Biography Ivo Rock was not built in a day One afternoon he simply kicked them into the garbage can. He had invested four years of blood, sweat and tears, lived from hand to mouth, let friendships go to waste. All the same. Songs like these seemed unworthy of all the sacrifices. That was back in 1997. „From today’s perspective the demos were probably not all that bad, but at the time I thought they were completely useless. I had to get rid of them.“ Ivo sounds brave, the way he says that with his friendly Swiss accent. Where others give up just because their computer has crashed unrebootably, Ivo rolls up his sleeves and tries again – and again. Over ten fruitless years in all went by until harvest time came: a wonderful, matured rock album. „All in all“ is, all in all, a confession of faith; faith in himself and in the power of the goals he had set. He has pursued his goal since he was 16, although for a long time it seemed as if the goal was receding as Ivo chased it. In his homeland, these days, the headlines say „Ivo shows ’em all“*. Shows them that you don’t endure your fate, you challenge it, and that even in the Swiss mountains, rock music is a goal worth living to attain. Applause comes not only from the many Swiss fans who bought „all in all“ as soon as it appeared in September but also from Neil Dorfsman, who produced the album. His musical instinct has already been responsible for a number of rock monuments: „Brothers In Arms“ by Dire Straits, Sting’s „... Nothing Like The Sun“ – masterpieces of pop history. When Neil Dorfsman agrees today to produce an unwritten chapter like Ivo, his personal radar must have picked up a tremor at the foot of Rock Olympus. And mountains are something Ivo has always rocked. It began in the Alps In his home town – Ivo was born in Basel, but his parents soon moved to the Central Swiss community of Stans (pop. 6500) – neighbours recall that Ivo wanted to be a rock musician even when he was a little boy. A snotty-nosed kid’s big ideas? No, this kid kept his nose clean! For this boy, musical instruments were like a Playstation he couldn’t put down. He started playing at five, when his parents sent him to piano school; Ivo stayed with it for 16 years, excelling in all he tackled, right up to Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos (a peak for the talented, an abyss for lesser mortals). At 14, he felt the provocative urge of a different kind of music: the album „In Rock“ by Deep Purple formed the basis of his record collection and was the spark that ignited his passion for rock’n’roll. Unquenchably. His piano suddenly felt the touch of hands which played percussion as well. Ivo’s urge for action soon took him from school to the building site, where he earned money to pay for classes at jazz school – his career choice had been made. Sadly, nobody at the school could teach him how to write a song, and so he went about the task himself. He left the building site and got himself a job as a tobacco products salesman, moved to Lucerne and devoted every free hour to music. In his spare time, Ivo played drums in cover bands – where he also tried his voice as a singer for the first time. „It was an absolute disaster, painful for all concerned,“ he recalls. Singing was what it had to be, then! Anything that is hard to succeed at is his thing. Today, Ivo is more voice than anything else. Fresh and sappy, it rises above the songs, while its raw eloquence puts the edge on any smoothness; and every few seconds one gets the impression of having recognized a different rock maestro. The years passed. Ivo spread his wings, alone or with musician friends. Many musician friends. (Ivo thanks them in the CD booklet. For two whole pages.) Eventually he got the chance to accompany the Swiss rock superstars Gotthard – not as a musician; as a tour backliner, who set up the drum kit before every gig. Gotthard were doing the warm-up programme to Deep Purple’s France tour, and so Ivo got to know the guys who set off his personal big bang, projected him onto the turbulent course of a young rock musician. Coincidence? Maybe. But Ivo noticed that he was still inhabiting the same universe, and stayed on course. The Major breakthrough In March 2000 he finally seemed to have arrived. A friend was playing in Cologne as studio guitarist for Klaus „Major“ Heuser (of German rock band Bap) and passed him Ivo’s latest demos. Klaus was the first to react positively. So positively in fact that Ivo sort of lit the touch-paper to a virtually new project: Helmut Fest, business partner to Heuser and head of EMI Germany for many years, saw this fresh young rock talent as the good reason he’d been looking for to start a production company: Festplatte – which means „hard disc“ – and Ivo became its operating system. Two years later, production was complete – and Ivo went into a trough of despair: „Where were the vibes, the spontaneous impulses? That beat that was pounding in me the whole time? We had lost the thread that led to the core.“ The core was Ivo himself, his conviction and extraordinary dedication. Everyone sensed that. And yet it seemed his time had still not come. All the same: „Without him, Festplatte would never have existed,“ as Fest says, „and at that point we thought him capable of even more than when we started work with him.“ The team decided to reboot. Their dream producer: Neil Dorfsman. The New Yorker and designer of sound couture for Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Bobby McFerrin liked what the Swiss rocker had to offer. "Musicians have to deliver what they do with heart and soul and Ivo is a combination of all those things," Dorfsman asserts. "He's a lovely guy. At the same time a guy with a lot of talent. He sings from the heart, just something soulful and from the heart and if you have that you got a lot." His plan: six new versions and four new recordings. Ivo felt he was where he belonged: „The preparations lasted five weeks, then there were four weeks for the recordings in Neil’s studio in Woodstock; mixing took just under another three weeks. It was the craziest time I have ever lived through! All the things that are in ‘all in all’ are the best moments of each individual who shared in this quarter of a year.“ All in all The album is bursting with collective professionalism and breathes the spirit of great American rock albums. And yet it is an intensely personal work, with all songs (except „break me down“) written by Ivo himself. There would have been no point in it otherwise: „Every song must have something to do with me, otherwise it flops. Every time!“ he explains. „And I wanted my songs to sound just the same on CD as I hear them in my heart.“ That is what he has been fighting for all these years. Drunk with joy, Ivo returned to Switzerland – with „all in all“ in his pocket, the first fruit of his long march. – No, wait! There are other fruits to harvest too. In Tessin’s Verzasca valley, Ivo is cultivating his little hectare of vineyard. He has been working hard there for years, cultivating special grape varieties ... But that’s another story. Berlin, November 2004 back