Background

Arjen Anthony Lucassen was born on April 3rd, 1960, in The Hague.

Education

Both Arjen and his older brother Gjalt were good students, but unlike Gjalt, Arjen wasn’t interested much in studying. A notorious trouble-maker in class, Arjen decided to pursue a career in the music business after graduating high school.

Career

Arjen’s love of music was sparked in the 60s, when he became a big fan of the Beatles. He started buying albums in the early seventies when the glam rock era started and bands such as T-Rex, Alice Cooper, The Sweet, David Bowie were rising stars. Arjen really wanted to be in a band but he was too lazy to learn to play an instrument so he started a play-back band mimicking his heroes Alice Cooper, Slade, and The Sweet. He actually did get a lot of gigs in schools and already then he was a busy guy.

Then one day one of the older pupils approached Arjen saying “You have to listen to this,” and handed him a copy of Deep Purple’s ‘Made in Japan’. “Glam rock is OK, but this is really great.” When Arjen listened to it and heard Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar playing, he knew what he wanted: to play guitar! So he learned to play guitar and went through a stage where he had a lot of different bands until 1980. One of these bands was called ‘Mover’.

Arjen had heard that the Dutch band Bodine had been looking for a new singer. Although he didn’t consider himself a great or gifted vocalist, Bodine was his favorite band so he wanted to get involved. The first album with Jay van Feggelen on vocals was one of his favorite albums. He figured that he would audition as a vocalist, and bring his guitar, hoping they would give him the position of second guitarist in the band. And they told him that he had good ideas, good lyrics and good melodies but his voice was not what they were looking for. So Arjen told them he had brought his guitar. Those were the days of guitar tandems in bands such as Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy. Arjen pulled out his guitar and his amps and just began to play some Bodine songs that he had been working on for a month. And they said: Ok, you’re in! Arjen stayed in Bodine from 1980 to 1984 and did two albums with them: ‘Bold as Brass’ and ‘Three Time Running’.

Then Arjen got a call from a young and fresh band named Vengeance asking him if he knew a guitarplayer. Arjen thought just a moment, thinking about how great Bodine was, and what amazing things he had learned from the older much more experienced musicians, but also how limited he felt about expressing his own musical ideas. He couldn’t develop himself as a composer and realized that there was a lot of spirit in Vengeance. So Arjen answered: “Yes, I know a guitarplayer… me!”

Vengeance was surprised and very happy, but wondered about his commitment to Bodine. Arjen told them that it was time for a change. He joined Vengeance shortly after that phone call and considers the time with them great, wild and quite enjoyable. He had more freedom to do what he wanted and to compose songs. But still, he had to make concessions since he was in a band and also had to deal with record companies demands. Not every band member agreed on his ideas, which made sense given the fact that they all hailed from different musical backgrounds. In 1989 the band replaced singer Leon Goewie with English native Ian Parry, but the band had a hard time getting a new style off the ground. In the early nineties the grunge and alternative rock genre exploded on to the scene. Arjen wished to go into a Rainbow direction with keyboards and bombastic sounds, and other guys wanted to explore Bad Company or Thin Lizzy styles. Because of this they wondered what the audience wanted to hear and started to write songs to please the fans. That was a bad decision. After a very successful farewell tour in 1992 Arjen parted ways with Vengeance.

Now the road was open for Arjen to work on his own material without interference or having to make concessions to band members. He recorded a few songs with himself on vocals and a record company heard it and was very interested to release the songs on an album. This album became Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy and Arjen went by his middle name Anthony. On this album Arjen played all instruments himself, except bass guitar which was played by Peter Vink and keyboards which were played by Cleem Determeijer. He didn’t know what he wanted to do musically so the album became a hodge-podge of styles. Country, pop, rock, prog all sorts of different songs, and, even though three singles were released and Arjen performed on various radio shows and small clubs, the album flopped. But to those who listen to the album can hear that there are a few songs that became the basis for a massive project that was still to come.

One particular album released during the 60s left a huge impression on Arjen. The album had everything Arjen was looking for: the music took him on an adventure, lyrics drew him into an emotional story, and reading lyrics along to discover that famous vocalists were playing parts. It became the ultimate tool for escapism for Arjen. The album was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. This album was followed by other similar albums such as War of the Worlds featuring Phil Lynott, The Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd The Wall. After that Arjen realized that time had come to do it himself, and to do it his own way. Not limited music to one style. He used all his styles - prog, metal, folk, Beatles - despite being convinced that listeners with strong genre preferences would hate not being able to pigeonhole the music. But that didn’t matter to Arjen: for once in his life he wanted to make an album without compromises, just making the music he loved. This album became Ayreon – The Final Experiment. He found a small Dutch label interested in the project and the album simply took off. Several years later, after changing record companies, Arjen has released seven Ayreon albums as well as one compilation.

In between Ayreon releases Arjen enjoys working on various side projects. Each of these allow him to focus on different stylistic aspects. While Ayreon tends to mix a variety of genres and musical styles, his various side projects tend to be more coherently focused on one style.

Ayreon fans were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime performance of the Ayreon album The Human Equation in September 2015. The performance featured nearly all members of the original album cast, as well as Mike Mills (Toehider, Ayreon) and Anneke van Giersbergen. It took place at the Nieuwe Luxor Theater in Rotterdam. The final show was recorded for a DVD release due in summer 2016.

Achievements

• Lucassen plays a wide variety of instruments: his main instruments are guitar and keyboards, however he also plays bass, banjo and many others. Overall, in his career and including all his bands and projects (as principal instrumentalist/creative force or as a member), Lucassen has released twenty-six studio albums, four live albums, two EPs and seventeen singles. He has also made many minor participations alongside various artists including Shadow Gallery, After Forever, Within Temptation and Avantasia, and appears in over 50 albums.
  
  Since the creation of Ayreon, Lucassen progressively made a name for himself under rock and metal reviewers, with many critics calling him a "genius", and praising his composition abilities and originality.

Works

More photos

• music

  • The Final Experiment 1996
  • Actual Fantasy Revisited 1996
  • Into The Electric Castle 1998
  • Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer 2000
  • Universal Migrator 2 2000
  • The Human Equation 2004
  • 01011001 2008
  • Theory of Everything 2013
  • The Source 2017

Politics

He tries to stay away from politics and does not talk about it in interviews.

Views

According to Lucassen, his self-made motto is "the meaning of life is to give life meaning", a sentence which he included in the Ayreon song "The Sixth Extinction" from 01011001, and considers himself "a very rational man. I believe in science".

Quotations: "Music is everything. Both listening and creating. Even if I wouldn’t be successful I would be creating music. Music chose me, I didn’t choose music. I have no choice in the matter whatsoever!"

“I am definitely not a genius! I have had the pleasure to work with some geniuses, so I know what I’m talking about. Unlike them I have to work really hard to achieve the level I finally reached, and it took me about 30 years to get there. I am however a big music fan, which I think is even more important than being a genius. I want to create the music that I would like to listen to myself. I think my talent and strength lies in the fact that I see the big picture; I know how things should sound, how to use and combine singers and instrumentalists and how to create a certain atmosphere, not just musically but also lyric wise and visually”.

"I love turning Science into Fiction...."

"I’m not a politician. I don’t have the answers."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: During the recordings of The Human Equation from 2003 to 2004, Lucassen suffered from "increasing lower back problems". The Doctors gave him an MRI examination revealing he was suffering of hernia; he had his examination filmed in order to use it for a video shoot, "as the 'Me' character [from The Human Equation] would also have needed a scan after his car accident".

Interests

• Food used to be Arjen’s favorite pass time. Strange, unusual and exotic foods were his favorites. Since he lost his sense of smell in 2007, food no longer has any flavor.
  
  Favorite movies: Alien, Stargate, 2001, Donnie Darko, Ed Wood, Being John Malkovich, The Omen, The Thing, Blade Runner, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Midnight Run, The Full Monty.
  
  Favorite television series: Blake’s 7, House of Cards, Babylon 5, FarScape, X-files, Sherlock Holmes (feat. Jeremy Brett), Firefly, StarTrek: Enterprise, Dexter, Six Feet Under.

• Writers

  Arjen hasn’t read a book in his life. He does read magazines and comic books, but gets all his story telling inspiration from old television series, movies, and science documentaries.

• Music & Bands

  Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Porcupine Tree, Hawkwind, Kansas, Rainbow, Led Zeppelin, Queen, The Who, Kate Bush, The Sweet, Ritchie Blackmore

Connections

Arjen was married to Jolanda Verduijn, who appeared as bassist on The Final Experiment, until they divorced in 2006/2007.

Lucassen is currently in a relationship with American guitarist and lyricist Lori Linstruth, who left Sweden to move in with him. She is his former bandmate from both Stream of Passion and Guilt Machine, and was featured in several Ayreon albums. Despite retiring as an active performer in 2010, she still acts as his manager, a role she has held since 2007, and is responsible for various other tasks on his albums; she notably co-wrote the story and lyrics of the Ayreon album The Theory of Everything.

Wife:

Jolanda Verduijn

girlfriend:

Lori Linstruth

colleague:

James LaBrie

Kevin James LaBrie is a Canadian vocalist and songwriter, who is best known as the lead singer of the American progressive metal band Dream Theater.

LaBrie provided the lead vocals for the main character in the rock opera album The Human Equation by Ayreon; in 2015, he reprised his role for a live version, The Theater Equation. He was also featured as the character "The Historian" in the album The Source.

colleague:

Hansi Kursch

Hans Jürgen Kürsch, better known as Hansi Kürsch, is a German singer, songwriter, record producer and former bass guitarist, best known as a member of the power metal band Blind Guardian.

He played characters in the Ayreon albums 01011001 and The Source.