greg Lake was kind enough to play bass, and when they recorded it that was ELP paying tribute to Tchaikovsky, so we thought this would be TSO paying tribute to ELP paying tribute to Tchaikovsky.

'Carmina Burana' was another one of those key defining moments in my life, in the mid 1970's I was in Germany and it was the first time I heard 'Carmina Burana' performed by a full symphony with choral and the audience, for a better word, was upper crust blue blood and it blew my mind. The lyrics were written in the dark ages by some monk in Bavaria, who hid them behind the wall because he was afraid of getting into trouble, and then when they found them in the 1800's this Carl Orff re-wrote the melodies in 1830. Then in the 1980's I went to see Ozzy Osbourne in the US and before Ozzy comes to the stage and a tape plays and the tape is 'Carmina Burana' and the crowd goes nuts. Then in the 1990's a friend of mine, a friend of mine took me to see his rap band play an inner city venue and before the band comes on stage the intro was 'Carmina Burana'. This is a song, lyrics were written in Latin in the dark ages, music written by a classical composer in the 1830's and it is blowing away upper crust blue bloods in Germany, suburban kids on Long Island and inner city kids here. That's the power of music; it's a magical thing. It was such an influential song in my life that I figured I would put that one on too.

I believe it is going to be the last song of what is going to be our first rock theatrical release at the New York City Blues Express and which we are in the studio recording as we speak and along with 'Romanov: What Kings Whisper', which is TSO's next album. My only problem is time because everyone wants everything now. I need one of those watches that when you click it, it stops time. They always seem to be in fairy tales in Great Britain but every watch stop store here seems to be out of stock!

The main thing is it is really important for us to get over to Europe and pay our dues here as we have put it off way too long just because we distracted doing albums for other bands, doing soundtracks for movies, there was just always something. The original idea was to come over in 2010 but when Madonna's rig collapsed in France, I told my managers push it to 2011 and double-check everything. With the economy, so many companies are in trouble that they are cutting back on workers. In America, I really know my vendors; I know that before we go out they use x-rays and double check every spot-weld. It's great selling over a million tickets a year but it's not worth it if it hurts one of the musicians or, God forbid, a fan. So we are trying to stay on the side of caution, we are just aware of the state of the economy we are sailing into, so we have to just dot all the i's, cross all the t's and not mess up.

You mentioned that you will be previewing the 'Night Castle' show at the end of the show on this tour, when will we get to see the full version?

PON: We can't wait, probably I would say in the next two, three years. There are multiple ways of going about it, one is to do a limited tour of the buildings in Europe and London is one of those cities that can support TSO's production.  Another is to do outdoor festivals, which I would really love to do because then there is no limit on the pyro because you would not have to deal with those pesky roofs. We are kind of figuring it out as we go, things just keep shifting, we are supposed to be going over to Asia this year, hit Japan, Taiwan and Korea but until the Korean situation calms down we decided to postpone that. It's a whacky world and every time you think you have got it figured out, something else whacky happens.

I'm a firm believer of happy endings, I guess too many fairy tales when I was a kid. The band is just unbelievably psyched to be coming over to Europe. The other nice thing about coming over to Europe is that over the 12 years that we have been touring in the US people have come to expect this over the top mind blowing thing. I remember the first time we toured in 1999 and when you hear of an orchestra you think of most people in seats not moving and then all of a sudden you just see this monstrous prog rock production rise itself on to the stage, assembled in front of your eyes and then the show just kicks off. The easiest thing to do would be to concentrate on the places that could have the bigger production, but you want everyone to be able to see it not just big cities or the places that don't have a coliseum. What's the point of having a great album if people can't afford it and what's the point of having a great show if people can't afford to see it? The show a couple of years ago got so big and complicated we were offered to just move it to Vegas and park it, which honestly, is tempting because you set it up once and that's it! But a lot of people never get to Vegas and if they can't get to Vegas, then we'll bring it to them.

Which band will you be bringing with you, the East or West band?

Well, actually it's one band and it divides in the winter because TSO's ideal is to do whatever it takes to make the music have the most emotional impact. The Christmas trilogy got so big in the states it blew everybody's mind and William Morris said to me "Paul, you have walked into a Tchaikovsky" and I knew what he meant, Tchaikovsky wrote the 'Nutcracker' ballet as another ballet like 'Sleeping Beauty' and 'Swan Lake', he never dreamt it would be as popular as it became. In the entertainment industry, anything to do with Christmas is the Holy Grail, if you are writing a book, song, movie about any other subject any other time of the year, you are competing with the best of your generation, anything you write about Christmas and you are competing against anything written over the last 2,000 years, you are competing with Dickens, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Frank Capra because it intimidated me the most, I got it out the way earlier.

Actually, when Atlantic said we understand the six regular operas, why the trilogy about Christmas? I said well, we write about subjects that are larger than life and I'm a big fan of Dickens, who wrote about subjects larger than life, he wrote five books about Christmas and when a British reporter asked him how come five books about Christmas? He said Christmas is too large a subject to take on in one book. So I said, "Ahmet, if it is too large for Dickens in one book, it's too large for me in one album." I said "I am just going to make three of them", one wonders it has the same affect on people around the world, the second how it has been done for centuries and the third to undo the mistakes. But we will only do it November to December, which is the holiday season in America and I won't do it before November 1^st and I won't do it after first weekend in January. The management said you are going to let a lot of people down and then an agent said "Paul, you have got 4 guitar players, you have got 2 drummers, you have got 24 lead singers, you have got 4 keyboard players, you could split this band in half and you are still five times bigger than your average band.

The first year we did it, honestly, we were scared to death, just because it was unprecedented and would the fans buy it?  But the fans understood it and it worked, so that was another lucky accident that we stumbled into. We would love to bring that over here and do a December tour in Europe but so much to do and so little time.

There's one full TSO band but when the band is on the road there is a back up band in New York City rehearsing so if somebody gets sick, they don't have to keep singing and we'll fly the back up in. I have seen singers go up there and sing when they should not be singing but it is a sold out show and they don't want to let the fans down. The first duty is to the fans but the second duty is to do no harm to the musicians, especially the singers. Again, America has probably gone from 30,000 record deals a year to probably under 3,000, so rather than pay cancellation insurance; I would rather pay the musicians.

You donate money to a charity in each city you play in; will you be doing the same over here?

PON: One to two dollars of every ticket we sell goes to a charity in the city we are playing in and in the last 12 years I think it's been about 14 million dollars to local charities. We intend to do one for London, yes. That kind of happened accidently too, usually at the end of the year we write a cheque to a charity, I won't name the charity but the next year our accountants found out that 96 cents of every dollar went to overhead and salaries and 4 cents went to the kids. It got me so angry but then someone said to me instead of one big cheque, leave a little in every city you play, everyone gets a little larceny in the hearts but then they can't do so much damage and that's the way we have been doing it every year since and it works!

You mentioned Tchaikovsky, you have got Mozart and Bach mentioned on 'Night Castle' and obviously Beethoven on the previous album, how do you think they would like your music if they were still around today?

PON: I hope they would like it, for me Mozart was the first rock star, Beethoven the first heavy metal rock star and when you think of the fifth symphony "da da da dum, da da da dum" if Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath had written that riff everyone would have believed it, and if Beethoven and Mozart had electronic keyboards, Marshalls and Les Pauls, they would be using them. One of the things I like about 'Beethoven's Last Night' and I try to sneak it into all the other albums, is a lot of kids would never listen to Mozart, Beethoven and Korsakov but you slip it into the middle of a rock opera and you rock it up and they think wow that's cool, then they read the credits and they think "That's Beethoven?" and all of a sudden they realise that some of the classics are really great.

For people who are into classical music they get to hear it with a fresh interpretation but for people who would never listen to it, we slip it under the door. 

It's 37 years of avoiding a real job and just praying that it goes on for another 37 because I don't have any other talents except "Shall I mop that floor again sir?" and it doesn't sound like as much fun!

Paul, many thanks for your time. All the best with 'Night Castle' and the European tour.

PON: Thank you too.

'Night Castle' was released 21^st February in the UK through all the usual music outlets and you can read what Uber Rock thought of it here.  The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's European tour meanwhile hits London on 28^th March at Hammersmith Apollo and you can buy tickets for that show here. If we were excited before we got to chat to Paul O'Neill, we are even more excited now; it's going to be a great night's entertainment.

Uber Rock would also like to thank Neil Richardson for stepping in and helping us out on this occasion.  THANK YOU!!!