Opeth in scream-free zone
Opeth mastermind Mikael Akerfeldt can now add 'world's greatest dad' to his list of attributes. Not only did he take his daughter to a recent One Direction concert in Stockholm, he actually paid attention throughout, unlike the majority of dads in attendance who took solace in their phones.
"Most dads weren't really looking at it but I was checking out the show, I wanted to see what those boys did to have two sold-out nights at the arena to 60,000 people each buying the f…ing costly tickets," he says.
Expecting a suitable amount of explosions and gimmicks for his krona, Akerfeldt admits he was a little disappointed by the heartthrobs' stage show.
"I was thinking that they're going to have bombs and s… going off but there wasn't much of a show, to be honest. It felt a bit cheap," he says.
Seeing the teenage fans swooning at the boy band got the 40-year-old thinking about his own youth spent at metal shows.
"When I was a teenager and I went to see Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, I was going insane," he exclaims.
"I was head-banging, I knew all the songs by heart so I was singing along. I always lost my voice."
The teenage Akerfeldt must have been smiling when Opeth went into the fabled Rockfield Studios in Wales to record their new album, Pale Communion.
A continuation of the the band's progression into classic rock shown on 2011's Heritage, Opeth recorded at the same studio where Black Sabbath, Rush, Hawkwind and many others put down classics before them.
"There was a little bit of magic there," he says. "The owner showed me some pictures of Rockfield in 1971, and one of my favourite bands hanging outside the studio, and it just looks exactly the same to what it looked like when we were there."
Fans who were disappointed with the lack of screamed vocals on Heritage will remain miffed, as Akerfeldt's vocals are once again clean throughout Pale Communion. The frontman says he may return to screaming on future albums but there was no room for it with their recent direction.
"It would be an expedition in bad taste for me to scream on the Heritage songs or on this one," he says. "People are speculating whether I can scream these days, if I lost my voice, but the simple reason why there's no screams is because it would have sounded awful."
