Robin Staps was just a child the first time the ocean tried to kill him. “I was out swimming off the coast of Spain with my dad and I swam into a school of jellyfish,” the German guitarist remembers, reckoning he was only eight or nine years old. “I started panicking and hyperventilating, and I eventually ended up underwater. My dad pulled me up and dragged me out. I had stings all over my body.”
For most people, a near-death experience like that would instil a fear of the sea for life. Robin, however, grew obsessed with the big blue and everything in it. In 2000, the guitarist founded a band called The Ocean, who are currently one of the biggest progressive metal acts in Germany. He has tattoos of marine life, including multiple jellyfish, up both of his arms. Plus, in 2009, he started his own progressive music record label called Pelagic Records (‘pelagic’ being an adjective for anything to do with the open ocean).
