“I said, ‘If nothing has changed, I might quit.’ But it was my baby from the start. I didn’t want to quit it”: How a sick and disillusioned guitarist turned his bitter resignation letter into one of metal’s greatest anthems

Helloween posing for a photograph with a giant pumpkin in 1988.

Helloween guitarist Kai Hansen was in hospital recovering from Hepatitis B when he realised he was going sour on the band he’d founded a few years earlier. It was the end of 1987 and Hansen had gotten sick on the US leg of the German power metal trailblazers’ tour in support of that year’s masterful Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 album.

“A girl,” he says of how he picked up the infection. “One of them. We were young guys, we were running wild, we had opportunities. You have to piss on every tree, right?”