INTERVIEW: TRAVIS MITCHELL, MINDSTORM

Critically acclaimed Canadian rockers MINDSTORM will be here touring through November and December, out to promote a strikingly powerful second album Back To Reality. Influenced by classic outfits of the seventies, like ZEPPELIN they also sometimes wander into the more progressive movements offered by YES and GENESIS. Although described as Heavy Rock, they display a clever knowledge of rock music's more intricate past and become an act worthy of note.

Fronted by vocalist and principal writer Travis Mitchell, they are combining their influences with the individual blend of their own style.

In a recent conversation, I asked Travis how he thinks the band is developing.

"We're still in the infant stages but I know and feel we're progressing to the level I want to achieve and I know we're offering what people want to hear."

I've noticed you compose with a number of different people.

"I like to work with different guys in the band. I think it allows us to reach something a little more diverse from track to track. If it's just one person writing, it tends to get a bit predictable and follows narrow routes."

How different is the new album from the first?

"I see it as a continuation of the old album, but with better songs and sounds and a more mature approach. The band has grown together as a team and has a stronger band feel, rather than just musicians playing together."

Do you think you've found your own sound or are the influences still apparent?

"I'd like to think we're developing something individual but I do have a lot of influences."

How well received are you back in Canada?

"Well, Canada is a pretty tough market to break at this point. So what's happening with us, like a lot of other Canadian bands, is we're having to go to Europe or America to get something going."

Are you ready for the tour?

"More than we've ever been. Make it known MINDSTORM are back. We really deliver, we don't disappoint."

Mike Harris
Riff Raff
October 1991

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!