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So business was booming and we were all millionaires just rolling in the money right? A lot of people certainly thought so, but in reality nothing was further from the truth. The company hardly had any working capital, since neither STONNE nor LEO had put a nickel into the operation.
The only other person - besides myself - having invested some money in the label was ETIENNE GEERTS, once indisputably one of Belgium’s greatest international basketball players and also a sales representative at ARIOLA (now BMG), where I met him in the late 70s, became friends with him, and subsequently convinced him to work with me at INELCO in the early 80s. Yes, we were shifting considerable quantities of records, but we had needed to borrow heavily from the bank in order to bridge the gap between the time suppliers’ invoices became due and the moment our distributors paid us for records sold. The more successful we were the more the bank and their offshoot factoring firm got their greedy hooks into us, leaving us with only a minimal gross profit, owing to the fact that the interest rates in the mid-eighties were so cripplingly high. Also over the years several distributors had gone bankrupt, or were going through financial hardship of their own. We’d already written of $ 30,000 when the original PINNACLE collapsed. BOOTS, a German distributor headed by MANFRED SCHÜTZ, before he founded SPV, and who distributed our KONEXION label also crashed owing us some money, and the same fate befell our Norwegian partner, who’s name now temporarily escapes me. We also made some serious mistakes of our own. In England we later left the reincarnated version of PINNACLE, headed by STEVE MASON, and moved our distribution to PRT, and in the Benelux we switched from INDISC to CNR. In both cases our sales plummeted, at CNR in spite of the gallant support from RIK BLOMME and MICHIEL WOLF, two key-CNR players.
And if high interest rates, and the losses sustained from bankruptcies and diminishing sales in a few territories weren’t enough, the times they-were-also-a-changing; the MTV-era and BON JOVI-like acts had arrived and costly videos were needed to promote rock bands now. Heavy rock music now also required polished productions, which in turn meant gigantic recording budgets. For a short while we valiantly tried to compete by signing acts like HAZZARD, a band formed by ex-ACCEPT guitarist HERMANN FRANK, and the imposing McCOY, previously on bass with the IAN GILLAN BAND. These were superior albums, which I'm still proud of today; McCOY was voted one of the 10 best rock albums of the year in the UK, and also HERMANN'S record was of exceptionally high standards - it's just that with a price tag of nearly $ 50,000 attached to it, we couldn’t afford it. After paying for the recording we no longer had any money to promote the record properly – shit, we no longer had any money to feed ourselves! It’s like buying an expensive sport scar but not being able to come up with the money for the petrol.
The continuous financial hardships we endured during the second half of 1985 started to erode my friendship with STONNE HOLMGREN. He also had a young new girlfriend demanding a lot of attention - and that kind of consideration also requires money! STONNE secretly found some financial backers and left me as well as his monetary woes behind, but not before he stole a company car and sold it to a secondhand car dealer. For the sake of five fantastic years I decided not to have his ass put in jail.
STONNE then formed his own label and appropriately named it AMBUSH, since he not only stole FAITHFULL BREATH from the MAUSOLEUM roster, but also enticed DAVID MOFFIT to leave MAUSOLEUM and work with him. DAVID also took POWERHOUSE with him, a dynamite British outfit that had roots in GEORDIE, the band BRIAN JOHNSON left to join AC/DC, and which I hoped to sign since this was a time MAUSOLEUM was in critical need of a credible album. So it hurt twice. In the end it only took STONNE a few months to run his company into the ground, and we haven't spoken since, whereas with DAVID MOFFITT and BOGI KOPEC things were soon after patched up. FAITFUL BREATH manager: BOGI of course went on to form the highly successful G.U.N label and the DRAKKAR management and publishing company.
So by the end of 1985 MAUSOLEUM was in desperate need of cash. We needed money to pay ICP studios up front, or otherwise they wouldn’t allow JOS KLOEK to finish mixing the KILLER double live album STILL ALIVE IN EIGHTY-FIVE, which we had recorded with the high-priced DIERCKX MOBILE studio. And this was a release that could have solved quite a few - if not all of our problems - since we had a realistic sales expectancy of around 30.000 units. So with only four tracks of the KILLER album mixed, and the remaining master tapes stuck in the studio, JOS and I decided to stage the second coming of the SHOCKWAVE INTERNATIONAL HEAVY METAL FESTIVAL. We had organized such an extravaganza the year before, at the height of MAUSOLEUM-mania, with KILLER, WILDFIRE, OSTROGOTH, CROSSFIRE, LIONSPRIDE, BLACK WIDOW and with special guests RAVEN, a NEAT RECORDS act who were also immensely popular in those days. The festival had not only proven a great promotional showcase for our artists, but we had also made quite a bit of money on the night. We decided that the 1985 epic scheduled for October 5th, 1985, at the LIMBURGHAL in Genk, should even be of more extreme proportions than the previous edition.
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