CANDLEMASS Bassist on MESSIAH MARCOLIN: 'We Call Him The Big Black Negative Hole'

CANDLEMASS bassist/leader Leif Edling recently spoke to Metal Maniacs magazine about the band's new album, "King of the Grey Islands", Messiah Marcolin's departure and the addition of SOLITUDE AETURNUS vocalist Robert Lowe. A couple of excerpts follow:

On Messiah Marcolin:

"I do want to say that if he [Messiah] hadn't taken this public, I wouldn't have had to respond in public. I think it's a shame that Messiah feels the need to go out in public and on forums to further prove that he's in the wrong, though I'm not surprised by it. He's a drama queen, and you've probably noticed that not many people are taking his side. We tried everything we could to make it work, but he just obviously can't be in this band. Our fans aren't stupid and they've seen and heard him pull this kind of shit before. For the last album, he did a lot of interviews where he was apologizing, saying he was sorry for being a wanker to the others in the band."

"With Messiah, it's not a matter of if you're walking on thin ice. You're always walking on thin ice. It's not if he's going to flip out, it's when. We found ourselves having to ask, 'Can we rehearse this week with Messiah? Can we record the album with this man? Will it be possible to do this show with him?' When you have to put these questions to yourself every week, it's just not worth it. To run a band is a really complicated thing, and when you constantly have to strive and argue with someone that takes such a nothing, little problem and makes a huge deal of it, it makes things shitty for everyone. And there's really no need for it. We had huge success with the last album and we sold a lot of copies. Everything was rosy, and we really had no fucking problems. And then Messiah starts in whining about this or that, and — we call him The Big Black Negative Hole, because he just sucks the life out of whoever's around him as far as the band goes. Sure, you have days when it's good, and we had good times with him, but you just know that very, very soon something will happen to turn it all to shit."

"There are a lot of people who say, 'Oh, Messiah is CANDLEMASS.' But he didn't sing on 'Epicus Doomicus Metallicus', now did he? And I can find just as many people who like that album better than the ones Messiah was on. ['Epicus'] was a very important album to a lot of people. I think that fans of the band should be open-minded about a new singer. There are lots of good songs on this album, and if you liked the last one, this one should blow you away."

On Robert Lowe:

"Well, we went for a Swedish singer first. We listened to about 30 vocalists from Sweden and didn't really find the perfect fit, so we branched out to the rest of Scandinavia and Europe. From there we even had to widen our search, so we were getting hundreds of people trying out. There were people from South America, Japan, India, Russia — just everywhere. Some of them were OK, some were more than OK, and then there were some that you wondered why they ever bothered opening their mouths [laughs]. The funny thing to me was that everyone who tried out had a MySpace page where we could listen to them. I knew MySpace was big, but I really never realized how popular it was until looking for a singer!"

"We wanted someone unknown, but someone with the stage presence and vocal prowess CANDLEMASS fans expect, and we as a band expect as well. We hadn't actually thought of going for someone already in a well-respected band, but we got an email from Heather, Robert's girlfriend, asking if we'd thought of Robert. I knew who he was, of course, but only had heard him sing SOLITUDE AETURNUS songs. We sent him the demoed tracks for the album, and after we got his tapes back with his vocals over top, it was like, 'Fuckin' hell, this is brilliant!'"

On "King of the Grey Islands":

"Everything with this album happened at the 11th hour. Still, we didn't panic or anything. We never really operate with a Plan B, which can be stressful at times, but that's how we work. We got Robert just barely in time for him to sing on the album, and I'll tell you, sometimes the stress was at ulcer level. We knew what had to be done, though, so we just made it happen as always.

"Let me tell you how close we cut it with finishing this record in time. After a month of work with special delivery from Dallas to Stockholm and Stockholm to Dallas, I had to take Robert's vocals and put them in the computer, then clean all the files. Our mail gets picked up from the post office at 7:00 p.m. on Friday and I literally ran to the mailbox and got there at 10 minutes to. Peter [Tägtgren] had to have the files by Monday so he could mix the album in the ten days he had to do it. In the end, the album coming out on time or not was down to a ten minute difference!"

You can read the full interview in the October 2007 issue of Metal Maniacs, on sale August 21.

For more information, visit www.metalmaniacs.com.