PETER LINDGREN
Opeth guitarist
www.opeth.com

Live Opeth pics

(Winter 2004) by George Dionne

For the past year and a half, Sweden's mighty Opeth have had their musical hands full. Late 2000 saw the release of their heaviest and perhaps most intense release Deliverance (read CD review), and they followed that up just six months later with a rather surprising, melodic and mellow release Damnation (read CD review). The songwriting duo of vocalist Mikael Akerfeldt and guitarist Peter Lindgren couldn't have made these two albums any more diverse. In support of those highly successful releases, Opeth hit the road in early 2004, but not before stopping to tape a special two hour performance for an upcoming DVD release. Lamentations: Live at Shepherd's Bush is the culmination of the hardest music Opeth has to offer, mixed with their unique balladry. As their current tour was winding down, guitarist Peter Lingren sat down with me to talk about Opeth's first ever DVD and more.

RIL: You just released a new DVD entitled Lamentations. Do you feel that it is a good representation of what Opeth is all about?
PL: I think so. Six or seven of our albums are heavy and one is mellow. The live set on the DVD is 50-50, just like our last tour. I think it's good.

RIL: Is your current set list consistent with the set list on the DVD?
PL: We did two sets on the DVD, but now we're down to one. We do a longer set that focuses more on the heavy songs and the older ones as well. We try to do a little from each album on the current set.

RIL: Your winding down your current tour with DevilDriver and Moonspell, have you had a chance to catch their performances?
PL: Plenty of times. I think we've done about 35 gigs together. I haven't seen them every night, but I've seen parts of their sets.

RIL: What do you think?
PL: I like both bands. They don't play my favorite kind of music, but they're good to listen to. They're great guys too. We love touring with them.

RIL: Do you guys hang out after the shows?
PL: All the time.

RIL: You mentioned that DevilDriver and Moonspell wasn't your favorite types of music, what kind of music do you like?
PL: Well, I like almost anything that is good. There's good music in all genres. I like some singer-songwriter stuff, seventies rock, metal, and jazz.

RIL: That definitely comes out in your music.
PL: You can tell when you listen to our music that we have a lot of those influences.

RIL: I'm not really a big death metal fan, but I was hearing some stuff about Opeth, and I received a copy of Deliverance for review. I popped it in and I was impressed. By throwing in the mellow parts with the death metal vocals, it made it so the death metal didn't irritate me like it normally does. Some death metal is just noise.
PL: I like the noisy death metal. For us, we're more than that, because we listen to all these other kinds of music. We just want to put everything in there. Death metal is one part, but we put some singer-songwriter stuff in there. That's why we do ten minute long songs. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to fit it all in there.

RIL: Your last two CDs, Deliverance and Damnation, were released six months apart and they were quite different from each other. One is heavy, the other is mellow. Are the two CDs related in a conceptual manner, or are they two separate pieces meant to display your harder side and softer side?
PL: Lyrically, they are not conceptual. They are related in a way that you can listen to one after the other. They are connected. Our original idea was to release them at the same time. There's no lyric concept, there's just a mood. It's the same mood on the albums, but we tried to express them in different ways.

RIL: Did you think that your death metal fans would be up set Damnation being all mellow songs?
PL: I expected that a few of our fans would not understand it. We do have ballads on all our albums and our fans enjoy them. Basically, you could pick all of those ballads and put them on one album, and that's what Damnation is.

RIL: What's it like to play the huge rock festivals in Europe, like the Sweden Rock Fest?
PL: We've never played that particular festival, yet. We're going to. The festivals are like 50,000 people. I've never been to an Ozzfest so I don't know what it's like here. When you go to a festival, you get to check out bands that you normally wouldn't pay to see. I think it's pretty cool because these people aren't all Opeth fans. There's a good amount that are Opeth fans, then there are so many more potential Opeth fans. It's a very good thing. I prefer it when we do a headlining show. We get more time for sound checks, plus we can play a longer set. It's cool every now and then to do these festivals because we can catch up with all these other bands we haven't seen for a while.

RIL: Do you think there are any differences between European audiences and U.S. audiences?
PL: It's hard to say. The U.S. is such a big country. There is no U.S. crowd so to speak. It's different from the West Coast to the East Coast. In Europe there's even more of a difference. A Swedish crowd is calm and they stand with their arms folded, but an Italian crowd is crazy. In general, Europe has the same differences that you have here. I think that Europe is more extreme. Swedish crowds can be the most boring to play for, and there's no really boring crowds here. No one is crazier than the Italian crowds though.

RIL: You and Mikael Akerfeldt were ranked #42 on Guitar World's 'Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time" list. You were ranked higher than George Lynch (Dokken), Ted Nugent, Steve Vai, and Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray). What did you think about that?
PL: We were above Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme) and John Sykes (Whitesnake) too, right? I love to see it and read it, but I think we should be there.

RIL: You don't think so?
PL: Well, considering who else is on the list. I mean they say John Sykes is below me, that's insane. He's a great guitar player, and I like him. Tony Iommi was number one right? He wasn't the greatest guitar player, but he came up with a lot of great riffs and stuff.

RIL: Are there any groupies in the world of death metal?
PL: Yeah, there are.

RIL: What do they look like?
PL: They're good looking girls. Death metal groupies usually have long hair and wear black clothes.

RIL: Do they have pale white faces?
PL: I think those are gothic groupies. There's a few of them as well. We all have girlfriends, so we can only look.

RIL: Are Opeth working on new material?
PL: Not really. As opposed to some other bands, we don't record material on tour. We don't have the equipment. We've got some ideas for when we get back home, but it's barely the start of a new album.

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