“It’s perfect actually,” he says, having just woken up, and sounding like it, from his home in Stockholm, “because I’m so super fucking tired of being here, it’s going to be excellent. I’m actually going to stay for another couple of weeks after we’re done. Have some vacation.”
The band are currently holed up in a studio in Sweden, working on what is going to be their fourth album, and the Aussie jaunt is going to provide them with a very pleasant and welcome diversion from the intense, immersing experience that creating a new album can often be.
“For us it’s kinda weird, ‘cause it’s in the middle of us writing the new album,” he tells us. “We’re kind of in the recording process now, and we’re going to Australia in the middle of it all, so it actually feels kind of nice. It feels very exotic, when you’re about to enter a studio 20 feet underground in Stockholm and you go to Australia.”
The band have been around for well over ten years now, but have toured here only once before. Whiplasher has some very fond memories of that trip, but apparently that has as much to do with the members of the band as it has to do with being in our country.
“It’s just chaos. We don’t usually talk about it, all the depraved stuff. It was just a very good visit, we had a great time. We went to visit our old label bosses at Universal, because they were living at Bondi beach in Sydney there, so we just got to hang out there for a week. We partied,” he hesitates. “I’d better not talk about it! We’ll get some new memories this time, I’m sure!”
Whiplasher promises the Aussie fans a pretty stripped back rock show, and more of a ‘best of’ set from their first three albums. “Even though it’s a very big sounding band, it’s super big sounding” he explains. “In our hearts, it’s simply, we’re into Iggy Pop and Kiss and MC5, so it’s a pretty straight forward rock band, but with a lot of make up and glitter. So it’s like The New York Dolls, but the Scandinavian modern one, and the darker version.
“We’ve been having a break, just doing the album, but before that we were touring with Rammstein in Europe. We’re very much in our element in clubs, which is what it’s going to be (in Australia). And, because we’re just writing and recording a new album and moving into a new phase with a new band member and so on, we’re just going to be playing the old songs, from the first three albums in clubs. And we’re doing it in Australia, which is a bonus. And if the girls are still dressed when we’re finished, then we haven’t done that well!” he adds, laughing.
As far as the next Deathstars album is concerned, Whiplasher tells us that they have always produced their albums themselves, and that there is again no temptation to seek outside help for their fourth long player.
“We’ve never used a producer actually,” he confirms, “and I don’t think we will, now, either. When we came to thinking about it, it was not that interesting for us. In the end we always want to have that control. Maybe the next one, that will be the one where we use a producer, but not right now.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
