The last Ayreon album may have divided his loyal audience, but Arjen Lucassen is bouncing back with a reboot of his sci-fi supergroup project, Star One. Here the prolific progger offers his candid views on why Transitus split the fans, on writer’s block and control freakery, and on the concept of new album, Revel In Time.

Time Traveller: Rich Wilson

There are those musicians who create songs as a pleasant pastime, writing when the urge to be creative strikes as a fleeting distraction from their everyday lives. Then there are people like Arjen Anthony Lucassen, for whom music and writing consumes every single day of his life.

It’s that drive that has seen him release music under a variety of guises, often laden with guest musicians to add even more sparkle to the recordings. The mainstay is Ayreon – a vehicle for all the genres ranging from metal to folk – which truly encompasses his approach to music. But there’s been a plethora of other musical monikers, from The Gentle Storm, Guilt Machine, Stream Of Passion through to albums released under his own name. The uninitiated may be confused by this array of projects, but Lucassen retains a hugely loyal fanbase who, for the most part, adore the music he produces. That said, his last Ayreon album, Transitus, produced a definite divergence in his fanbase.

“I have to say that it did sell it very well,” Lucassen tells Prog, “so that was not the problem. “It was just that opinions were varied and there was controversy. I usually don’t really get that, but it was a love-it-or-hate-it album. I had the same thing with the Guilt Machine album [On This Perfect Day, 2009], which I’m very proud of, but people either loved it and thought it was the best thing that I’ve ever done, or they didn’t like it and thought it was the worst thing that I’ve ever done. So that happened with Transitus as well and it wasn’t received that well by the fans or by the press. I think the reason was that it wasn’t really a true Ayreon album. I’d wanted to make a movie, so it was basically film music, every song was written for the movie. We needed two million euros to produce the movie and it wasn’t to be. So, the record company said ‘Let’s release it as Ayreon’, which in hindsight was a mistake.”