Ayreon

Best known for his musical project Ayreon, Arjen Anthony Lucassen was born on April 3rd, 1960 in The Hague. Both Arjen and his older brother Gjalt were good students, but unlike Gjalt, Arjen wasn’t interested much in studying. A notorious trouble-maker in class, Arjen decided to pursue a career in the music business after graduating high school. During his teens, Gjalt always teased Arjen a lot, and Arjen has been taking his revenge by playing jokes on his brother in the credits of his Ayreon CDs. If you look carefully, you’ll find a Gjalt ‘joke’ in the booklet of every CD released after 1995.

Arjen’s love of music was sparked in the 60s, when he became a big fan of the Beatles. He started buying albums in the early seventies when the glam rock era started and bands such as T-Rex, Alice Cooper, The Sweet, David Bowie were rising stars. Arjen really wanted to be in a band but he was too lazy to learn to play an instrument so he started a play-back band mimicking his heroes Alice Cooper, Slade, and The Sweet. He actually did get a lot of gigs in schools and already then he was a busy guy.

Then one day one of the older pupils approached Arjen saying “You have to listen to this,” and handed him a copy of Deep Purple’s ‘Made in Japan’. “Glam rock is OK, but this is really great.” When Arjen listened to it and heard Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar playing, he knew what he wanted: to play guitar! So he learned to play guitar and went through a stage where he had a lot of different bands until 1980. One of these bands was called ‘Mover’.