1. When did you first start playing guitar? Were you self-tought, or did you have traditional training? When did you start playing a 7 string?
2. Could you give a brief detail of everyone's circumstances when Mithras was first formed? How exactly did you know Rayner and how did you guys discover whatever common interests caused the formation of Mithras?
3. What do you guys currently do for fun? What hobbies, sports, games, etc do you partake in regularly beyond music?
4. Is there any way to get any of the old Imperator or early Mithras demos? I know you mentioned something on this forum, but that was around 3 years ago.
5. In this photo http://www.mithras.org.uk/Images/archiv ... 000.04.jpg , you were one hell of a cute kid, did the 15-18 year old Leon pretty much have an entourage of young girls following him at all times?

Thanks in advance.

Hi there!

1) I started playing guitar in 1996, I was self taught / taught by someone who could play a bit and then we learnt together for a while. I had a few more formal lessons but just to teach me some very basic music theory.

I often tuned down to A# and we used two tunings in Imperator / Mithras so it was natural to progress to a seven-string which I did in 2000 if I remember correctly.

2) Rayner and myself knew each other since we were children, and played in a band previous to Mithras, which wasn't as extreme (death/thrash basically) so we knew each other really well as musicians and friends already. We formed Mithras in 1998 with the aim of doing a much more musically extreme and adventurous band as we were quite "different" to other people at that time. Rayner also wanted to play bass as well as sing (he only sang in our previous band).

3) For fun we rehearse, haha. Sports wise we both do heavy weightlifting in our gym a few times a week, Rayner wrestles as part of a wrestling federation now and again and we're both currently engaged with various building and decorating tasks for "fun".

4) Not at the moment. As I've said before we only did extremely limited releases of these cds, however should the demand be great enough we might rerelease both of them on a "proper" cd at some point.

5) Haha, I was actually 20 in that picture, are you sure you aren't confusing me with Steve (ex guitarist)