Anneke van Giersbergen says The Gathering planned two Mandylion reunion shows and sold out five in 20 minutes.
Anneke van Giersbergen has described how a coffee between old bandmates turned into a world tour. Speaking to Michał Choiński of Poland’s Mystic Festival, the singer said The Gathering originally intended to mark the 30th anniversary of Mandylion with a couple of hometown concerts, and were caught out when the entire run vanished in a matter of minutes.
Van Giersbergen said the reunion started as nothing more than a get-together, and that the scale of the response was outside anything the band had planned for.
“Well, actually, and it’s not a humble brag, not at all, but we didn’t expect this to happen because when we were going out for coffee and we said, ‘Okay.’ So, it was just nice to have coffee, to be together and to say hi. And so we said, ‘Okay, so Mandylion is 30 years old, and we got a gold album.’ And we thought maybe it’s nice to celebrate. And we knew that people were listening still to Mandylion and to The Gathering. And then we said, ‘Okay, so when we do it, we have to do it right. We’re going for, like, maybe two shows in Holland.’ Two shows. Like, we do one big show and maybe two. And it’s not bragging at all because we were so surprised that when those two shows came into pre-sales, they were gone within one minute. We got super-angry texts and mails by everybody, like, ‘It’s already sold out.’ So the guy from the venue, he said… And the server went out, the whole thing. And then the guy said, ‘Okay. Well, we also have the Wednesday.’ Okay, so we do the Wednesday. Gone. ‘Okay. We also have the Sunday.’ So, gone. So in, like, 20 minutes, five sold-out shows. And we were, like, ‘F**king hell.’ And then we said, ‘Okay, well, we keep it like this because now it’s really special.’ And then Wacken Open Air and everybody jumped on it [with offers of more gigs]. And then we said, ‘Okay.’ So after these shows we said, ‘Okay, we do one year of cool festivals and nice club shows. And then we end it. And we celebrate for a year.’ And honestly, it was such a beautiful thing that everybody was jumping on it and celebrating with us. Yeah, it’s great. We didn’t expect it. We hoped it, but we didn’t expect it,” she said (via Blabbermouth).
Those five nights ran consecutively at Doornroosje in the band’s home city of Nijmegen between 27 and 31 August 2025.
Van Giersbergen was asked whether the nostalgia attached to the shows sits comfortably with her. She said the pull is generational rather than sentimental, and put it down to how music lodges in people at a certain age.
“Oh, it’s very positive,” she explained. “And I think the nostalgia comes from it being 30 years old. So anything 30 years old which you locked in your heart in those days is… I see people, ‘Yes, yes.’ I have it, too. I grew up in the ’80s. I was born in ’73. So growing up in the ’80s and then being a young adult in the ’90s, whatever you hear and whatever you go through, and then the music that you listen to is locked in your heart forever. So I listen to those records also — records of Pink Floyd or, yeah, lots of music. And it takes me back to those days. And that’s another thing — the fact that Mandylion made such an impact in those days, and that people still listen to it, and still listen to metal music and metal from nowadays as well is amazing, amazing. So it’s super positive. And we feel it, too, we, with the band.”
She added that the absence of any commercial obligation has changed how the shows feel.
“I sang with The Gathering 10 years ago for this one reunion, then 10 years before that. So it was kind of 20 years ago that we really, really played a lot together, and it feels so good,” Van Giersbergen continued. “And the thing is there’s no pressure anymore because there’s no record company saying you have to make another album, blah, blah, blah. So this is only celebrating the songs of Mandylion, and everything else is the same. The jokes are the same in the dressing room, and the way the guys play their instruments, the same. It’s the same vibe, and it’s so nice. It’s so nice.”
Asked what happens after the anniversary run, Van Giersbergen was unambiguous, and drew a line between her own plans and the band’s.
“With The Gathering, we don’t have plans. So we really, really… unlike the promise, we do only two shows. This is a promise. We do this one year of Mandylion shows. We end it in a wonderful way. And for the rest, we have no plans together. And The Gathering, you should ask them. I don’t know their future. But for this, the Mandylion shows, this is one year of celebration, and then it stops. Because then also it remains special. So that’s the plan,” she said.
Her point about not knowing the band’s future carries some weight. Silje Wergeland, who had fronted The Gathering since early 2009, announced in December 2025 that she was leaving after 16 years.
Van Giersbergen spent 13 years in The Gathering before departing in 2007. Asked what she had to unlearn to build a solo career, she said the problem was not technique but expectation.
“I don’t think I had to unlearn anything, but I had to start again at a certain level, because a lot of people thought that I would then just go on the same level and I would go do the same thing,” she replied. “But I didn’t, of course. There was a lot of people who, they weren’t happy that I left, but I wanted to do so much more creatively and make a solo album. I had a family, a young family. My kid was two years old then. I wanted to have more integrated music, family and our life together. So all these things led up to this point that I thought, like, ‘Maybe it’s nice. Maybe it’s good for me to, to step out, to spread my wings, and to go out on my own.’ And then, yeah, I had this total creative freedom, so I did a lot of different things immediately. But I had to start somewhere. There was less people coming to the shows, less people buying my albums, so I had to really work hard to get to a certain level again, which was fine. I like working hard.”
On whether the split left lasting damage, she was direct about the fallout and about what repaired it.
“When I left the band, they weren’t happy. That’s for sure. Of course. And I knew — I thought about it for a long time — because I knew when I would do this, I would put everybody on his head, and that would change a lot. And I know that they didn’t want that. So, obviously, yeah, they weren’t happy. And so we lost contact for a little while, for sure. But, luckily, time passes and they found their way. I found my way. And we have so much mutual respect for each other and for each other’s music and for each other’s path. So, luckily, time heals a lot of wounds.
She described what the band had been before the split, and why walking away was harder than it looked from outside.
“In those days, we were always together,” Van Giersbergen concluded. “It’s the only thing that we ever did in our lives was The Gathering. We were five, six, seven days a week, we were together. There was nothing else. We didn’t have kids, a mortgage. We didn’t have anything else than this band. So to quit that, to stop it and to put everybody in a weird position and in uncertainty, that was a big step to take. I think it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because I knew I would lose my friends as well, at least for a while. So I’m super happy that we can do this. I mean, who would have thought 20 years ago [that this would happen]?”
The 2026 leg opened on 19 May at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London and covers roughly 30 dates across Europe, North America and South America. The last of those is a headline show on 17 October at Movistar Arena in Santiago, Chile.
The band confirmed in June that the Mandylion lineup will play one further concert on Saturday 16 January 2027 at AFAS Live in Amsterdam, closing the tour after 29 shows worldwide. That night will take in a second album as well, as the band explained in a statement: Nighttime Birds, the 1997 follow-up, reaches its own 30th anniversary in 2027, and The Gathering described the two records as linked and representing a single chapter in the band’s development.
The touring lineup is Van Giersbergen with drummer Hans Rutten, guitarists René Rutten and Jelmer Wiersma, and bassist Hugo Prinsen Geerligs. Keyboard player Frank Boeijen has stepped back from the road for what the band called personal circumstances, with Remco van Zandvoort, who covered for him in 2022, taking his place.
Mandylion came out in August 1995 through Century Media Records. It was The Gathering‘s third album and the first to feature Van Giersbergen, and it moved the band away from death metal vocals towards the atmospheric sound that “Strange Machines” and “Leaves” carried to an international audience. Van Giersbergen takes her own band back out in November for a European run of her own.
