Power metal legends Sabaton are about to release a concept album centering around the stories of World War One. Prior to its release, bassist Pär Sundström was kind enough to chat with Rockpit representative Oliver and put up with his questions about obscure Sabaton errata throughout the band’s history. Check out the interview!
Oliver Yeudall: How are you doing today?
Pär Sundström: I’m doing well. I’m happy about all the stuff that’s going on with the band now and that there is such a big interest for it. We are on this little PR tour, which is over five weeks long and doing something like four hundred interviews. I am so happy that there is so many people who have an interest in Sabaton now. Some years ago when we were trying to do something, people didn’t even want to talk to us. But nowadays it’s a huge interest, so I’m happy for that and happy to go around. I mean, today maybe not so inspiring, I’m sitting in an office and making phone calls. Even if I get the chance to talk nice people from all around the world, I prefer to go meet people in person.
Oliver: Yeah it’s a shame we can’t meet in person but I’m still glad to chat. So yes, you have a new album!
Pär: Yes, we do. We spent the winter recording it. It was quite intense because we were doing so many other things at the same time. You know, ok, we’re going to do a concept album about World War One, but we are also at the same time launching the Sabaton history channel, we are upgrading the Sabaton cruise and we are rebuilding the entire stage show. There were so many things we were working on at the same time, which made it a little bit stressful for us. But now I think we are all starting to feel a little at ease even with this pretty intense promo tour. At least now we have received feedback that people like the new album, then we can start to feel a little bit more relaxed.
Oliver: That’s good to hear. With the new album, what was the decision that led to focussing on World War One?
Pär: We did songs about it in the past and we like this time period. It’s a pretty dark and destructive war. When we were doing it in the past we were excited about it and this topic is pretty interesting for us. We of course had a lot of topics that we thought about, but timing could not have been anything better for doing World War One because of the (pretty much) one hundred years anniversary so there was so much going on with this. We thought let’s be in now, let’s be in the momentum cause we won’t get a second chance at such good timing.
Oliver: Oh yeah it certainly is good timing. When you were recording it, did you have any challenges with the new album?
Pär: We changed the studio and even if that’s not really a huge challenge, it’s a little bit of a different way of working. We changed from [the first studio] where we know exactly how everything works and how we’ve been doing the albums lately, to Jonas [Kjellgren of Black Lounge studios], but Jonas is not new to Sabaton. He has been doing a couple of songs with us in the past. That’s actually why we decided to go there. We did our live songs with him and did a couple of cover tracks and things like that. It was actually when we were doing the Manowar cover Kingdom Come. We put it out and people were like “Wow, damn, sounds really good we would like to hear more.” So we decided to go with a whole album and see what else he could do with it. It turned out to be great and let’s see if fans prefer this sound or [the original studio] sound. For us, we like both and we like to work with both, so it’s not really a huge deal for us. Neither of them provide us with a challenge, they both provide us with the good solutions! The biggest [challenge] was that we were doing so much things at the same time; the Sabaton history channel taking a lot of time. This was the biggest challenge, to make the time, the time to work.
Oliver: It’s good that the Sabaton history channel is up. How’s that going by the way?
Pär: It’s doing really well. We have reached our first goal so to say, which was one hundred thousand subscribers, we set out that that was the goal. After that we can start to think about how to involve the channel with different ideas. I am very excited about it, one of my favourite projects we have launched for many, many years. So thinking about that I am very excited how we can continue to develop the project. Originally when we started to sit down and have the meetings and discuss how it’s going to look like and what it’s going to do, we had so many ideas. One of the producers, he had to always tell me “Hey, you have to calm down,” we have a couple of years to work on this and can’t do everything at once because we don’t have the man power to do everything that you really want to do at the moment. I’m happy that we made the initial launch and we have now reached goal number one, which is good, so now we are looking for the future.
Oliver: Well that’s good. I guess going back to the topic of World War One, I’ve got a question about one of your older songs [Cliffs Of] Gallipoli. We’ve recently had ANZAC day here, so it’s one of those songs that gets passed around by Australian fans a lot. What inspired the band to write about Gallipoli specifically?
Pär: It was written over ten years ago and one of the songs that’s taken the longest to write. It was a story that, I think at least in Sweden, nobody knows about it. World War One is not very known in Sweden at all, we barely knew anything. When we started to work on this, we barely knew that Australia was even involved. I think it was a big wakeup call when we got the whole story presented to us and was like wow. This is something that we feel very passionate about to write. I guess that’s how Gallipoli was written.
Oliver: That’s excellent. Actually going to one of your other songs, I’ve had a request to ask about 7734 from the Fist For Fight demo and exactly what it means.
Pär: If you take it on a calculator and turn the calculator upside down you get something. It’s just the song doesn’t really have a big meaning. It was before we started this topic of war and, honestly, we didn’t like to write lyrics at this time. We just needed something to sing and [we’re] trying to do whatever, traditional topics, something like that, but it didn’t mean anything to us. After we started to write historical things, we were so happy we went down that road because, looking back to what we did on Fist For Fight album, the songs give us nothing.
Oliver: Ah, fair enough. With the early days, with you personally, what was your musical history like before you founded Sabaton?
Pär: At the age of thirteen we formed a band. We were four guys with long hair in the school and we decided to form a band. I didn’t know how to play anything, but the guy who played guitar in the band, he was like “I’ll teach you”. That’s how we started to play. We were always ambitious in what we wanted to do. We started to play covers of course. Originally they were covers of Iron Maiden and Metallica, but a little bit later we started to play Moonspell and Bathory because this was the time when there was no melodic metal out there. But thanks to Hammerfall coming out and putting melodic metal back on the map, when we had Sabaton a couple of years later we could start to play what we really wanted to do. So that was exciting. And always, no matter if it was my first band or it was Sabaton, I always wanted to take it all the way. With the first band, not possible, but with Sabaton we are at least on the way to go all the way.
Oliver: With you and your bass skills right now, what equipment do you use? How do you get the sound you like?
Pär: All of us, we use the Kemper Profiler to make the sound that we have on the stage. We actually let the sound engineers design the sound for us because I don’t find it useful to come and push, like “I want to sound like this,” then the sound engineer says that’s not going to work with guitars, with the drums, whatever. We actually have the sound engineers design both our sound on albums and live, so exactly what’s in it I’m not even sure at the moment [laughs] and they constantly tweak it to be better and better. For me it’s not important to be egotistic and say I want something in a particular way. For me it’s important that the band sounds good.
Oliver: That’s definitely important. With the new album, do you have plans to tour with it?
Pär: Yeah, we have already announced a couple of parts of the tour, which we call The Great Tour. We have some shows in the summer festivals in Europe and then we are North America in the autumn and we also have announced a Russian tour. But there’s more to it and we are also looking into the possibility of how we can bring Sabaton as a headliner to Australia for the first time.
Oliver: Oh yeah that’s an interesting challenge, because when I saw you in Hamburg your stage, you have a lot of equipment there.
Pär: Yeah pretty complicated to transport around.
Oliver: How difficult is it to tour with a stage setup that huge?
Pär: Including a tank and a lot of pyros, it does create a bit of an issue sometimes. It’s not often that we can bring everything with us, so sometimes we play with a scaled down set, which is still more important than not playing at all.
Oliver: And I would definitely like to see Sabaton tour Australia soon.
Pär: We would love to come to Australia. Such a nice country and nice people and great memories for us. We want to come back and play a full show instead of just a short set opening for somebody else.
Oliver: That would be good to see. Thank you very much for the lovely chat.
Pär: Thank you and have a good evening.
The Great War will be released worldwide on July 19th
