Despite selling two million albums worldwide, Swedish rock stayers Millencolin get ’some aggressions out’ on their latest set Kingwood.

Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with guitarist Eric Ohlsson. For once you guys are not kicking off a world tour in Australia. What’s going on?
Ha! This time we didn’t start with Australia actually which we’ve been doing over the years. We started with a European tour and then the US west coast and then back for a lot of the European festivals. But since we released the album in April we’ve pretty much been touring and recently just now we’ve just had a little vacation break.

Tell us about some of the larger shows you’ve played recently, including the Good Charlotte supports you did in the UK?

Yeah, that was before Kingwood was released. We just wanted to go out and try the new songs on people who hadn’t heard us and to see the reaction and be in England too so we could do press at the same time. Plus it’s an experience to play as a support band, we’ve only done that once in the modern times and that was with The Offspring in the States. But Good Charlotte have some strange fans, I didn’t know they were that extreme because there were girls with black mascara from the age of 12 to 15 pretty much. Haha! I didn’t really expect that. There were some older people too though.”

I heard you recently passed the one million albums sold mark?

Ah, two million!

Wow, congratulations!

Oh, thanks. It’s close to two million I think.

You mentioned Life On A Plate is one of your biggest selling albums and I notice you’ve re-released Bullion as a live b-side. You’re obviously still quite fond of the early stuff?
Yes, some of the songs. Bullion for example is a song we will play live pretty much forever I would think and also Mr Clean from our first album. They’re some songs we still think are really good songs but there is a lot of crap on those albums too. At the time when we recorded those albums, it was the absolute best we could ever do so I’m proud of them because it was the time we were in, you know.

So how do you approach those early pop-punk tracks given they’re more than a decade old?

I think we play them in the same way (they were recorded) but maybe a little bit better though. In the beginning when we were playing live we had a tendency to play everything so super fast, ha ha, even faster than on the albums, and it sounded really bad when we heard it recorded live. Now I think I think we sound more like on the albums.

The consensus is the band is leaning towards a more conventional rock sound these days … how do you see it?

With our previous album Home From Home which I think is the most rock n’ roll-ish album we’ve released, we hung out a lot with our best friends in a Swedish band called the Peepshows and also the Hellacopters and the Backyard Babies and so we just had more rock n’ roll around us. So that’s probably formed the album a little bit. It was nothing we really thought about, going in that direction, but we were listening to so much of that sort of music, we turned more towards rock n roll.
But then on this album Kingwood, you know Nikola released a solo album in between, as you might know, which was more singer-songwriter slow songs. So when we were rehearsing for this album, he wanted to play the faster stuff and scream again because he was kind of tired of doing his slow songs. He wanted to get some aggressions out so that’s why this album is rougher and little bit harder.

Did working with Chips Kiesbye help with that approach?

Yeah, he’s a legendary singer of a band called Sator in Sweden and they were huge back in the day, really really big. They had a lot of hits from about ‘88 to ‘92, around that time. We’d never met him before but we knew that he was really into music and had produced a Hellacopters album so when we were looking at producers we were also talking to Lou Giordano who did our Home From Home album plus some other guys. Ever since we recorded Pennybridge Pioneers with Brett Gurewitz in the States, which was a completely new thing for us, we found that the experience of gong somewhere else to record and not doing the same thing you did on the previous album was a really good thing. So we wanted to do something new and it felt good to use a Swedish producer and to record in Sweden.

He came to our home town and we rehearsed and he was sitting around and making notes for the songs. He really put in a lot of effort on the album. He didn’t change the songs that much because he considered them finished but he had a lot of good input on everything and that’s good because we were blinded by stuff we put together. He’s a super great guy with the harmonies and the guitars too. He had a lot of good ideas.”

How’s your own guitar sound changing over time? Are you moving away from that buzzsaw pop sound?

Not really, rather the opposite way, we tend to have punk songs with more distortion back in the day, it’s all blurred out when you listened to it whereas now it’s a cleaner sound, harder to play but it sounds better in the end.

Tell us about the studio diary that accompanies the album?

We wanted to do something in the studio for the fans. It was really fun, I just shot it with my regular pocket camera, still photo camera and it’s so easy on MacIntosh, you just import it into the computer and put it up on the homepage. It only took half and hour each time and we had wireless internet in the studio. So I could sit there and do it while we were actually recording. It became the highlight of the day to watch the movie. The fans on the net were waiting for the little movies every day so I put it together into one long whole movie and out it on the CD.
Incidentally, what’s become of your old Swedish friends No Fun At All? They were fantastic.

No Fun At All actually play some gigs every once and a while. They did a show in Belgium two or three months ago and it’s not super impossible that they’re going to tour again some time.