When ACCEPT asked Mark Tornillo to front the band in 2009, he had not toured or recorded in years. Speaking to Finland's Chaoszine, he admitted the return was harder than it looked from outside — and that the fix came from a vocal coach in New York City who had worked with Steven Tyler among others.
"Basically, what he said to me was, like, 'Look, I can't teach you how to sing. You know how to sing.' He said, 'I could teach you how to sing tomorrow.' And I was, like, 'Oh, okay. I'm very interested in that.'"
The lesson was warming up properly, and Tornillo says it is the single thing standing between him and a wrecked set. "If I just go out there all guns blazing first song without doing any vocal exercises or warmups, you're not gonna last. You're gonna get a quarter of the way through the set and you're done. So I make sure I do a proper warmup now. And I try not to talk too much, 'cause that's worse than singing."
The routine itself has barely moved in fifteen years: a 45-minute tape the coach made for him, lightly edited, with some passages taken an octave higher to open up his top end. His pre-show discipline is stricter still. "I don't drink before the show. I'll have a beer on stage. First song, there's a beer out there, and I'll start drinking beer. And that's all I drink when I'm singing." Food is out entirely. "I ate breakfast this morning. I won't eat again until after the show. I want an empty stomach. It's just way easier to sing when there's nothing in there."
On singing the pre-1996 catalogue originally recorded by Udo Dirkschneider, Tornillo says he stopped impersonating a long time ago. "I definitely pick up some of his nuances, but at this point in time, with the old songs, I kind of look at them as, like, making them my own, make it the way I would've done it back then. I wanna make it try and sound like the record without being too ridiculously going over the top trying to sound like Udo."
He named 2010's "Blood Of The Nations" as the record that pushed him hardest, with producer Andy Sneap doing the pushing. "I hadn't recorded an album in — oof — almost 10 years at that point… It was a lot of mental and physical work to get back to singing in that way that I used to do." Sixteen years on, he is realistic: "The older you get, the instrument starts to get tired. But it's hanging in there. I'm not gonna argue about it and I'm not gonna fight it."
ACCEPT's 50th-anniversary album "Teutonic Titans 1976–2026" arrives September 4 via Napalm Records — 19 reimagined classics with roughly 50 guests, including Tobias Forge on "Save Us", Philip Anselmo, Kirk Hammett and Mikkey Dee on "Fast As A Shark", and Rob Halford with Matthias Jabs on "Balls To The Wall". Tornillo is now the longest-serving frontman in the band's history.
Source: blabbermouth.net