Morgana Lefay
Undying Evolution

18.07.2013

They say that the bands you get to hear first get stuck in your mind the hardest for the rest of your lifetime. Sweden’s Morgana Lefay were not the first heavy metal band that I got to hear, but I did get to hear them nearly 20 years ago, when they released their third album “The Secret Doctrine” (1994), and some of the tracks got to be played on Russian radio. I’ve followed the band ever since throughout all of their tribulations – breaking up with Black Mark Records, changing the name to Lefay for a couple of records, then regaining the name for a couple of more records, and finally taking an extended hiatus in 2007, while also not forgetting to release great heavy metal music all along the way. When I got to hear that Morgana Lefay are billed among the acts to play at this year’s Sweden Rock Festival, my heart started pounding in my chest, as at that moment I didn’t even know they were back in the business. But my heart started pounding even faster when I got the contacts of singer Charles Rykotnen, and we agreed on an interview. On a sunny festival day Charles brought the entire band with him and we sat together in the press area for half an hour, discussing a variety of subjects related to Morgana Lefay…

How did it happen that Morgana Lefay are back together again? As far as I understand, we have to thank the team of Sweden Rock for that…

Charles: Yes, we had an offer to play at Sweden Rock Cruise in October last year. From that, some other festivals showed up, one thing let to another, and now we’re here.
Tony Ericsson (guitar): Blame them!

Why did you decide to accept their offer? As far as I understand, everybody in the band currently has other projects…

Charles: The reason is that it’s always fun to play with this band. The long vacation that we had was something that started with a short break but ended up with a long break because of all the projects that we have. When we had this request to play, of course, we accepted it.
Pelle Akerlind (drums): It was just like, “Do you want to play? Why not?!” It’s as simple as that.

What are your current ambitions with Morgana Lefay? Do you consider this a new start for the band, or are you only doing it for fun and have no specific plans for the future?

Charles: It’s more like the second thing that you said. It’s for fun, and we don’t want to have too many plans for the future. We just go with the stream, and as long as we think that it’s fun, we go for it. As long we have these requests for playing, we take them. When it comes to the new record, we want to be very…
Pelle: I think that will be the same thing. It we get the right songs and we feel like, “Well, that would be fun”, we will do it. If it feels like we don’t wanna do it, then we won’t do it.

What went wrong in the band after “Aberrations Of The Mind” (2007)? Was there anything wrong with the actual album, or were there some other problems?

Charles: It was more like we were going uphill for a very long time.
Pelle: I think that the break was also a thing that happened. We didn’t rehearse for a while, and then we didn’t rehearse for another while. And here we are, five years later.

Do Black Mark Records still own the rights to the name Morgana Lefay, or are you finally free from that contract?

Chrales: We’re free to do whatever we want. Actually we have been that since we started Lefay. The only reason why this name thing came about was that under our contract with Black Mark, we had one more option to do. But we left Black Mark and ended up with Noise Records, so there had to be another record on Black Mark before we could get the name back. Now we have the whole rights to the name and can do exactly what we want to do with it.

By the way, with Noise Records currently out of business, are you legally allowed to re-release Lefay albums?

Charles: Yeah, we have been in contact with Warner Chappell, which has the publishing rights to that – well, maybe. We don’t know exactly who has the rights, but I think it’s them. It seems to be a long procedure to have them back again, but we would like to do that and maybe re-release them. We’ll see, but it’s totally up to the conversation we have with the publisher.

Looking back at Morgana Lefay’s long discography, what is your most favorite album? And is there a record you would like to re-do if you had the opportunity?

Charles: I don’t think we want to re-do anything, we stand for what we have done.
Tony: “Sanctified” (1995) is the best record, I think.
Charles: And I think “Maleficium” (1996) is the best record.
Pelle: Yeah, “Maleficium” and “Grand Materia” (2005) maybe.

There are a lot of people who may not know the band, but they know your cover version of ABBA’s “Voulez Vous”, which you recorded in 1995, and which ended up on the Nuclear Blast tribute several years later. How did you get the idea to do it? It was long before tributes became a trend…

Tony:  It was a stupid silly joke! (laughs)
Charles: Yeah, it was a little bit of a joke in the beginning, but it became a serious thing pretty fast. We thought it was kind of cool to do exactly that song, “Voulez Vous”, which has absolutely nothing to do with metal music, but then again, it’s much cooler to turn this song into something heavier.

Another thing like this - you were singing about “The Lord Of The Rings” in the mid-90s, long before Blind Guardian recorded “Nightfall In The Middle Earth” and Peter Jackson shot his famous movie trilogy. Were you a Tolkien fan or a fan of fantasy literature at that time?

Charles: I’ve always been a big fan of fantasy, and Tolkien is one of my favorite writers. I really admire his work and this fictional world that he created.

I have an impression that Morgana Lefay aren’t a very lucky band, you should be more successful than you are. In your opinion, what slows you down? Why aren’t you as big as Hammerfall, for instance?

Charles: I think we’re too lazy. We like to hang out and have fun, we have all this fucking business. Playing live is the most important and the funniest thing to do, everything around it, such as having to travel there and be away from home for too long, just sucks. Every night on stage, between 45 minutes and two hours, is totally amazing, and the rest is like, “Oh shit, we have to do it to get to the next venue”. It’s a dilemma, this thing – because we have to travel to get to the stage. And we live in the middle of Sweden, up north, it’s 900 km to this place, it’s far away from wherever you want to go, even from a fucking shop. (everybody laughs)

Speaking about your interests, I read a 2005 interview with your former drummer, Robin Engstrom, and he said that “Charles is very much into occultism, Gnosticism, religion and other obscure things like that”. Can you tell us some more about this aspect of your interests?

Charles: There’s not much to tell, I’m just interested in that. I was more interested in that 10 years ago than I am now, but it’s still something that I want to believe or see. It’s what I choose, unlike these religious fanatics that believe in something that I consider totally fucking strange. Maybe there is something else, and I’d like to question religion a little bit.

By the way, do the rest of the band share your interests? Do you discuss with them the themes of your lyrics? Are you free to sing whatever you want, or do you sort of present the lyrics for their approval?

Charles: I don’t think so.
Tony: Obviously no!
Charles: Sometimes I get great help from them, especially from Fredrik (Lundberg, bass), with whom I co-wrote almost all the songs on “Aberrations Of The Mind” album. We sat together, pink-ponging ideas and brainstorming. Everybody comes up with something when you are stuck, but there’s never been anything like, “You can’t write about this or that”. I think I’m free to express himself.
Tony: (laughs) Yeah, he thinks he is free to express himself.

On the present day metal scene, where music is mostly distributed in the digital format, labels have a hard time. A lot of bands communicate with the audience directly and sell their music directly, without labels involved. As far as I understand, Morgana Lefay is a band that has never been very happy with labels – does the current situation make you happy? Do you welcome this change?

Pelle: I think there’s not much of a choice. The technology is here and you just have to accept that. The problem with the music industry is that they tried to fight it for several years, but you can’t fight the Internet:
Charles: One thing that I will miss is the big expensive productions, when you can hear that there is quality into it.
Tony: When kids download the stuff, they don’t realize that the artist doesn’t make any money, the record company doesn’t make any money, so they…
Charles: When we recorded “Grand Materia” and “Aberrations Of The Mind”, we were in the studio for about three months. That would be impossible now. Maybe the best thing would be to have a distributor on the Internet, but I would prefer to do everything myself and take all the money.
Pelle: It costs a lot of money to record an album, but you don’t know where you can get it back.
Charles: Still you have to record music, because that’s how people get to hear your songs.

Another sign of the times is that people tend to listen to single tracks, they don’t have enough time and enough patience to listen to entire records. But Morgana Lefay has released quite a few concept albums, and in order to truly understand them, people have to listen to them from start to finish. In your opinion, is there still room for big pieces of music on the scene? Or do we have to say goodbye to works like “The Dark Side Of The Moon” - or “Grand Materia”, for that matter?

Pelle: Every time there’s an action, there is a reaction. I think people will come back to it. “I remember how it was before, and I want to be there again”. People still like vinyls.
Charles: In this genre, people are still quite good at buying records.

Do I get it right that this won’t stop you from doing a concept record, if you feel like doing it?

Pelle: Hardcore fans will still want to hear the whole thing, so they will buy the record.

What audience is coming to Morgana Lefay gigs at the moment? Are there mostly oldtimers who followed the band in the 1990s and 2000s, or are there a lot of young people as well?

Charles: The majority are the people that we have had from the beginning. But there are some new listeners, some younger people as well – thanks to YouTube, Spotify and shit like that.

Are you OK with this situation, or would you like to have a younger crowd?

Charles: You always need a younger crowd if you want to live on it in the future.
Pelle: You just want a crowd that loves our music, and it doesn’t matter if they’re 50 years old or 15 years old.
Charles: We’re actually thinking about making a children’s album. (everybody laughs)

Do you all have children?

Charles: Two of us do.

When you were starting the band, what were your influences? In Sweden back in the day, everybody was into death metal, and you were completely different from that trend. What were your sources of inspiration?

Tony: Metallica and Queensryche.
Charles: I was listening to Judas Priest, Urial Heep and even Kiss when I was really young, that what we started with. But there’s a big difference when it comes to music tastes in the band - we have guys who listen to Meshuggah and Slipknot. In the end, it makes us sound like we do.
Pelle: Everyone brings something different to the table.
Charles: The instrumental parts can sometimes be very aggressive, but the song itself may eventually sound closer to the 80s power metal thing… I don’t know, it’s very hard for us to explain, let the listeners decide what we play. We just play what we like to play.

Was it easy for you to make it in Sweden in the beginning, when everybody was listening to death metal?

Charles: That’s what I was talking about in the beginning, this uphill thing. It has been a bit of a struggle, because people have big difficulties putting us in a box, they don’t know where to put us. Maybe that’s been a kind of problem, but more to listeners than to us, I guess. (laughs)

Can you tell me a few words about other projects that the band members are currently involved in, such as Med Messiah or Cibola Junction?

Charles: Cibola Junction is like going back to the 70s a little bit. I really like that kind of music. It’s basically 70s hard rock. When it comes to Mad Messiah, it’s more like Morgana Lefay, but it doesn’t exist anymore. Then we have LadyDie, I don’t know how to explain this, these two guys are in the LadyDie project (points at Pelle and Peter Grehn (guitar)), it’s totally different.
Pelle: It’s like Meshuggah meets Pantera meets Alice In Chains. And I’m also in Trail Of Murder with Urban Breed from Daniel Olsson from Tad Morose, as well as in Bloodbound.

What can you say about the metal scene in your home town, Bollnas? It’s the home of three famous heavy metal bands, Tad Morose, Morgana Lefay, and Bloodbound…

Pelle: And Trail Of Murder, don’t forget it! (laughs)

Yes, sure! Are there any younger bands in Bollnas which you consider worthy of attention?

Charles: Yes! Actually there’s re-growth. We rehearse in a large old school with a lot of rehearsal rooms in it, and new bands show up, and they’re really talented. From the beginning they sound quite nice.
Tony: When we retire, we will hope, “Maybe I’ve inspired some younger people to make it big”. That’s how fucked life is – young people are better than you are.
Charles: It seems like hard rock and metal music will never die anywhere - and especially not in Bollnas.

How much do you know about the metal scene in Russia? Do you know that Morgana Lefay songs were played on the national radio in the mid-90s?

Charles: No, I didn’t know it. Unfortunately I’m not familiar with any bands from Russia, maybe I should be…
Pelle: I’ve heard that the Russian crowd is fantastic, so I really want to go there.
Charles: It’s always been on my “things-to-do” list – let’s go to Russia and let’s go to Japan.
Pelle: Maybe we’ll go to Russia this fall with Trail Of Murder. The plan is to do like six shows in Russia.
Charles: And play Morgana Lefay covers! (everybody laughs)
Pelle: Yeah, only Morgana Lefay covers!

Morgana Lefay on the Internet: http://www.morganalefay.se

Interview by Roman Patrashov
Photos by Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
June 7, 2013
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