Anneke van Giersbergen says the Mandylion reunion could have been awkward, and that the band will stop to keep it special.
Anneke van Giersbergen had not stood in a rehearsal room with these five men for twenty years. She admits nobody knew whether it would work.
The Gathering‘s original Mandylion lineup is most of the way through a run of shows marking the album’s 30th anniversary, and the singer told Paolo Phoenix of “Magenta TV” at Wacken Open Air that the reunion was less of a certainty than it now looks.
“It’s quite special, because when we were young, we were young adults, and whatever you do then, you pick up like a sponge, and you take with you for the rest of your life. And we were always together in the studio, rehearsal room, on tour — day and night, we were together for so many years. So, obviously, then we were apart for 20 years, but when we got back together in a rehearsal room for this, it felt like yesterday. So it’s so weird that you can feel the same feeling, and the jokes are the same… So we feel the same way. They feel like brothers to me. So it was very nice. On the other hand, you’re more adult. Most of us have a family, and we lived life, and we’re a little bit wiser, a little bit older. And so we also take that feeling into the rehearsal room and on stage with us, and it’s quite special. But we didn’t know. We didn’t know how it would feel. But [it] could [have been] awkward as well. So you have this idea, ‘Let’s do this reunion,’ but then you come together, and it’s awkward. I mean, that was a possibility. But it wasn’t. So it’s quite nice,” Van Giersbergen said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Singing thirty-year-old lyrics has been its own adjustment: “I guess, yeah. I don’t know. When you’re young, you have different emotions about subjects like love, and so when we play these songs now, sometimes you get thrown back into the same emotions that you had 20, 30 years ago. But they’re not the same. You have different view of life — a little bit — when you’re older. So I guess it’s a two-part [thing]. You feel these same feelings and emotion when you sing these lyrics. On the other hand, you’re kind of an adult and look at some things differently, which is nice, ’cause you can revisit these days.”
The scale of the thing surprised them. What was pitched as a single concert has turned into roughly thirty, and Van Giersbergen says that is exactly why it has to end.
“I don’t know. We liked it to be special, right?” she recalled. “If we would go on and on and on now, it wouldn’t be special anymore, and it wouldn’t have the impact that it has now. And on the other hand, to be perfectly honest, we didn’t expect people to be so enthusiastic about us coming together again and celebrate this album. So we went from, ‘Hey, let’s do one show,’ to, ‘Hey, let’s do a whole year of all the big festivals and clubs.’ So it’s super special, and we wanna keep it that way. So we have no plans for the future.”
Asked what she wants audiences to take away, her answer was about the decade the record came from: “Well, I like this question. We are enjoying so much playing these old songs. We’re getting into these emotions and to the feeling and the vibe of the ’90s, and I know a lot of people in the audience do, too. So this nostalgic feeling is very strong. And I hope people go away with, like, ‘I felt 20 years old again,’ and that was a great era, the ’90s. So I hope people will get this feeling again and they walk away with that.”
The reunion began over lunch. Guitarist René Rutten has said the band was presented with a gold disc for Mandylion in the Netherlands two years ago, and that he raised the idea of marking the album’s thirtieth birthday during the meal afterwards.
Two shows were announced in December 2024. Demand pushed that to five sold-out nights at Doornroosje in Nijmegen between August 27 and 31 last year, preceded by a try-out concert at Dynamo in Eindhoven on June 29, a venue chosen because Dynamo Open Air in 1996 was the band’s first major festival appearance after Mandylion came out.
The 2026 leg opened on May 19 at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire in London and runs through Europe, North America and South America. The South American closer is a headline show at Movistar Arena in Santiago on October 17, but the tour itself finishes on Saturday, January 16, 2027 at AFAS Live in Amsterdam, where the band will play material from Nighttime Birds alongside Mandylion, describing the two albums as inseparable.
Alongside Van Giersbergen, the lineup is drummer Hans Rutten, guitarists René Rutten and Jelmer Wiersma, bassist Hugo Prinsen Geerligs and keyboardist Frank Boeijen.
Mandylion was The Gathering‘s third album, released in August 1995 through Century Media Records, and the first to feature Van Giersbergen. She left the band in 2007 after 13 years and has since worked under her own name, as Agua De Annique, and with Devin Townsend and Ayreon among others. Her own band’s autumn tour begins in November.
Silje Wergeland, who fronted The Gathering from early 2009, announced her departure in December 2025, saying that after 16 years of making music with the band it was time to move on. She previously sang with the Norwegian group Octavia Sperati.
