“We steal the fanciest clothes we can find in the clothes-recycling-bin” – interview with Gatto Panceri 666 of Nanowar of Steel

It’s our time to make you smile and Nanowar of Steel is exactly what we all need at the end of this chaotic year! If you haven’t heard about them, here’s a brief summary of the band: they are the kings of masterful heavy metal parodies! On December 4th they released their album Stairway To Valhalla on vinyl for the first time – we had an extremely fun chat with the band’s bassist, Gatto Panceri 666, and not just about the new vinyl. An old joke still deserves a song, so have fun!

About Stairway To Valhalla vinyl:

Hi human being, there is a very simple explanation for why this is an important release. An ancient prophecy of which bands such as Blind Guardian and Rhapsody of Fire have talked about extensively in their publications says that if you don’t buy the reissue of Stairway to Valhalla before Christmas there will be 666 waves of COVID-19. So as you see, the future of humanity is at stake.

About the next album:

Yes we are working on our new album and I can already tell you that it will disappoint most of our fanbase, because we’re sick and tired of making people smile. Regarding the time, I can give you a general answer, that is, it will be out for t > 0, though if you take the implications of special relativity about the absence of simultaneity, you might as well think that for some observer outside of our light cone this album is already out. It’s a matter of systems of reference, you see.

We have a goalkeeper, our drummer, a defender (in all senses) which is me, Gatto, Midfielder Mohammed Abdul and then the two strikers – Mr. Baffo and Potowotominimak. It’s the ancient formation of Mr. Trappattoni.
About the teamwork

About their appearance:

We steal the fanciest clothes we can find in the clothes-recycling-bin and then we filp head or tail in order to decide who wears what. It’s a lot of fun, unknown diseases and plus it gives us a fresh breeze of unknowness.

About the inspiration:

Literally anything. Body parts, relativistic quantum field theory, Manowar, the grave of Arkan in Novo Groblje in Beograd, people fucking in the background in a cheap hostel in Melbourne. That’s the beauty of being a Nanowarrior, the sky is the limit. Actually no – the sky is not the limit, we’ve shown that in our video for the song in the sky.

Q: I’ve read an interview with you Gatto, where you mentioned that doing comedy is way harder compared to writing on other themes. What do you do when you stuck during the songwriting process and how do you get over with? Where do you find inspiration?

Gatto: Sorry it will be again me answering this question. As I told you – we get inspiration from literally anything. So when we get stuck we try to raise the stakes and put some even more absurd or inappropriate element in the song to see if it tickles our fantasy enough to move on.

Q: Which was the hardest song to write and why?

Gatto: I would like to say in the sky but no, as far as I remember I would say Norwegian Reggaeton. Seriously, we changed the title/theme of the original song (which I won’t mention here) several times, and then we worked maybe 3 or 4 months on the text, meeting almost every week, to make every single piece fit into the puzzle. I would say it worked but it really was a lot of effort! Btw sorry for the serious reply, I’ll make sure this won’t happen anymore.

Q: How much did COVID-19 affect you and how did you keep your positivity? What advice would you give the people on how to maintain their positivity during these trying times?

Gatto: Me and Mohammed Abdul (the guitar player) have profited a lot from the situation. I finally had the time to develope my Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence skills by completing a bunch of courses on Udemy and Coursera. I learned a lot about convolutional neural networks and deep learning on PyTorch and TensorFlow, while sharpening my pandas/scikit-learn/scipy knowledge. Now, thanks to that I got a very comfortable remote job designing an AI pipeline for astrophysical data processing. Abdul was working home office in his brand new comfortable apartment so he was really enjoying himself all the time. We recorded an album, shot a bunch of videos, plus since during the lockdown times I had some time to spend on social media I enjoyed long small talks with some groupies with whom I had interesting intercourses once the floodgates were opened again. All in all, we’ve been doing great! Thanks COVID-19!

Q: Please share a fun fact about the band!

Gatto: We’re a serious band, we don’t do funny stuff, sorry. Oh wait (I apologize in advance for the serious answer once again) – during our last tour, which ended right before the pandemic, in March 2020, we went around IKEAs in Italy, France and Spain organizing a so called “eat and greet” – we’d meet our fans in IKEA’s cafeterias to have lunch together, and then walk around IKEA praising the furniture which we mention in Valhalleluja, singing around the KIVIK, KNOPPARP, VITTSJO and so on. In some cases we also organized a treasure hunt, hiding posters, CDs, T-Shirts inside IKEA’s beds, shelves and closets and asking our fans to find them. We ended up having problems with the security but overall it was a lot of fun! There’s a short documentary about that on YouTube.