Rehearsals

Johan Dereborn live on stage!

(Photo: Lena Janson)

Everything started off really cool, the new band met for the first time, without vocaists for the first days.

We learned the songs all over again (three years since we played most of them!). This time we tried to make the arrangements a little "lighter" and less "heavy metalish" ... Felt good from day one!

After a few days the ladies arrived. Martin and I arranged an audition in April, and these 3 were the top of the line!
Helene Genym, Ida Engström and Terese Löf. Helene sang with us on the release of E4E, but the other two I had never played with. It turned out to be fantastic! These ladies really do a great job, and their voices match perfect with each other!

The next week we met up with the crew and tried on our in-ear monitor systems for the first time ... it's a bit hard to explain, but imagine having your own personal walkman where you can decide exactly what you want to hear and how loud ... GREAT!

Premiere Weekend

Well ... we went to Norway, and everything went ... well ... not exactly perfect! The stage was by far too small for the production, there weren't power enough so we couldn't use some of the special effects and the pyrotechnics didn't work at all ...
Anyway we did the gig and went back to sweden. Tomas Bergqvist (percussion on the LMS tour) was called in to shoot the pyrotechnics on the premiere. As a drummer he's got really good timing, and he had played most of the songs, so it seemed to be a great choice. He was with us for 5 or 6 gigs, and then Jonas Hultgren took care of business, and he will be the "bomb- and fireman" for the rest of the tour.

[the following paragraph needs a bit further information, so please read tour diary part 2 to get an explanation to this, edited]

A review from the premiere in Lund you can read elsewhere on the site. The reason there were problems with your passes was that the tour manager this year is Robert Telenta, who has been a security guy for us when we have been to Russia and so on. he's "new on the job" as a tour manager and had quite a lot to take care of on the premiere evening so unfortunately he missed to put the passes out. He's learned since then, I promise!

The day after the premiere we got some great reviews! 4 of 5 in Aftonbladet and 3 of 5 in Expressen. felt reaally good and everybody was happy!

Since then we've done 6 or 7 gigs, some good and some awesome! The tour is well organised, feeling in the band is great, we have a great nightrider coach with 12 beds, kitchen, video, dvd, playstation 2 and so on. (A lot of GTA 3 is played ...) and everything would be fantastic if it wasn't for Martin's health ... he's been coughing for 5 weeks, and ripped a muscle in his right arm apart in Finland, so he's a bit frustrated to say the least! Hopefully it's getting better soon.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the tour, hope to see you down the road, and hopefully I'll be able to write some more "diary-like" notes for you in the future!

/Johan