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 MÅRTEN HAGSTRÖM, guitarist for Swedish experimental metal titans MESHUGGAH, tells TOM HERSEY about diehard fans and the band’s first Australian shows in their 21-year history.
Meshuggah are rumoured to be notoriously press shy. In the November 2006 issue of Decibel, where the band’s groundbreaking Destroy Erase Improve album was being inducted into the magazine’s coveted Hall Of Fame, the editor spent his editorial complaining about how hard it was to get a hold of these guys for an interview. When Mårten huffs “I still got a lot of these to do” at the start of our chat, there’s clearly still a lingering sense of resentment towards interviews. However, from avoiding the calls of one of the largest extreme metal magazines to taking time out of their schedule to talk with Australian street press is symptomatic of the evolution of Meshuggah’s music and career.
One by-product of Meshuggah’s development is the band’s first ever Australian tour. A series of shows that has both long-suffering Aussie fans and the band themselves, psyched. “This tour is something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time now. We were all stoked when we got an offer to tour Australia that we could fit into our schedule because this tour is something we’ve been wanting to do for ages. It’s going to be nice to see the Australian crowds, we don’t really know what to expect because we’ve never been there.”
While Mårten jokes that the band is coming to Australia because, “you people have been nagging us”, he explains that the band has stayed on the topside of the world to crack the lucrative metal scenes in the States. “We’ve been talking about coming down to Australia for years now but we’ve just been focussing pretty heavily on the US for like the last ten years, and then whenever an offer would come in to come down to Australia we’ve been looking to get back into the studio or just take some time off. It’s just been bad timing more than anything.”
It’s bad timing these past 20 odd years that had Australian Meshuggah fans pretty desperate to see the band. The least of which was the simple nagging and message-board moaning Mårten referred to. Friends and friends of friends were telling stories earlier in the year about looking to travel abroad to see the Meshuggah as they toured in support of their ObZen album. Despite the fact that Meshuggah was famously named one of the ten most important bands in heavy metal by Rolling Stone and the band’s name is derived from the Yiddish word for crazy, Mårten still is dumbfounded by the actions of mental dedication some fans show.
“When you see somebody turn out with a Meshuggah tattoo, and that happens pretty frequently at this stage, it’s like, ‘what the fuck? I don’t even have that’. It’s really fucking weird, but it’s really nice because it shows you that the music means something substantial to people. Like for example we had one girl come from Japan and see us in America and then in Holland and Belgium. Stuff like that is just kind of awe-inspiring.”
MESHUGGAH play The Arena Sunday Oct 12 with support from Alchemist. OBZEN is available now through Nuclear Blast/Riot. www.meshuggah.net
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