OPETH Frontman On 'Craziest' Thing He Did As Metal Musician

October 31, 2008

Germany's Metal Hammer magazine recently conducted an interview with OPETH mainman Mikael Åkerfeldt. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Metal Hammer: What does heavy metal mean to you in general: Lifestyle or music?

Mikael: It's both. The lifestyle includes the music. Sometimes, when I think back to what it was like in the early '80s when I grew up, I get all warm and fuzzy inside and feel a genuine love for it. I get really nostalgic. It certainly is a lifestyle, because once you become a metalhead you become an outsider to contemporary society. It's still something like that today. For example, if I go on a promo trip today and live in a posh hotel at breakfast, the people are looking at us in our black clothes and treat us like being lesser. Sometimes that's uncomfortable but it makes you feel proud as well, to not be part of the fucking sheep."

Metal Hammer: What was the craziest thing you ever did as metal musician?

Mikael: "I didn't have too many rock-star moments. But I did a stupid thing when me and Per Wiberg [keyboards] were in Australia. We got drunk and chunked the chairs right from the balcony of the 12th floor onto the street. It was dangerous, but obviously we were really drunk. And we ended up paying for these chairs. We could have killed someone but my vision wasn't clear at that moment and I thought we were dumping the chairs on the roof of another building, though it really was just the street."

Read the entire interview in English or German.

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