Bio­graphy:

Sym­phonic and Space Rock, that's what these Ger­man Prog Metallers brought to the table and bring it they did. The bands sound shares more in com­mon with Eng­lish Pro­gress­ive Metal acts like Pink Floyd and Yes than their Krautrock coun­ter­parts - per­haps unusual con­sid­er­ing their Ger­man nation­al­ity and music dur­ing this period in Germany.

Borne­mann described the ori­gin of the name of the band thus: "The name Eloy is based on the book 'The Time Machine' by H.G Wells. Wells describes in his book the situ­ation of man­kind about 800,000 years later, and 'Eloy' is a human race in his story. The Eloy in Wells' story have made a new start with the help of the time trav­eler. In a way, it was a new begin­ning for the human race. Ger­man rock bands in the late 1960s played mainly cov­ers from other bands instead of play­ing their own com­pos­i­tions. Record deals for Ger­man bands were abso­lutely rare and Ger­man bands gen­er­ally were con­sidered to be second class bands in their own coun­try. At that time it was a strong effort for a Ger­man band to come out with only their own com­pos­i­tions. It was a start into an unknown future, and from this point of view, com­par­able to the human race in Wells' story. That is why I got the idea to name the band 'Eloy'.

The band were formed in the 1970's by gui­tar­ist and vocal­ist Frank Borne­mann. The band have had sev­eral dif­fer­ent line ups with Borne­mann being the only con­sist­ent mem­ber. Borne­mann tried to per­use a more com­mer­cial sound to the bands music. But des­pite being suc­cess­ful in Ger­many selling over a mil­lion albums in 1983 alone and becom­ing Ger­manys most suc­cess­ful pro­gress­ive band out­selling bands such as Yes and Pink Floyd, they never gained much pop­ular­ity in the United States or any­where apart from Germany.

In 1971, Eloy got their first record­ing con­tract with Philips and went to Ham­burg to record their debut album with sound engin­eer Conny Plank. Due to a ser­i­ous car acci­dent, which left him unable to play for a long time, Helmut Draht the lead singer at the time had to be replaced by Fritz Ran­dow, because of this Frank Borne­mann took over the vocals and Man­fred Wieczorke switched to play­ing the organ, which expan­ded the instru­mental range of the band and fit­ted in bet­ter with their musical intentions.

With their new bass-player Luitjen Jansen, they recor­ded the album Float­ing which con­sol­id­ated their suc­cess. How­ever, the band did not con­sider this rock-orientated mater­ial a step for­ward and went on to tackle a more sub­stan­tial project.

Unfor­tu­nately, the influ­ence of Eloy's man­ager at the time, Jay Part­ridge, caused strong ten­sions between the band mak­ing them even­tu­ally fall apart. Frank Borne­mann found him­self without fel­low musi­cians. How­ever, EMI stood by him still trust­ing his artistic abil­it­ies. They offered to help him to rebuild the band with new mem­bers and con­tinue his career.

The search for new musi­cians was soon suc­cess­ful. First, Frank joined forces with Han­over gui­tar­ist Detlev Schmidtchen, Detlev switched to another instru­ment and now oper­ated the key­boards for Eloy. Klaus-Peter Matziol and Jur­gen Rosenthal were a very cre­at­ive new rhythm sec­tion, enrich­ing the sound of the band.

In 1977 Eloy recor­ded there album Oceans which has remained Eloy's best selling album of today. This album pre­cisely mirrored the zeit­geist, with its syn­thesis of atmo­spheric elec­tronic sounds, orches­tral rock-music pat­terns and eso­teric lyr­ics. It brought about the band's break­through in the music industry and put them at the top of the so-called progressive-rock movement.

The band then opened there own record­ing stu­dio called 'Horus Sound' and then they later recor­ded there album col­ours in spring 1980.The songs were now shorter and more rock ori­ent­ated, which earned them applause from their former crit­ics, although some Eloy fans were dis­con­ten­ted because they pre­ferred the atmo­spheric sound waves of the pre­vi­ous line-up.

The band decided to go back to there old paths and in 1984 returned to atmo­spheric sounds, coupled with pulsat­ing rhythms, heavy riff­ing and grip­pingly arranged com­pos­i­tions that there old fans enjoyed most. The new album was called Met­ro­mania yet this new com­mon ground was not enough and the ten­sions within the band did not die down.

After the break-up, few expec­ted to hear from Eloy again. But the cre­at­ive spark was not extin­guished. Together with key­boarder Michael Ger­lach from Ber­lin, Frank wrote songs for a new album Ra, which was released in 1988.

1993 was a spe­cial year in the band's his­tory with the 25th anniversary of Eloy the fol­low­ing year. It was to be cel­eb­rated with the ambi­tious Chron­icles pro­ject, with two CDs com­pris­ing the best Eloy songs.Due to pub­lic demand, there was a second part to the tour in 1995, and the second part of Chron­ic­als was released that year as well.

In 2003, EMI released Time­less Pas­sages, the ulti­mate song col­lec­tion on two CDs. The product was graced with elab­or­ate cover art­work, strongly sug­gest­ive of the band's hey­day. 

Present Day-

The 'The Leg­acy Box' double DVD was released in Decem­ber 2010 and con­tains numer­ous videos and TV record­ings from all the band's peri­ods, as well as a com­pre­hens­ive doc­u­ment­ary of the band's his­tory with inter­views, a photo gal­lery and many other features. "

The band played at fest­ivals in Ger­many and Switzer­land in July 2011 with the per­son­nel largely the same as on the 1994-1995 tour

Eloy are still going strong actu­ally. They recently con­firmed their first ever U.S appear­ence for June 2012 at the North East Rock Art Fest­ival. Eloy will be the last band to EVER play at this long run­ning prog festival.

Band Mem­bers (At the time of HMR Releases):

Frank Borne­mann (Lead Vocals and Gui­tar)
Hannes Arkona (Gui­tar, Per­cus­sion and Key­boards)
Hannes Fol­berth (Key­boards)
Klaus-Peter Matziol (Bass)
Fritz Ran­dow (Drums)

Dis­co­graphy:

Stu­dio Albums-

 

Eloy	1971
Inside	1973
Float­ing	1974
Power and the Passion	1975
Dawn	1976
Ocean	1977
Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes	1979
Col­ours	1980
Plan­ets	1981
Time to Turn	1982
Per­form­ance	1983
Met­ro­mania	1984
Ra	1988
Des­tin­a­tion	1992
The Tides Return Forever	1994
Ocean 2: The Answer	1998
Vis­ion­ary	2009

               

Tour Dates:

Tour details and latest news can be found over on Eloy's offi­cial web­site.

Videos: