Crashdiet
I Enjoy Every Minute Of What I’m Doing

10.12.2019

Sweden’s Crashdiet have had a more than fair amount of hardships and tragedies at almost each stage of their career, which seems even more unfair given that the music they play is associated by most with partying and having a good time. Suffice it to say that the band has gone through four different singers in five records, with the original one, Dave Lepard, dying at the age of just 25. Nevertheless, Crashdiet have a remarkable tendency of coming out stronger each time, and though their breakup with singer Simon Cruz a few years ago might have meant the end for many bands, they only took a break and then came back with yet another fine record, “Rust”, which saw the light of day in September. And already on December 21 Crashdiet are coming back to Moscow where they haven’t played since 2010. This was a fine opportunity to catch up with drummer Eric Young and try to find out a secret of the band’s endurance.

You are starting a tour with Skid Row tonight. What are your expectations? How do you think you are going to like performing with Skid Row?

Well, performing with Skid Row is like a dream come true. It’s something we grew up listening to, and something that definitely inspired me as a musician and music writer for our own music. It’s surreal in a way. I’m expecting some real nice shows and a lot of people, and I hope the guys are as fun to hang out with as I understand they are. It’s gonna be cool.

You have only played in Moscow once so far, and it was 9 years ago. What memories do you have from that visit?

I remember that I heard a lot of Ace Of Base and E-Type! (everybody laughs) You guys seem to like that stuff over there. I remember also that we arrived a day or two before the show and we were invited to go to the venue to have dinner, check out the venue, have some nice food and stuff like that. It was such and nice crew and promoter, I can’t remember his name right now, sorry about that, but anyway, we had some really nice food, and I remember specifically when he was like, “Alright, who wants some vodka?” We were like, “Oh, let’s have some vodka!” And he ran and got like 12 bottles of vodka! (everybody laughs) “One bottle for you, one bottle for you…” When you’re a guest at somebody’s place, you don’t say anything, so we just drank that vodka and had a really good time!

Hopefully you’re going to have equally good time in Moscow in a couple of weeks!

Oh, I don’t doubt that! I think we’re gonna have a really nice time. I remember we had a great time last time in Moscow, so I’m really looking forward to coming back there.

For the release of your new album, “Rust”, you established your own label in Scandinavia, which is called Diet Records. How do you like it so far? Does it help the band business-wise in any way?

Actually, to be honest, it’s a lot of work. Me personally, I handle most of the live production, tours, live shows and stuff like that, and then we have Martin (Sweet, guitar) and Peter (London, bass) that are handling the record label side of the whole thing. I can only tell you what I’ve seen on them, and I’ve seen two guys really working their asses off and pretty tired of it already. (laughs) It’s a lot of work. If you want to do it yourself, which you prefer to do because then it gets done the right way, you have to remember that it’s a lot of work. But it certainly puts us in the front, it puts us near the fans, and it puts us in a much better position connecting with fans in different way. If you see it that way, we feel a lot closer to the fans, which I think is a really good thing.

How did you find your new singer Gabriel Keyes? Why did the process take so long?

To be honest, we weren’t sure we were gonna do anything right now. We were all pretty tired, we were beaten up by the tours we had done and the tragedies and the issues we had with everything. It was just like a whole nightmare at a point. When we parted ways with Simon, we just felt like, “OK, we need to take a break from this for a while”. Actually it was a friend of ours called Sven who in the beginning of our re-awakening with Gabriel was our manager for a while, he contacted us and said, “Guys, I really think you should check this guy out. His name is Gabriel, he sings like a motherfucker, and he’s a great guy. I think Crashdiet needs to get together again and put some music out”. It was actually his initiative to put the band together, we were kind of doing our thing on separate ways for a while, not really sure what we wanted to do. So we said, “Why not? Let’s see who this guy Gabriel is”. We did some rehearsals and we had so much fun writing music together again, so we just decided, “Let’s do it”. That’s the beginning of the whole thing after all these years. I think we were probably a good three years without doing anything. I’m really happy that he came into our lives. To be honest, if Gabriel wasn’t the one that came in and said, “Guys, we need to do this”, I don’t think we’d be where we are right now.

Your guitar player Martin has a side project called Sweet Creature, in which he is also the lead singer. Why is he not singing himself in Crashdiet?

Well, ‘cause he hates singing! (everybody laughs)

But it would make the life of a band much easier, wouldn’t it?

For us, yes, but not for him. He hates that part of it. He made that album (“The Devil Knows My Name”, 2016), which I think is a great album, by the way, because he felt he is an artist, he needs to create stuff. I get the impression that he sang on it just because it was the easiest for him, but then I asked him myself, “Hey, maybe you should sing”, and he said, “Never! (laughs) This is not what I’m supposed to do”. He wans to write songs and play guitar.

Some bands keep the same line-up, others go through multiple changes. But in Crashdiet it’s a bit different – only lead singers change. What keeps the rest of you together, what kind of bond do you have with each other?

You know, the bond is the same as three brothers. Or even more, because these are brothers that I chose. Brothers you have in a family are brothers you’re born with, you cannot choose them. It’s family. But these are two guys that I’ve grown with for 15 years now, 16 even. It’s a bond that you cannot explain. We’ve been through everything together – multiple deaths, highs and lows, and we’re still here. It’s gonna take a lot of separate us. In my opinion, it’s the best bond you can have when you have two friends that you can go through anything with. I think that’s our really strong side, we have this really good base of people, the three of us. Without that, I don’t think we would exist.

We’ve often heard people calling Crashdiet an unlucky band – like, “they could have been really famous all over the world if not for this and that”. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, of course. There’s no denying that we’ve had some really bad luck with things that happened. (laughs) It’s a matter of what you do with it. You can either stop and let things be in your way, or you just accept the fact that shit happens. The only thing we can do is move forward. We’ve had our bumps on our road, but what are we gonna do? (laughs)

Let’s now change towards a lighter subject – we’ve seen on your Facebook page that you now have a Crashdiet beer. Could you talk a bit about that?

You know what, I’m not really involved in that. I was kind of surprised myself that we have it. (laughs) We all have our projects in this band, and that’s been something that I haven’t really been involved with. I can’t really tell you much about it, other than that I’m excited that we do have it. It’s a collaboration with a friend, but I can’t really share any other interesting information, I’m sorry.

Back to the “Rust” album – what is this animal that is depicted on the album cover? And who came up with it –somebody from the band or the cover artist?

This is the artwork done by the very talented Christel Mentges, who is Peter’s girlfriend. She has basically done the whole artwork set about the world of Crashdiet, her interpretations of our world, our beings and everything like that. I guess this cat that is going through hell is a kind of metaphor for what Crashdiet is about. To be honest, on a deeper level, I’m not really sure what all the significance is, but I know that she’s been interpreting the whole world of Crashdiet. It’s a really cool artwork, if you ask me. It’s one of the best ones we’ve had.

As far as we understand, you have a different producer and a different mixing engineer for each of your records. How did you choose Chris Laney this time, and how did you like working with him?

Well, Chris Laney did half of the first album (“Rest In Sleaze”, 2005) as well. We’ve been working with him before, we’ve done different projects with him, even before the first album we recorded an EP with him, “Riot In Everyone”, which included “Riot” and a couple of more songs eventually led to our first record deal with Universal Music in Sweden. So we have a really long collaboration with him, and he’s a dear friend. It just felt like the right thing to do this time around, to have him be a part of mixing, and I think it was amazingly done.

Speaking about producers, you worked with Kevin Churko on “The Unattractive Revolution” (2007), and usually when a band starts working with Kevin, their sound changes significantly, but it wasn’t that dramatic in your case. What’s your impression from working with the guy?

Well, he had a very specific kind of idea, a very specific sound in mind. If you listen to the album, it’s a very American kind of image music-wise: loud drums, loud vocals… We worked with him only by sending stuff over the internet, so we never actually met the guy, which would have been fun to do, but he was a very busy guy, he was sitting in his studio somewhere in Los Angeles, but I’m not really sure. We just had some correspondence with him, we sent stuff to him, and I think it came out pretty good.

In general, how do you look on the Swedish hard rock scene, or sleaze rock scene, if you will? Are you friends with bands like Hardcore Superstar or Crazy Lixx, or are you more like competitors?

No-no, we’re friends. In Sweden it’s a really small landscape, although we have a lot of music in Sweden, rock culture in Sweden is huge. Every subgenre of that is equally important, and all the bands we have in Sweden are very much in it together. We’re a team, we’re a big team, and there’s very little competitive feeling going around. We all know each other, we all share the same goal – to just play music and have a good time and try to deliver as much good hard rock as we can to the audience. I would say the sleaze scene is not… Hardcore Superstar are always delivering good stuff every time they come out with an album, but it’s been a long time since I saw anybody else in that scene who was that good. It’s going up and down, and I guess we’re in the down low right now. That’s why we felt that we needed to come back and release an album, I guess. (laughs)

Bands like yourselves or the above-mentioned two have something in their sound that makes them very Swedish, not like the rest of the bands that come from Finland or even the United States. In your opinion, what is it that makes Swedish sleaze rock bands what they are?

I would say it’s the Swedish heritage of old pop genres and a whole army of good songwriters. There’s something in the water that we drink, I think. (laughs) There’s so many bands that deliver so much good music. I guess sleaze kind of falls in the same… I’m not trying to pat my own back or anything like that, it’s just that if it’s Swedish music, it’s often very very good. I think it has to do with the freedom we have here with music. We’re taught at a very young age that if you wanna go pursue your happiness in music, go for it. We have music classes from very early on, and there are always music instruments laying around in schools, people are really encouraging you to play music from the start. I think that’s a big contributing factor to the whole thing.

Our website has recently published an interview with Eric Danielsson of Swedish black metal band Watain, and he was talking how he learned a lot about what riot means from Dave Lepard. Is this a two-way connection? Have Crashdiet learned anything from Watain or the black metal scene in general?

Myself I’m a big black metal fan, I’ve always listened to a lot of black metal, and I remember that Dave was the same, we shared the same fascination for that. We’re all friends with Watain, at least me and Dave were. But I don’t think we have any more than that attached to our music. Every time I write music for the band, obviously if I’m a big fan of black metal, there’s always gonna be a little of that in the music I write. But it’s not that we have any kind of influences that we go by in any clear way.

You have a very broad listening taste, with a lot of extreme metal within your scope. But with Crashdiet you play music that is very far away from that. Is it something you chose intentionally, or do you just follow your heart here?

In our music, we don’t have a lot of death metal, of course. But we have a certain kind of darkness, I would say. For me, it’s just that I love playing music, and I’m a big fan of rock, classic rock as well. As much as I prefer more extreme metal, it doesn’t exclude the fact that I’m a big fan of classic rock, bands like Cinderella, Guns N’ Roses, Ratt, Tesla and all that stuff. When I’m writing music for Crashdiet, I tend to gravitate towards that end of the spectrum. Somehow I try to incorporate my likings of death metal and stuff like that into this, maybe sometimes I play too much double bass drums than I should. (everybody laughs) It’s all fun, it’s all music, and we’re all having a good time. It’s definitely not that I’m sitting up there playing drums and feeling that I would like to play faster or anything like that, it’s not the case. I enjoy every minute of what I’m doing with this band.

Speaking about the early era with Dave – in the past few years there were a couple of releases with him, “Live In Sleaze” and “Rest In Sleaze – The Rough Mixes”. Will there be more archive releases like that? Do you still have any unreleased stuff with him in your vaults?

Not really in our vaults… Of course, there’s a lot of demos and stuff like that that we haven’t released. It’s hard to say… Right now we’re focusing on what’s happening right now, with Gabriel, and I think that’s gonna be a priority. Maybe further down the road we will try to put something together; something that I would certainly want to do is maybe an EP or even an album with Gabriel singing old Crashdiet songs. But we don’t really have anything planned at the moment.

In your opinion, how has your fanbase changed? The people who bought “Rest In Sleaze” and were coming to your shows 15 years ago – are they still with the band, or is there a whole new audience that is embracing Crashdiet at the moment?

I would say it’s not a whole new audience, but there’s definitely a lot of new people coming to the shows. Obviously there’s gonna be the people that have stuck around since back in the day, and it is fun to see that they’re coming back and still supporting us, this is a blessing. I would say it’s a mix, which I think is the best out of the two – we still have some of the old fans and we have a lot of newcomers. I’m really happy about that.

What plans do you have for next year? When shall we expect a new Crashdiet studio album?

Next year is gonna be full of touring. We’re trying to hit South America and Europe again in the spring, probably come down to Australia towards the summer, and then do as many festivals as we can do all around wherever. And then let’s see. It all depends on where want us to come by and play. There’s always new songs coming out from both me and Martin, we’re a productive bunch of guys, so I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year’s time we would have a lot of songs to put out on an album. But I don’t really see an album coming out already next year. I’d probably see that in 2021.

Crashdiet on the Internet: http://www.crashdiet.org/

Special thanks to Eugene Silin (Alive Concerts) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos by Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
December 1, 2019
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