Katatonia has been exploring the darker corners of the musical spectrum for some time now since me [Anders Nystrom, the guitarist] & Jonas [Renske, the singer] brought this baby to life all those years back (1991!!) &, eight albums in, it’s still as rewarding a journey as ever. We are currently out on the road in support of our "Night Is The New Day" album & getting to meet a lot of fans old & new across Europe, so we will be documenting our adventures for you with this diary.
The Preparations…
As you probably know by know, we have two new session members in the band - Per 'Sodomizer' Eriksson on guitar which you might be familiar to some being the lead guitarist in Bloodbath and also the live guitar tech for Katatonia. Then we have a local bloke from Stockholm called Niklas 'Nille' Sandin on bass. What these guys both had in common when boarding the Katatonic ship was the big task of learning a minimum of 25 songs for us get this machinery rolling again. What made it a bit more complicated at this point was that we didn't have a place to rehearse any of this stuff. It might sound weird, but the truth is that we haven't had our own practice room since sometime back in the 90's and the few times we did rehearse in 2000's we mostly sneaked into other band's hangouts or went up to Avesta where the Norrman brothers could borrow a room, but with their departure from the band that room would also be gone. It took us about two months of actively hunting for a new place until we scored one in a suburb outside Stockholm that we contracted for 2010. With the calendar already saying february 1st, we now had one month to go until the tour kick off, so we booked the four following weekends to spend the time jamming it all out and also taking the opportunity to finally look over the big picture. You know, it's no secret we have a lot of keyboards and atmosphere on our albums, but we never had the chance to play them back live making our performance a bit dry, hollow and definitely missing some magic. Since the new album is our most electronic and atmospheric driven album to this date a solution was mandatory, so we decided that everything a keyboard player would normally do we'd invest in new gear and incorporate into backtracks and get the full production with us on the road to be able to take that further step up the ladder.
When we finally got the 25 songs repertoire under our belt, we also decided that we'd divide them up into two different sets with 4 songs being different in each and alternate between them every other night of the tour. This way every city doesn't get an exact re-run of the night before and it also keeps it fresh and exciting for us. We're of course focusing on emphasizing the material from the new album, but we have also thrown in a couple of songs we have NEVER played before and also a revisiting a few songs we played only a very few times, so it's definitively a fresh injection into the live actives.
March 2nd, 2010, Tuesday...
Daniel and Sodomizer had driven down from their home town Falun two days before to kick out the last rehearsals for the last weekend and make all the final touch ups. Yesterday evening we felt this is probably as good as it gets for better or worse, so we spent a few hours marking up the gear and packed the stuff up.
The bus arrived to our rehearsal place in the afternoon boarded with the special guests - our finnish friends in Swallow The Sun. Also our new road crew had found their way onto the bus already. On this tour we're using a nightliner from Belgium's Coachliner with Pete Savage as driver. We're having Paul 'Soldier' Solynskyj as guitar tech that we met on the Paradise Lost tour last fall where he was teching for them. We're having Jimmy Petterson from Gothenburg that mostly works with The Haunted as our drum tech. As a merchandiser we got Petri Eskelinen that used to be in the finnish band Rapture (go to the merch booth and tell him how much they rocked!) and of course our tour manager/front of house sound engineer Ronnie 'dotcom' Backlund from Stockholm. The wheels are rolling…
March 3rd, 2010, Wednesday…
After a very long ride from Stockholm - Hamburg, we woke up the morning after parked outside the familiar Logo venue. The first thing we saw was a big "ausverkauft" sign over our tour posters, nice!!! I think we played this venue two times before and despite it being a pretty small venue we never sold it out on previous occasions. My dearest memory of Logo is back in 2001 when we were supporting Opeth on their "Blackwater Park" tour and due to having a cold Mike had lost his voice this night, so he invited me and Jonas and the guys from Novembre who were also on the tour to sing a song each. I think Jonas did "Creedence", I did "Forest Of October", Novembre guys did "Demon Of The Fall" and the rest of the set was instrumental. What topped the night of as even more bizarre was that we decided to run to McDonalds just before the buss call that night and order 60 (!!!) cheeseburgers with spare coins!
Anyways back to 2010, while waiting for the venue to open, we decided to go visit a music store for some supplies. Got a channel strip, some cool led lights and I got one of those super small Akai claviature keyboard that makes "writing music on the road" actually a possibility. Back at the venue, we find our backline has already been delivered. The always so nice Jens From Gewa Music had sent us 5 heads of our Laboga amps and two cabs for the tour. All the merch has arrived as well. I have to say the designs we got are really representable for Katatonia, I'm especially fond of one shirt design with a girl vomiting leaves that Travis Smith did, very nice! The guys in the opening band on the bill showed up eventually too - a couple of german guys playing instrumental atmospheric music under the name Long Distance Calling! Also Maciek and Dawid from our sponsors Mayones guitars showed up and gave us goodies and discussed amongst other things my new "state of the art" studio guitar we've been planning to make. Very excited about that one!
Being the first show with new members and new gear, there were of course the unavoidable technical problems to overcome, but also a lot nerves to control. Despite the misstakes, the energy was maxed out thanks to the gig being sold out! It can only get better from here!
- Anders Nystrom, Katatonia, 2010
Read the next part of the diary on Monday.
