The mere mention of the word Opeth is often enough to attract the attention of most heavy music listeners. Those two syllables command a level of respect, and regard. Despite what you may think of them, it’s undeniable that, right now, the Swedish ensemble are right at the top of the metal heap. You go to a show and you’re guaranteed to find a sizeable slice of the audience wearing their Opeth shirts with pride, that big elaborate ‘O’ worn like a badge of honour.
So, now with the ambitious and luscious Damnation album out in the world, Opeth have found themselves in an enviable position. They’re arguably the first band from an extreme metal background to start breaking into some serious big time sales-figures territory – but don’t go thinking it’s all champagne and cocaine just yet. They still do what they gotta do, and so it’s with a dutiful sense of responsibility and obligation that guitarist Peter Lindgren picks up the phone and dials from his home in Stockholm, Sweden.
“Actually, we have two days of interviews, and me and Mike [Akerfeldt, Opeth frontman] split them up," says the affable axe-man, a touch of weariness from yakking on the phone all day faintly noticeable in his voice. “He did his day yesterday, so it could be worse!” he laughs.
Even with Damnation appearing last year, the band are doing a fresh round of interviews for their upcoming tour of Australia. Originally slated for December last year, the dates were pushed back to this March, and anticipation, naturally, skyrocketed as a result.
“The set now is gonna be different to the one we did last year," says Lindgren, referring to last April’s Deliverance tour. “If we do tours in the same country twice, or more than twice, we change the set. Like if we go to Sydney twice, for example, and there’s a year in between, like now for example, then we change the set, because there’s a lot of people who are gonna go to both shows, and we want to give them something else."
“There’re a few songs that people always request though, and we need to do them live. [One is] ‘Demon Of The Fall’, which is the song that we always close the set with, and ‘The Drapery Falls’ is one that we always do live as well, from Blackwater Park.”
Opeth have also just released their first live DVD as well, an impressive collection that features two separate sets by the band. One contains only their softer works, while the other is the heavier Opeth we all know and love. Fans expecting to see this sort of performance though will be a little disappointed.
“We actually haven’t done that many double sets [live]. We did tours for Deliverance first, and then we did a tour in the United States and one in Europe for Damnation… We only did [the double set] for the DVD and we rehearsed it twice in Sweden, so we only did three. In general though, from now on, it’s a long set that we’re gonna do in Australia, about two hours or something. It’s going to be a bit more than an hour of heavy stuff, and a little less than an hour of mellow stuff.”
Even though the quartet made their name by being so versatile across both very different styles, it’s unsurprising that the singularly mellow Damnation has been opening some previously unknowing eyes to the band. So much so that the album actually pushed its way onto the musical wasteland that is the US Billboard charts.
“Well, we’ve been in this band for such a long time now that major record sales figures, while of course it’s great, we’re not striving for it. It’s way too late for that. We’ve done seven albums. If we wanted to sell more albums, then ten years ago we should’ve done shorter songs!” Lindgren replies with glee. “We did Damnation because we wanted to, because we like that kind of music. We didn’t do it because we wanted to sell a lot of new records."
“Now for us it’s all about integrity. We just want to do whatever we like… But I wouldn’t mind of course selling one million albums!” he says with a hearty laugh.
While healthy sales figures will always put a little light in a musician’s heart, there’s a saying that for every good, there’s a bad. In Opeth’s case, the bad came at the end of last year when they were suddenly thrown against an almost insurmountable brick wall. Their drummer, Martin Lopez, was struck down by an unexpected anxiety attack just as they were about to leave for an overseas show, and he just couldn’t bring himself to leave home. He pulled out of the tour and the band had to either cancel shows or wing it with a stand in. Even though there was one memorable night in Vancouver with the legendary Gene Hoglan sitting behind the drumkit, such a blow is hard for any band to deal with.
“He actually had a new problem before this US tour,” Lindgren says with a note of concern. “The problem is that we’ve been touring too much; he’s just had enough of flying out, airports and all. I know that the problem starts when he’s leaving home and he’s going to the airport. As soon as he’s on tour, it’s fine you know."
“[What happened was] We were flying to Canada, but we were going to Dortmund in Germany first, then Calgary and then Edmonton, and the flight never even reached Dortmund because there was ice on the landing lane or something. So we ended up in another city in Germany. Basically a lot of problems, we had to take a bus, missed a connection flight, had to stay over in a hotel. So when he woke up the day after, he had this attack again. An anxiety attack. So he went back home to see his doctor and got some medication for it, and then he flew out on his own two or three days later. But since then, he did the whole tour and he’s fine."
“It’s not mental,” the guitarist’s sure to add. “He’s got something with his blood. When he’s in a stressful situation… I don’t know what happens, but the blood creates something that makes him panic. I don’t exactly know what it is but he’s got medication for that now.”
The constant pressures of touring and always being away from home were recently exacerbated by some frictions sparking up between the band and their management. “[They’ve] been giving us late information about flights, we turn up at the airport and we realize it’s a fucking shitty grouping, you know. So what we’re gonna do is go to the management, and say we need the plans to be clear and we need proper flights, basically, so we don’t have to have a layover in Hungary for four hours or something, just to save a hundred bucks or whatever.”
With such frustrations putting serious cramps in their style, Opeth still don’t have to look very far though to find something that’ll cheer them up. The overseas show they were heading to when Lopez first came down with his panic attacks was actually in Jordan, a country hardly known for its love of rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, if the show had gone ahead, Opeth would have been the first metal band to ever grace their shores.
There was the sticky requirement though that the band could only perform mellow songs. “There were religious reasons for that. But that’s fine with me. We are a metal band, even though we’re doing mellow songs. The only bands that play there are big names, like Sting or fucking Michael Bolton! And they sold 6000 tickets for the first show that we were going to do. We’ve never played in front of that big a crowd before,” Lindgren enthuses with some regret.
Along with Jordan, the guitarist and his troupe have also been given offers to play in such locations as “Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Dubai to be exact. We’ve been close to going there a few times. And also Israel, which is in the same region, but it needs to be a bit safer before we actually go.”
So despite any problems they might be having, both of the internal and external variety, it’s still a very rosy time for the Opeth boys. Once again, it’s all about taking the good with the bad.
There was however a bit of an occasion of icing-on-the-cake just recently. They were nominated for the Rock/Metal category of this year’s Swedish Grammy Awards, this marking their third consecutive nomination and their first after winning it last year for Deliverance. Lindgren is in two minds about this affair.
“First of all, it’s a bullshit prize,” he’s unafraid to admit. “You can only get nominated if you’re backed up by a record label. We got nominated the first time when Zomba was doing our publishing in Sweden, and I think the albums before that are equally good, it’s just that now we had the big record label nominating us. And it’s not the best band that wins; it’s the band that’s the most hyped."
“But I also think that, for a band like us, we’re not doing so well in Sweden and all of a sudden people know who we are, which is the good side of it. We can do better shows now in Scandinavia because we won the Grammy. So that’s the good thing.”
Finally, there’s one extra upside to winning an award like the Grammy, and it’s all about impressing that toughest of all the tough judges.
“For people who aren’t into music, who don’t know what it means to be on tour, my mum for example, I could tell her, ‘We’ve been on tour for 15 months, we sold out shows in New York’, she’s like, ‘Great’. But now I say ‘We’ve won the Grammy’, and she’s like, ‘That’s fantastic!!’” he says, bursting out with laughter. “She knows what it means. People can grasp it, how well it’s going for us if we say we won the Grammy.”
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