Discovering Coheed And Cambria is like discovering Star Wars, says Claudio Sanchez

Coheed And Cambria leader Claudio Sanchez was delighted when a colleague compared the band’s long-running sci-fi concept to Star Wars.

Just like the Skywalker family saga in George Lucas’ vast movie universe, Coheed And Cambria’s Amory Wars storyline has run through everything they do, including latest album Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind.

Sanchez told Guitar World he’d had a “great conversation” with a PR executive, who said: “What does a new Coheed fan look like coming into this, 20 years into our career? It must be something not unlike Star Wars. You’re young, you get into The Force Awakens – only to find out that there's this whole mythos for you to go back and [explore].”

He continued: “I was excited when somebody said that to me, because they got it – for a long time nobody got it. This isn’t just about music; this is about a culture that this band has been trying to develop since 2002, but it was just a hard thing for people to swallow.”

In Vaxis II, criminals Nea and Nostrand escape a prison planet with their newborn child Vaxis. Sanchez eplained: “Their son doesn’t interact with the plane of existence that they’re on, so they think a pharmaceutical could help cure him, but what they don’t understand is that he is actually a highly evolved version of the human species.”

But he argued that listeners didn’t need to follow the storyline: “There’s something that people can latch onto, personally, as opposed to being force-fed this strict concept.”

He added that there was a comparison between his original creations and the band he named after them. “Though it’s very much about our main characters, it’s [also] about Coheed And Cambria. We’ve always been, in my mind, the underdog – the outcast of the scenes that we came up in.

“Standing in front of our audience, no, I don’t feel that way, but sometimes in the periphery there are little things that still ground you – there’s still room to feel that way.”

Vaxis II is released on June 24. The band tour the UK and Europe later this year.

Not only is one-time online news editor Martin an established rock journalist and drummer, but he’s also penned several books on music history, including SAHB Story: The Tale of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, a band he once managed, and the best-selling Apollo Memories about the history of the legendary and infamous Glasgow Apollo. Martin has written for Classic Rock and Prog and at one time had written more articles for Louder than anyone else (we think he's second now). He’s appeared on TV and when not delving intro all things music, can be found travelling along the UK’s vast canal network.