Sweden’s premiere purveyors of thrash metal meets sleaze rock, Hardcore Superstar last hit Australia in June 2018 and the demand was there for an encore appearance, so here they are! Fusing a base of hard, aggressive heavy metal with the catchy, melodic and decadent hard rock of glams glory days, Hardcore Superstar’s self-coined ‘street metal’ is made for the stage!
We catch up with frontman Jocke Berg to discuss the tour with Buckcherry as well as their latest album and the current rock scene in Sweden.
Andrew: Thanks for your time, really appreciated! We’re excited to see you coming back to Australia.
Jocke: Yeah I mean last time we were there was in 2018, before that was 10 years ago so now it’s only 18 months.
Andrew: Yeah it’s good to see you back so soon, that last tour must have been a lot of fun. How was it?
Jocke: It was great and it was great to be back in Australia of course but this time we come back as the main support for Buckcherry. I think it’s a good thing because we play bigger venues, it’s a big country so we have to work on it.
Andrew: Yeah for sure and this time you are doing a bit more touring around the country, instead of just the east coast you are traveling to Perth as well which is the first show of the tour. Have you been to this side of the country before?
Jocke: No never, I’ve only been to Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Andrew: Oh cool well hopefully you will enjoy yourself here and it’s a bit warmer on this side of the country as well.
Jocke: So your from Perth?
Andrew: Yes I am and we will be seeing you on the first show actually.
Jocke: Oh great!
Andrew: We are looking forward to the tour and you are teaming up with Buckcherry, you guys must have done some shows and tours in the past right?
Jocke: Yeah we did a European tour together in 2013 and we kept in touch, I keep in touch especially with Stevie and Kelly and they are great guys so it’s going to be a lot of fun to meet the guys again and tour with them.
Andrew: It seems like a good combination, a perfect team together.
Jocke: Yeah the best thing is we work as friends on tour, it’s not just musically. We can talk to each other like friends, it’s not a good thing when you tour with a band that you can’t talk to and have fun together. I mean you are far from home and on tour for like a month or something, you have to be with human beings that you can talk to. You know how rock stars can be!
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah this is going to work out pretty well then since you guys get along pretty well. So when you came over here last year it was only a couple of months before your last album “You Can’t Kill My Rock N Roll” came out, so since that time how have the fans been responding to the new songs so far?
Jocke: Immediately after we went into the studio and recorded the album, we felt that this is going to be a great album. It was similar to when we released our self titled album “Hardcore Superstar” back in 2005, we felt that in the studio as well. It was kind of the same feeling when we did this album, you can see it was a great success because we played 5 or 6 new songs every night when we do the show and the people love it. Especially the title track “You Can’t Kill My Rock N Roll”, it’s like a feel good song so people can relate to it, you can’t kill my rock n roll.
Andrew: Yeah exactly and I guess that’s what rock and roll is supposed to be, fun and I guess some people would say over the last 10 or 20 years, especially since the grunge scene came out in the 90’s that rock and roll has kind of gone on a downward slope. would you agree or do you think rock is in a better place now?
Jocke: I think it’s always been in a good place because it’s like what media tells you, media tells people what to do but rock and roll is the genre that’s always been there. It’s like a shape shifter, it was grunge but it’s also rock and roll. Now it’s another name on it, I don’t know what, Nu-metal or whatever but in the end it’s rock and roll. But the media tells people now this is happening and that’s happening, whatever.
Andrew: Yeah I agree rock and roll will always be around no matter what. What about in your home country in Sweden, there seems to be so many great bands coming out of Sweden at the moment. What’s going on there, it must be a very healthy rock scene there at the moment?
Jocke: Yeah I don’t know, maybe it’s something in the water supply.
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah it must be but it’s awesome.
Jocke: In Sweden it’s like you either play football or soccer or ice hockey, or you play music, it’s always been like that. We have this, I don’t know what you would call it in english but it’s like a thing you go to after school where you can play pool and stuff with your friends…
Andrew: Like a clubhouse.
Jocke: Yeah a clubhouse and in Sweden where I grew up it was very popular and it closes every night at 10, then you had to go home because everyone had school the day after. But in those clubhouses all over Sweden we had rehearsal rooms for teenagers to go in and start a band and it was packed every night so I think that’s why we have so many good bands coming out from Sweden because we always went to the clubhouse and rehearsed.
Andrew: Was that how you got into music? What was the first beginnings of you really getting an interest in this kind of music?
Jocke: When I was 9 years old on Christmas morning I got Shout At The Devil and Kiss Destroyer as a Christmas gift and I got the vinyl and it had the inner sleeve with the guys standing there and I told my Mum I want to be like these guys. The funny part is that a lot of years after that, maybe 20 years after that, we sold out a show in our hometown with 3000 people and my Mum was there and she told me that story on Christmas when I was 9 and now I know what she means when she told me, ‘When you were 9 years old and you wanted to be like these guys’. It was a fun moment for her, and funny of course.
Andrew: Oh for sure, it must be! You’ve been doing this for a while now so at what point did it become really serious for Hardcore Superstar where you thought this could actually go somewhere?
Jocke: We released three albums before the black album, the self titled album in 2005 and before that we struggled a little bit because we were trying to find the Hardcore Superstar sound and personally I think we found it on the self titled album in 2015. So that’s when I realized that this is going somewhere for real, of course we believed in the band before but it was kind of a struggle because if you listen to the first album, the second album, the third album, it’s almost like three different bands. But it wasn’t until the self titled album in 2005 that we finally found the Hardcore Superstar sound in what we wanted to sound like. So back in 2005 we realized that we are good at this, we can do this [laughs].
Andrew: Yeah it’s been great for you guys and obviously a lot of fans love it. You had the new album come out last year and now that some time has passed, and I know I asked how the fans responded but how do you feel about those songs now that a year has passed since it’s release?
Jocke: The best thing about the new album is we play 5 or 6 new songs every night and we never get tired of them. I mean we’ve released a lot of albums and there’s a lot of songs that you get tired of, it’s like, ‘Oh I don’t want to do that fucking song again’. But even after a year now and we’ve played them so many times, we never get bored and I think that’s because we see the reaction from the audience when we play the new stuff from the album and you can see the smiles on the faces so that gives you motivation to keep doing this.
Andrew: When you write and record these songs, do you ever think about how they would play out live to an audience?
Jocke: The main thing when we write songs in Hardcore Superstar is that we try to think how it would sound live and how the audience would react. I mean I talked to Adde [drummer} the other day, because he’s the main writer in the band, he asked me this, ‘Jocke when you go on stage what do you want to feel?’ ‘I want to feel tough, I want to feel like I’m standing on top of the world’. And that’s what Hardcore Superstar is about the sound, so you want to be tough and you want to stand on top of the world and you just want to conquer. It’s almost like world domination, that’s what we try to put down on the songs.
Andrew: So for setlists, obviously we saw you a year ago so you would probably be bringing in some different songs to the set but do you find that’s becoming a difficult process or easier to put together a setlist for a different tour?
Jocke: It’s easier to climb Mount Everest than to put [together] a setlist! We have to play those songs, we have a lot of songs, we have to play “Moonshine”, we have to play “Above The Law” and we definitely have to play “Last Call For Alcohol” or “Someone Special” for example from the first album. I love that song but it’s like one of those songs that, ‘Oh not that song again’.
Andrew: [laughs].
Jocke: But we have to play it. We’ve been doing this for a year now since the album was released so we kind of figured out now that the audience want to hear more songs from the new album, that’s why we play so many songs. I mean 6 songs from the new album is pretty much…I mean when you listen to Iron Maiden live they play maybe 1 or 2 songs from their new album. So it is hard to do a setlist but we’ve been able to so far so I think we manage!
Andrew: Well we are looking forward to seeing you guys in Australia this October, it’s going to be what seems like another cool show with you guys. Thanks for your time and we will see you in October!
Jocke: Thank you!
Buckcherry / Hardcore Superstar / Bad Moon Born
October 2019 Australia Tour Dates
Tuesday October 08 PERTH, Rosemount Hotel
Wednesday October 09 ADELAIDE, The Gov
Friday October 11 MELBOURNE, Max Watts
Saturday October 12 BRISBANE, Zoo
Sunday October 13 SYDNEY, Metro
Tickets on sale now at http://silverbacktouring.com.au/buckcherry-2019/
