Vanishing Point is one of Australia’s most successful metal bands, but the international success of Vanishing Point has only come about after a lot of hard work. The reason why they focused so much of their attention, early on, on the international market, was because metal — and particularly power metal — is far more popular overseas than it is in Australia. Knowing that finding success locally with their genre of music would be extremely difficult, and knowing that Australians tend to underrate their own bands, they asked themselves if they really did want success, and whether they’d be prepared to go overseas to get it.

“It took a number of years for us to get a decent amount of exposure in Europe. But we just kept on hammering the European market either on the internet, or through the press over there in their magazines, and things like that. We just kept hounding the record labels over there, rather than concentrating any kind of effort here in Australia,” said vocalist Silvio. “A lot of it was hard work. Definitely. But the way we see it, we love what we do. We never really thought that we’d get any kind of success out of it, to be quite honest. We never thought we’d do anything or go anywhere. And I think it was that mentality that kept on going, that just kept us going because we just did it because we loved doing it, rather than searching for that lucrative record deal.”

That hard work got Vanishing Point to the Mecca of all metal festivals: Wacken, in Germany. Not only did the band manage to get onto the main stage of this amazing event, they were the first unsigned band to do so, and they were also the first Australian band to do so. It’s a big accolade, and one that was utterly breathtaking.

“It’s a very difficult thing to describe because you actually have to be on the stage to understand what I’m, what we all went through. To be on such a huge stage, and you’re talking—the lighting rigs alone were probably two telephone poles high, and the stage is probably about fifty metres long, sixty metres long, so you can literally run across the stage at full pelt,” enthused Silvio, “and it’ll still take you twenty seconds to get to the other side. The production is just huge, the crowds are just massive. And for an unsigned band, from Australia to actually be a part of that was very, very humbling. Just having that feeling of euphoria just take over. It’s just—just awesome. It really is amazing.”

Vanishing Point’s latest album The Fourth Season has been released to almost universal acclaim. Aptly titled, given it’s the band’s fourth release, a lot of pre-production was undertaken by the band before they went into the studio. This meant that they knew exactly what they were going into, and exactly how many songs were going onto the album.

“Recording does get a little bit easier each time,” mused Silvio. “I guess, by the fourth album, you really sort of know what to expect. You kind of prepare yourself, not just physically but mentally for all the stress levels that you encounter in a recording environment.”

Writing is always a team effort for the band. Each of the band members is passionate about the music and the goals they’re trying to reach—an environment that can lead to stress and arguments—but the teamwork, compromise and vision always work together to produce material that they’re proud of. Writing the lyrics for the material is also largely a team effort but, perhaps surprisingly, Silvio personally finds the process very difficult.

“It’s a really difficult experience to go through. I hate writing lyrics for the music,’ he stated. ‘If we have the music written first, it’s kind of like sculpturing a piece of artwork. Because with every part of versus and choruses and all that kind of stuff, you’ve got to actually find a word with the exactly the amount of syllables that fit the timing of the song, and it’s got to make sense somehow. So it’s a very, very difficult process that we go through. We can write a whole verse for a song and within an instant we can just trash it and just come up with something completely new. If I felt that if I sang the song and it didn’t feel that it was flowing off the tongue, so to speak, I’d trash it straight away and try to come up with something new.”

The artwork for The Fourth Season is very striking, and yet this came about in an unexpected way: by a search on the internet after their initial attempts at gaining images weren’t working for them. Silvio explained how the artwork came about:

“We were forced to pretty much embark on a bit of a search on the internet, just to find out some images that maybe we could sort of work with, that could possibly suit the style of music. And we came across this image. It was called Symphony Number Five, and we looked up who the artist was, and it was this lady in Estonia, named Kadri Umbleja,” Silvio recalled. “We immediately fell in love with it. It was just a real haunting kind of image, that lady kind of swooning, playing this violin on this dark, sort of dismal beach. We just emailed Kadri to ask if we could use, and told her what we wanted to use it for. She was elated. She even turned out to be a fan of the band as well! Yeah, it was it was one of those things that was just all working for us.”

Despite their success, Vanishing Point do most things themselves. They administer their website and their MySpace themselves, and do nearly everything in Australia and New Zealand on their own. Their label, Dockyard 1, takes care of international promotion. But the band is passionate about doing it themselves.

‘All the emails and things like that come directly to us and we reply to every single one of them,’ said Silvio. “So if people want to get directly in touch with us it’s very, very easy.”

Which is why they were able to get such a huge amount of feedback on their latest release.

“We’ve had heaps of feedback so far. It’s been amazing. It really has. With every new release that comes out there’s just hundreds of emails that come from fans all over the world through the website or through the MySpace and the general consensus with everyone is that they’re really, really happy with what we’ve done.’ He laughs. ‘I’d worry if they didn’t!”

After the album launch party on the first of December, the band are going to take a bit of a break before launching into a national follow-up tour in February 2008, hopefully followed up by a Japanese tour and some festivals through the European summer festival season in August.

To all the fans and readers out there, Silvio had this to say:

‘Thank you for taking the time to read this interview! We’ll be on tour early next year and hope that everybody has an opportunity to come out and look out our live shows. If you like what you hear, come out and support the Aussie metal scene!’

The Fourth Season is out now on Dockyard 1/Riot.