Luxi Lahtinen of Metal-Rules.com recently conducted an interview with At The Gates guitarist Anders Björler. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.
Metal-Rules.com: There was years of talk about the At The Gates reunion shows before they actually happened. Did you, at least at some point, start losing faith whether you could ever get these reunion shows up and running, the more time passed by?
Anders: Well, the biggest reason we didn't play was that Adrian [Erlandsson, drums] was very busy with Cradle Of Filth. He couldn't get any time off. He wasn't even allowed to play in another band, and that was the major problem. I think we started talking about a reunion in 2002 or 2003, so it's been in talks for a few years. Last year I called everyone up and asked if maybe they would like to do a summer thing next year, and everybody was pretty positive. That was a big thing, about planning ahead a year in advance, so that all the guys could get ready to do it.
Was the main idea behind these reunion shows basically the fact that while you were still around back in the day, there were so many people out there that never got to see any of your shows, so you kind of wanted to warm up this idea that "let's give them at least this one opportunity to come to your shows, and enjoy them while you are doing them?"
Of course it's for the fans, but it's also for ourselves, making a final group of shows. When I left the band, it was so sudden, so we couldn't do a last show, so this seems like a worthy ending, somehow.
Jeff Walker from CARCASS also said in one interview that he would have teamed up with At The Gates for a few shows, but obviously these shows won't happen as Carcass seem to be busy with their own reunion shows at the moment?
There were some talks, but mostly about the U.S. tour. But mostly, we wanted to do our own thing, separately from Carcass. We respect Carcass, but touring-wise we wanted to keep it low-scale, so that we were in control of the tour. We do festivals together anyway.
Originally you were obviously about to play only a few shows, but then again, as long as there's demand for these At The Gates reunion shows, you will do them as much as it can be possible correct?
Well, everything was planned previously, even the Swedish dates, but we couldn't announce those until now. About the U.S. tour, we thought about doing both an east coast and west coast thing, but that never really happened, so we thought of doing a two-week stretch instead. The original idea was just New York and L.A. We did some dates in Japan in May as well. It was amazing, it felt very good to play together again. We've never been there before. Tokyo was a magnificent show. However, we do not have any plans to go back to Japan, this is the end. As for places like South America and other places we can't play, we will try to get a DVD together and release that next year, hopefully.
Have you received lots of mail from some people in record companies, showing their interest toward an idea about at least one more At The Gates album?
Not really an At The Gates album, but we've received some interest for live recordings. We'll see what happens, we're not in a big hurry to release anything, really. But no new studio album. It seems pointless after 12 years. I think people might think they want it, but when they actually hear it I don't think they'll want it anymore. That's our feeling about it, at least. "Slaughter of the Soul" was a very good album to end with, as it would be very hard to top.
Read the entire interview at Metal-Rules.com.
It's good this way, Slaughter of the Soul will stay a classic.