The Devil’s Door — The Story Behind the Song and Video
There are some events that stay in your mind long after you have watched them.
For me, the opening ceremony of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland in 2016 was one of them.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel is an extraordinary piece of engineering. At around 57 kilometres, it was officially opened as the world’s longest railway tunnel, connecting northern and southern Europe beneath the Swiss Alps. The official ceremony on 1 June 2016 brought together political leaders, dignitaries, engineers, workers and performers for a huge theatrical production.
But it wasn’t the engineering that caught my attention.
It was the ceremony itself.
The video
The video accompanying my song uses footage and imagery inspired by that opening ceremony.
You see workers in orange marching through the darkness of the tunnel. You see strange theatrical characters, elaborate costumes, symbolic imagery, movement, fire, machinery and scenes designed to create a feeling of something much bigger than a normal railway opening.
The production was created by Swiss theatre director Volker Hesse, and it was deliberately theatrical and symbolic. Hesse himself described the production as having a darker side, saying that alongside the celebration of progress he wanted to convey that progress could also have an unsettling or frightening side.
That idea is important to understanding my song.
I’m not claiming that the ceremony was literally a Satanic ritual.
I’m looking at what was presented on stage and asking a simple question:
What does it mean?
Why “The Devil’s Door”?
The title comes from the imagery.
A tunnel is already a powerful symbol. You enter darkness, disappear underground, travel through something you cannot see through, and eventually emerge somewhere completely different.
Then add the imagery used during the ceremony — demons, strange creatures, death and rebirth, workers marching through darkness, theatrical rituals and a huge sense of transformation.
To me, it created the image of a door into the unknown.
So I turned that feeling into a song.
“They open the devil’s door…”
That line isn’t meant to be a scientific statement.
It is a musical question.
Are we watching a celebration of human engineering — or something more symbolic?
The song
I wanted the music to feel uncomfortable.
Not heavy metal. Not theatrical rock.
Something darker and more restrained.
A slow, eerie rhythm. A marching feeling. Deep bass. Synths and piano sitting underneath the vocal. Plenty of space and big tape echo, allowing certain lines to hang in the air.
The vocal is deliberately delivered almost like someone telling a story rather than screaming at the listener.
The result is meant to make you think rather than simply react.
The chorus is the heart of the song:
The Rola Colas are concerned,
Most of you are not able,
They open the devil’s door,
You sleep in the corporate cradle.
That is deliberately provocative.
The phrase “corporate cradle” is about passive acceptance — being surrounded by television, advertising, corporations, politics and entertainment while rarely stopping to question what we are actually being shown.
Why I wrote it
I didn’t write this song because I wanted to attack the people who built the tunnel.
Quite the opposite.
The engineering achievement itself is remarkable.
I wrote it because the contrast fascinated me.
On one side, you have human beings achieving something incredible through engineering, science, mathematics and years of hard work.
On the other, you have an opening spectacle filled with imagery that many people found disturbing, bizarre or difficult to understand.
That contrast created a story.
And that’s what I wanted to capture.
The song is my interpretation of what I saw and how it made me feel.
It isn’t intended to tell people what they must believe.
It is intended to make people look again.
Progress, symbolism and questions
One of the most interesting things about the Gotthard ceremony is that even contemporary coverage recognised that it was deliberately strange and symbolic. International media described the production as an eclectic and unusual performance, while Swiss coverage emphasised the tension between celebration and the darker side of progress.
That is where I think music can do something that a news report can’t.
A news report tells you what happened.
A song can ask you how it felt.
And sometimes the questions are more interesting than the answers.
The Rola Colas approach
This is what I like about The Rola Colas project.
The songs don’t all have to be straightforward love songs or traditional rock stories.
They can be observations.
They can be uncomfortable.
They can take something that happened in the real world and turn it into a piece of music that makes people stop scrolling for a few minutes and actually think about what they’re watching.
“The Devil’s Door” is one of those songs.
Whether you see the Gotthard ceremony as avant-garde theatre, symbolism, artistic provocation, a celebration of human achievement, something darker — or simply a very strange opening ceremony — is ultimately up to you.
I don’t claim to have the final answer.
I wrote the song because I had questions.
And sometimes, that’s exactly why a song needs to be written.
The Rola Colas
Songwriting, observation and music from the other side of the ordinary.