Metal Mania Community

Chameleon is an album that has a lot of background to it so this entry may be longer than the others. This was a dark time for the band. They were in huge debt because of their court cases with Noise records, there were severe tensions within the band about what direction to take with the music, Ingo was also getting extremely ill due to his psychological state. The band also faced adversity from their record company EMI who told many vendors not to order the album because it wouldn’t sell. Chameleon was released in 1993 and was very poorly received by fans and critics alike. The irony is that years later the album became accepted by many fans. Songs like Giants, First Time, Music, Step Out of Hell, Windmill and I Believe have become fan favorites over the years. A funny thing is that in past interviews and conversations Michael Kiske, Roland Grapow and Michael Weikath all told me that Chameleon was like a 3 man solo album because each of the songwriter’s songs were completely different from one another. This would also be the last album to feature Michael Kiske as their lead singer and Ingo Scwichtenberg as their drummer. Looking back on it Chameleon is a great album, and people tell me all the time how it shouldn’t have been a Helloween album. I tend to disagree, I think this record was important for the band in many ways and adds to Helloween’s diverse catalog of music……a catalog I would argue is more diverse than most bands let alone metal bands.