In May of this year Swedish metal band Avatar released their fifth full album “Hail The Apocalypse”. In summer they did not go unnoticed on Alcatraz Metal Fest and their European tour brought them back to Kortrijk, this time to “De Kreun”, where they were headlining the event. FrontView Magazine was there too and had a chat with frontman Johannes Eckerström!
FVM: Hello Johannes, welcome to Belgium! How are you doing? Johannes Eckerström: Fine thank you.
FVM: Tonight will be the second time that I’ll see you. I saw you for the first time at Alcatraz Metal Fest... Johannes: Oh yeah yeah, that was fun! FVM: ... , that was very impressive! Johannes: Thank you (smiling)
FVM: Was this year the first year you were in Belgium or were you here before? Johannes: No, we have been here a couple of times through the years, opening for other bands and a mini thing... a mini festival, whatever they call it, in... I don’t remember the town actually, but I think this might be our fifth show here.
FVM: What do you think about Belgium? Johannes: I really like it! I have some nice concert memories here and also some crazy ones... (laughing) we’ve played in a ... like a weird, what was it... in a hostel/recordshop/hotel/venue everything at once, it kind of felt like the ‘Fawlty Towers’, you know that one?... in Antwerpen. It was just one of those bizarre places and I was partying harder back then and so it’s a real mess you get with those memories.(laughing) It was quiet special. I think we’ve have done, as an opening band, some of our early bigger show, so to speak, up here. I have a good relationship with it, really like the beer!
FVM: You’ve released “ Hail The Apocalypse” in May this year, you’re now almost finished with this tour. How were the reactions of the audience? Johannes: It has been great! I think we have been growing exponentially. It has been a very successful year for Avatar. Basically if you just start counting from one year ago around this time, we came home from a tour with Avenged Sevenfold and Five Finger Dead Punch in Europe and since then it has been really crazy with multiple European tours and multiple American tours, we had a decent festival summer and the album came out and hit the billboard top 100 over there and it has been doing well in big parts of Europe as well so it really feels... feels very real what is happening now, it’s really nice.
FVM: Did anything special happen during the tour this year?Johannes: Well, I moved to Helsinki in my private live that was very special (smiles) I left Sweden. Well, many special things off course. When you get to do when you do... when you play early on a festival in an area you’ve never been to before and you kind of get to steal the show honestly and we did that a couple of times in the States, well those good fine memories, when people underestimated us... we always like to be underestimated and then proof people wrong. FVM: That is good! Better that way then the opposite! Johannes: Yeah, absolute... definitely!
FVM: When you make a new album, you say you always want to do something different, not just make a copy of the last one. Isn’t it difficult to always doing something else? Johannes: Yes, but it’s supposed to be hard, you know, because it’s supposed to be better every time. You’re supposed to reach a new level of greatness every time. It’s what I think. It’s one job that an artist has to do in order to have the right to call yourself an artist, is to improve, to challenge yourself and move on and push the boundaries. One way for us to do that is just simple not treat what we are doing as a formula.
FVM: Is it also a kind of growing up? ‘cause you guys started when you were just teenagers? Johannes: Yeah definitely! Absolutely! I think that’s valid for everyone doing music. It’s hard to pretend that you have the same view on the world and music as you did when you were 17 years old. It will move and evolve and it also goes a bit back and forward what you’re exited about at that current time in your life, you know. And we’re just now so much at “we are going to do metal and we make the best out of it we can”, but everything else there’s no real rules to it because, like you say, we are changing and the music has to change with us. I would feel like a poster otherwise. (smiling)
FVM: Now you are here, without the make-up. What’s the story behind ‘the Clown’-look? Johannes: It happened very organically. We finished up the album “Black Waltz” and we knew we wanted to take it one more step, and started to look at the whole Avater thing as an art, not just the songs, not just do songs and put on a leather jacket and say “yeah, f*ck” and that’s it. We wanted to do more with it and in this process exploring the visual sides of it, we met up with this guy, Bryce Graves, he had a sideshow group called “Hellzapoppin” and knew how to drill himself in the nose and do all those thing for the ‘Black Waltz’ music video. So we did a music video with him and a couple of others, and we needed me to fit in. In, you know, while singing the song in that circus, we taught “How can we make it?” and it was an happy accident, you know, a scared clown is good and it just fits, it felt right. It clicked with all of us. And that was basically it, we’ve felt we found the face of the music there and we’ve been building from that ever since. FVM: And is it something that will stay or can it make an evolution as well? Johannes: It can! We don’t know, that’s the wonderful thing and I love that. I don’t know, it stays on today, probably tomorrow, and likely also next year, but we’ll see. We always take the band where the band needs to go. Because anyway it’s a very honest thing and once it starts to feel dishonest and becomes a farce then it stops being interesting to us. But it still feels honest and genuine, so we’ll stick with it. FVM: That’s a healthy way of thinking! Johannes: Yeah, that’s what we discovered is the best carrier choice we made, is realizing that we need to be honest, you know, you cannot “fake it ‘till you make it” kind of thing, that doesn’t really work with music, because you don’t write your best music when you are trying to be somebody else. It has to come from the heart.
FVM: That brings us to the ‘show’ part. I’ve read that John (drummer) also designs the lighting for the shows himself. Johannes: Yeah, and now on this tour we’re working with an old friend of ours, Jimmy, who is our light tech on this tour, but it was nice for John to have a partner in crime there. Some stuff is pretty programmed that has John’s design, and they’ve developed it together. But that’s just how we put in the team of the band, you know, we put in our weight, all of us, in different aspects of it. If I’m more into doing the music and lyrics, say this part of it, there’s somebody who picks up another end of it and so you see it’s true, but it’s a whole idea, we always want to be the ones, as a group, in control of what we are doing and how we are being portrayed and what we are talking about basically. It’s all part of that.
FVM: Your music is now a mix of a lots of styles together, hard rock, heavy metal, even rock ‘n’roll. Who are your inspirations? Who did you looked up to before you started performing yourself? Johannes: Well, in my case the journey would be first Beethoven, then The Beatles, then Hulk Hogan, then Michael Jackson, then Black Sabbath, Blind Guardian and then boom! You know... (laughing) And it’s still quiet defining, the first thing I wanted to become as a kid was a ... I think I wanted to work in a pizzeria when I was 4, but shortly after that a wanted to be a conductor, you know, standing in front of an orchestra, that was cool! FVM: That’s the Beethoven thing?! Johannes: Yeah, exactly! (smiling) I wanted to be that. And then with Hulk Hogan (laughing), the pro-wrestler, and Michael Jackson, I discovered this whole audience going ‘Whauw’ thing and with The Beatles it was still play guitar, write your songs, rock’n’roll and all of that, and Black Sabbath, the old school stuff, hard rock stuff and then stuff like Blind Guardian is what made me stop cutting my hair and those things are just there in what I’m doing.
FVM: Are there other bands now you like to go and see now? Johannes: Yeah, I just saw Anathema, before going on this tour, with my girlfriend and it was amazing. I also went to see Casualties Of Cool, one of Devin Townsend projects right before going on the US tour, so a bunch of progressive stuff it seems (smiling,) is what I’ve been doing up right now, but yeah, I’m still a fan. (smiling) FVM: So when you are in the crowd where will you be? First row, in the moshpits or rather in the back? Johannes: It depends, I have drawn myself a bit too much to the back, I feel, but again at Blind Guardian I’ll stand in the front and I ‘fight’ with the kids and at some stuff I’ll step further back, it depends, if I used to stand in the front I’ll try to steal a stand in the front when I go and see them and if it’s new stuff I watch in the back and I’m more of an adult. (smiling) FVM: Has that changed since you are on stage yourself? How you look to the audience and so? Johannes: Yeah, in worst cases it has, but in the best cases and when the band I’m watching is really good, it doesn’t change, you go there to enjoy and take it for what it is. If they not so good and me being in the audience, I turn more pretentious, I guess, and then you start to feel as you are working with it yourself, but I try to turn that off as much as I can. (smiling)
FVM: So now your tour is almost over. You’ll probably go home for the holidays I presume. What are the plans for 2015? Johannes: We are looking into more touring. Definitely we’ll start writing, we already have started writing, but you know, the next step in what we’re doing. We have got some good festivals coming up, including Wacken and a couple of others... We’ll do some more shows, make a new album and probably make another music video, because we want it. We like making those. FVM: You like making music videos? Johannes: Yes, since we took control over it and we start to really treat also that as art, like I was talking about before... since then I started to enjoy it so much. FVM: Maybe another idea for the Clown then...? Johannes: Yeah, Yeah exactly! It’s part of a challenge actually, because it was fun, the Clown was very useful in the beginning ‘cause people weren’t prepared for it. It kind of scared some, but now people expect him to be there, so then you... like I said, we always try to challenge ourselves. FVM: Yes, ‘cause now people think “Oh Avatar, that’s the one with the Clown!” Johannes: Exactly, which off course is cool and great, which means that we’ve succeeded in something. But we always want to surprise ourselves and the people watching and listening, so it’s a bit tricky sometimes.
FVM: I have just one last question. You are from Sweden, there are so many famous bands in all kinds of styles. (ABBA, Roxete, Europe, Sabaton, Ghost, Arch Enemy and so many more) What is the Swedish secret for success? Johannes: Well, a couple of things. One thing is that it’s very easy to get the chance to start playing an instrument in Sweden as a kid, you know, all afterschool activities and all that. For the first year if you get to go to a music school, first year you get the instrument for free and it’s pretty cheap as well afterwards, anyway for kids to play, so it’s an opportunity that many, many kids get. And also, it’s kind of encouraged because of those past successes. In Sweden it’s not so often that the parents are like “Oh you want to be Rock ’n’ roll, then you’re not my son anymore, you’re supposed to be a doctor!”. We’re not like that, you know, so culturally, the state gives you a chance, your parents kind of give you the chance, there is somewhere to play. People, you know the grown-ups think that it’s a cool thing for kids to do, to have a project to do together and they appreciate that because Swedes are enthusiastic in music in general like that, so many dad’s want their sons and daughters to grow up and to be the next Van Halen, they don’t mind that at all! So it’s encouraged in many levels and people don’t see it as wasted years at all. It’s a combination of things, it’s not a big risk to go into music. If you want to get out and do something else and become a doctor, you still got that chance.
FVM: What would you be if you weren’t a musician? Johannes: I always think, nowadays, that I would be a children’s psychologist. FVM: a children’s psychologist? Johannes: Yeah, I think psychology is intriguing, children are interesting. It all could make a difference in many ways, a more real way then you do as a musician. It’s just something I can see myself do more than once a week, you know, that I would be interested to do.
FVM: So that we’re my questions, is there anything else you like to share? Johannes: No, I think you did well! (smiling) FVM: Thank you very much and good luck with the show! Johannes: Thank you!
