Swedish black metal giants Marduk are on their way to perform a few gigs in Australia. Black metal gigs such as these don’t always hit that side of the world and it peaked Metal Wani’s interest. Over the weekend, they interviewed guitarist Morgan “Evil” Steinmeyer Håkansson, discussing these dates and the recent incident during their North American run. Marduk’s scheduled concert in Oakland, California last month (18) was cancelled by the police due to safety reasons. Police stated the band was criticized for glorifying Nazi imagery and anti-Semitism and it would attract a group of anti-fascist protesters that could result in violence. Aside from this one incident, their tour was a success and we managed to catch one of the dates.
During the interview, Håkansson commented on this issue (transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“The whole thing about that, I think, was really blown out of proportion. It’s actually a handful of kids who decide they wanna judge what people should listen to or see. It’s the way they work there — not satisfied with anything in their lives, so they demonstrate and cause problems for other people. So I think it was really blown out of proportion. But the police decided to cancel it because of security reasons. Otherwise, the show would have happened, because the promoters wanted to do it, we wanted to do it. So it was just really blown out of proportion and giving air to those kind of people, so it was a bit retarded. But we’ll be back over there. We’re going back already in August/September.”
Håkansson didn’t seem as upset or surprised as we were stating:
“The world is really filled with retards, so shit will always happen. Every circus has its clown, so… whatever. Shit happens. I’m not gonna focus that much about it. We’ll get over it like we have done with a lot of problems in the past. So it’s no big deal.”
It seems this cancellation didn’t scare them off from returning since they plan on hitting North America again during late summer/early fall:
“We’ve done a lot of touring for the ‘Frontschwein’ album across most parts of this world, and we still have some to go, because we’re gonna do the final touring… I think we’ll be August and September over in North America — we’re gonna do the U.S.A. and Canada again. And after that, I think we’ll enter the studio around that time. We have completed a lot of music and everything is falling into its right place. We’re just looking for the right option to enter the studio and then we’ll see when. We’re not gonna go out and speak a lot about it, but we will let everybody know when the album is completed; it’ll be known. But we are far ahead in the process of it, so we’re keeping busy, as usual.”
Håkansson might want to dial back his use of the word “retards,” but oh well. Check out the full interview below:
