Nach einigen kleinen Startprobleme hatten Bolli und Almaron auf dem diesjährigen Wacken Open Air die Chance, Peter, Mastermind von Hypocrisy, mit einigen Fragen zu löchern.
Deadfall: Thanks for the interview, Peter. Where do you all know each other from?
Peter: Mikael and Andreas used to play a long time ago together and, to make a long story short, I put the band together. We used to have another singer, which Mikael and Andreas were playing with, in another band before. Its just like, we’ve always been in a really close world. We lived in the area and were playing metal, you know. Horgh, of course, comes from Immortal now, and I’ve known him for 5 years or something like that because he played with Pain live with me and so I know how good he is, so I guess that makes a long story short.
Deadfall: Do you have any contact to other Swedish Death-Metal bands?
Peter: Yes of course. You get to know one another especially when you’re on festivals. You meet a lot of people and through the years I think I know a lot of metal bands like Dismember, Entombed, some people from Arch Enemy, Haunted..a lot of people.
Deadfall: Are the contacts really close, did you become friends?
Peter: Ah, yes and no..I mean you meet up on festivals and gigs, there you go crazy and in the end you get as close as you can get with a lot of alcohol in your blood.
Deadfall: How do you actually start writing a song?
Peter: Its all in here first (points at his head), you have an idea how you want a new song to sound or whatever, you start spinning into your head, different kinds of attitude in the album or in the song and then you just let it out and start writing the riffs.
Deadfall: Why did Lars Szöke leave the band?
Peter: He wasn’t really developing anymore, it was just really hard to get him to play different things, like to make him faster or make him play certain parts and stuff like that and in the end we just said ok, fuck it.. me and Szöke have been playing for 20 years now, we just had to either die or change.
Deadfall: What was the main reason for almost breaking up the band after the final chapter?
Peter: A lot of business bullshit with record companies and management and booking agencies and us, and it just got too much and I personally said fuck it, I’ll stay in the studio, record, fuck everything, I don’t anymore really deal with everything anymore. Everything got to a good solution I guess, we just kept on going because everything after that that was like more saying fuck everything and it just got to a better point where we could keep on doing it.
Deadfall: Lets get to your new album The Arrival.. On The Arrival the songwriting was done by all members of the band, are you gonna continue this?
Peter: Yea, teamwork. I think that’s the most important thing, I mean I could write an album by myself, Mikael could write an album by himself but we need input from each other to make Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy. So that’s very important. Mikael has a certain kind of style when he writes music, I have a certain style when I write my music and I think together it becomes Hypocrisy.
Deadfall: Is this gonna affect maybe the lyrical theme of Hypocrisy’s future releases?
Peter: We don’t know yet. I just talked to Horgh about the next album, he was talking about some lyrics he had in his head, and I said, go ahead, write it. When it gets on the table, all of us take care of it and see what’s good and bad and so on. Definitely it's teamwork, yeah.
Deadfall: Do you see any influences of your project Pain on The Arrival?
Peter: I don’t know, like I said, I’m in both Hypocrisy and Pain, so its very hard to turn off, and go
like that way or that way. It's pretty much the same person and it's very hard to not have my stamp on it because I am who I am. I really try to keep it as far away as I can.
Deadfall: You had a great gig with Destruction yesterday, how did it come to this?
Peter: Schmier (Destruction) asked me, if I wanted to do it, go up on stage and play the song. They were one of the most influencing bands in my life since I was a kid, of course I wanted to do it, wanted to be a part of it. Same as when I got them to record in my studio that was just one of the highlights in my life.
Deadfall: What was your best and worst gig ever in your career?
Peter: I dunno best gig can always be better, but I think one of the worst gigs we ever did was on a festival in Italy where everything just went really sour. The [..] that Lars was playing with for keyboards and stuff - he just went out, he just played like walking a line without a safety net. We didn’t have any crew to help out plus we missed the first flight to the festival, it was just really a bad day, I guess it was not supposed to be good.
Deadfall: We got some questions from our listeners: Was The Arrival composed for secure reasons after the experimental Catch 22?
Peter: No, not really, because we developed our style from the beginning of the 90s up to 1999’s self-titled album and after that we did two albums where we wanted to do something different and not stay in the same kind of path and I think The Arrival came back to the same path we did, like 5 years earlier. It was great to come back to that and do what we know best. No, it was not security or anything like that, it was just time to do a typical Hypocrisy album. For Both, us and also for the fans.
Deadfall: You covered Eleanor Rigby with Pain, why did you chose this song?
Peter: Cause, I think Beatles is one of the biggest influences of today. They were very early with the shit they did. Did a lot of good songs and that song, for me, is one of the first gothic songs I ever heard. It’s really the original it’s very dark and heavy, even though there’s no drums and nothing, but its very depressing. I had a clue about how I should do a cover, with violins, it was great to do that, go in the studio with 20 people playing violins for you.
Deadfall: And you covered it with even more gothic influences..
Peter: Yea but also I made a it a little bit more “Rammsteinisch”. I’m very happy with that song. Everybody knows that song but he kind of never heard it before. (A. d. R.: Ahja..) |
