Over the years a number of people have mistakenly call Millencolin an ‘Aussie band’ unaware that the four-piece punk outfit are actually from Orebro, Sweden. The truth is that Aussie fans have actually adopted them as ‘surrogate-Aussies’, in much the same way we did Kim Cljisters before Lleyton dumped her arse.

The adoption process was probably put into place because of the fact they have been so kind to Australia. They tour here as often as they can, always have time for their fans and do nice acts such as release their new album (‘Machine 15’) here on our fine shores weeks before it will be available anywhere else. Truth be known they love their adoptive country as much as we love them, after all they do have legions of fans here, and Australia was the first country in which they had a gold-selling album. That’s not a bad stat considering Millencolin are now classed as the Europe’s Greatest Punk Band, a label that while the band are proud of they are also clearly embarrassed about.

I only get a very short period of time to chat to Millencolin’s guitarist Erik Ohlsson who quickly apologises to me for being sick ‘I’m sorry man I’ve got everything going on here at the moment, puking, fever, you name it I have it,’ he explains. ‘I caught it at a skateboard contest our band organized, first the drummer, then the rest of the band, then me…we still did our show though.’

There are two things about that statement that doesn’t surprise me. Firstly; that Millencolin where at a skateboard park. Millencolin and skateboarding go hand in hand. The band met through their love of skateboarding, took their name from the skateboarding trick ‘melancholy’ and regularly organizes skateboarding contests in Sweden. Secondly, it didn’t surprise me that they would battle through illness to put on a show, you get the feeling Millencolin would crawl over broken glass for their fans.

I ask Erik what he can tell me about their new album and he quickly says ‘To be honest this is our best album yet. It’s very Millencolin, we’ve continued the progression we’ve been doing on each album, our last album was a very dirty punk sound very flat guitar based. This time we’ve gone for more dynamics and I feel it’s as good as we can get.’

With a number of rumors circulating I ask if ‘Machine 15’ is really a concept album. ‘Kind of. I do the artwork on our albums and I’ve always wanted to do an album where the artwork is a concept that ties into the music, and that’s what I’ve done this time,’ he explains. ‘This is our seventh album and we were all ready to call it seven, and then we realized we’ve been together for 15 years. That’s where the 15 came from. Then on the front we have this Godzilla-dude, a robot…Machine 15 he’s called. Actually the album is a robot itself it’s fifteen tracks… see not that meaningful,’ he says with a laugh.

It is only days away from their Australian tour so I ask Erik about Millencolin’s love affair with Australia. ‘We love Australia,’ he yells. ‘Australia…Australia…Australia… We sold gold there and you have the best fans there and the best vibes.’ The thing is when Erik said that you could tell he meant it, this wasn’t just some PR talk to pump up the tour.

He asks me what the weather is like in Australia at the moment and I tell him hot. ‘Great,’ he responds. ‘We don’t have a lot of time off down there, but I really want to do some fishing. It’s not great you’ve had such a hot summer though… the weather is really stuffed up. When I was a kid here in Sweden all through winter we would have snow on the ground… this winter we had just four days of snow. I really don’t know what’s going on.’

I tell him that people in Australia often think Millencolin are Australian and he laughs, ‘I take that really proudly, man. It’s a privilege. Not like the last time someone said something like to me. We were in America and this woman said wow you guys are the best American punk band and when we said we were from Sweden she said Sweden? That’s upper-state New York, right?’

I point out to Erik that each time I’ve seen Millencolin live they’ve been performing with major acts such as Blink 182, Foo Fighters and Queens Of The Stone Age. ‘That’s right we have,’ he replies. ‘To be honest I love Big Day Out but it’s different when you tour with a band. At Big Day Out you just walk through the corridors saying hi to people, although I did get to play ping pong with Dave Grohl; that was cool.’

Erik tries to desperately talk over the person interrupting our phone conversation to tell us that our interview has to be wrapped up. But he knows there’s no point fighting, even one of the nicest musicians in the world can’t fight against managements decision. ‘Tell my fans down under that we can’t wait to see them all. We’ve missed you all so much. Two years has been way too long. I’ll see you real soon, man.’

And with that the interview was over, but at least we have their fine new album to look forward to.

Dave Griffiths

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There’s little doubt that in the five years since Coal Chamber split up and Dez Fafara formed his new band, DevilDriver, that the man himself has also under gone a radical charge. Gone are the Gothic garb he wore in the Coal Chamber days and it also seems that he is enjoying being away from the stress that led to Coal Chamber’s demise.

It was a very relaxed Dez Fafara I spoke to when I caught up for a chat, ‘I’m in a very rare place at the moment… I’m actually at home for six days. Then it off to Europe, a tour I’m looking forward to because we’re headlining it, that means we get forty five minutes on stage not twenty,’ he says with a chuckle

Dez says he has got used to touring even though he is very much the family-man these days, so much so that even during this interview he has a regular ‘family-guy’ moment when his Red Doberman made such a racket he couldn’t hear on the phone he nicely yells out to a family member to ‘put him outside’. Dez has learnt to incorporate his family in his music so much so that his young son has a guest vocalist spot on DevilDriver’s critically acclaimed new album, ‘The Last Kind Words. I ask him whether he agrees with the claim that this is DevilDriver’s best album yet, ‘Definitely I do, in different ways we have progressed and we are still evolving.’

That evolution has seen DevilDriver produce their heaviest but also their most melodic album to date, where they hoping that this there third album would define their sound, ‘Definitely, it was time to define ourselves. I always believed that if the second album doesn’t kill you, the third would go nicely. This time we went into the studio totally compared. We want to keep ahead of all the metal bands in the United States. If they’re doing B we want to do A… but with the sound of this album it pushes and pulls both ways between the musicians and the songwriters. We felt we had to define ourselves right now because there are so many other bands out there right now. Even the record label originally said that this album was too heavy.’

I ask him what part Jason Seucof the producer played in producing the new sound on this album. ‘Jason was great to work with, an unbelievable talent and most people don’t know this but he is one of the best guitarists in the world, right up there if not better than Yngwie Malmsteen, and not only that but he knows how to capture the guitar on an album. But the great thing is he can get what he wants from song in an hour instead of six. At first I wondered if he was lazy and then I realized he just knows how to get what he wants… he captured the vibe.

Dez has always been a promoter of a hard work ethic so it’s little surprise to hear that the album only took two months to record, ‘I am lucky that I am surrounded with artists, great musicians who share the same ethic.’

One of the disappointing things about the arrival of ‘The Last Kind Words’ was it was spoilt by many fans by being leaked onto the internet but I was surprised to learn that Dez wasn’t all that upset about it happening, ‘All our albums have been leaked and I know that downloading could kill underground art, but on the other hand it spreads your music and more people will come to our shows.’ So does that means Dez downloads? ‘I do,’ he laughs. ‘I’ll download a couple of songs and if I like what I hear I go out and buy the album.’

And while he may not be skeptical about downloading he is skeptical about a rumor currently going around that former Pantera and current Down lead singer, Phil Anselmo recently came out and said that DevilDriver are the new Pantera, ‘I’m not sure if he really said that or not, I’ve heard he did, and I mean I’ve been friends with Phillip for years, when I didn’t have a home I lived with him, but we don’t want to be the next Pantera, we are DevilDriver.’

With Dez in such a good mood and talking about dispelling rumours I asked him if he was comfortably talking about all the things that have been said about the split of Coal Chamber and to my surprise he responded with ‘Shoot…I’ll tell the truth.’

I started by asking him if it was hard to jump straight into DevilDriver after Coal Chamber’s demise, ‘Not very hard at all. I saw them (Coal Chamber) going on a wayward journey… off the tracks… drugs, stuff like that. We were sitting on the tracks and there was a train heading right towards us. To be honest I was recording a demo for DevilDriver while still in Coal Chamber. I mean when we were recording Coal Chamber’s third album (‘Dark Days’) we weren’t even in the studio together.’

So do you see DevilDriver as a new beginning for you? ‘Yes…but it’s still hard work. People talk about DevilDriver having a very different sound to Coal Chamber but even back when I was writing Loco (one of Coal Chamber’s first hits) I was listening to…and being influence by Emporer. Back then I wanted to be like that but the musicians around me didn’t want to follow…we were electronic…Goth and it was new.’

That lead to the question that I had been so nervously waiting to ask. Could he ever see Coal Chamber reforming? ‘I don’t know. A week ago if you had asked me that I would have said definitely no, but three days ago…and you’re the first person I’m telling this… three days ago Meegs the guitarist rang me to say he is getting himself off the drugs and apologized for the hell he put me through. It’s brought peace to me…I can go to bed of a night with peace.’

Well perhaps we may have Coal Chamber back together again one day but if DevilDriver keeps producing albums like ‘The Last Kind Words’ we are hardly going to complain.

Dave Griffiths

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An interview with Clare Bowditch is really a chat with a talented performer who is not just passionate about her own music but someone who is passionate about music and life in general.

The first part of our chat revolves around a great number of subjects such as; the lack of music festivals in Gippsland, Aussie Hip-Hop, how great The Herd’s cover of ‘I Was Only 19’ is and what a great musician Paul Kelly is.

Clare is excited about all these topics but her excitement rises to another level when talk turns to her magnificent new album ‘The Moon Looked On’ and The Chill Island Festival (to be held at Churchill Island on November 4^th) of which she is the curator of. ‘Chill Island is going to be great,’ she says. ‘We’ve already got Gotye and Ben Kweller and worked so hard to get Paul Kelly as well.’ She fails to mention that she will also be performing.

Aside from organizing Chill Island, Clare has been busy promoting her latest album, ‘The Moon Looked On’, an album that many believe would have been a difficult album to produce after Clare’s ARIA win last year, however Clare dismisses it with a laugh. ‘It actually didn’t affect the album at all because it was virtually finished, but it did actually re-inspire is.’

I notice when talk turns to her ARIA win she still describes it is a ‘surprise’ but also says that ‘it’s one of my proudest moments…it was voted for by my peers.’ I ask her if she feels the same way about a number of her tracks including the terrific ‘Divorcee By 23’ making it into Triple J Hottest 100 last year and she replies, ‘Yeah but it’s different, it’s great, that means the punters have the music in their lounge room’.

But it hasn’t only just been becoming an ARIA-award winner that has been a major change for Clare in her life recently. She has also recently married her partner and long time music collaborator, Marty Brown as well as given birth to twins. But of all those things it has been her honeymoon to Vietnam that has most inspired ‘The Moon Looked On.’ There is a definite Asian feel to the album and it is something that Clare is proud of ‘We brought back a lot of different instruments from overseas… from different cultures, although we wasn’t trying to make it (the album) sound like a different culture. But we did have a lot of fun and we’ve used an electric guitar this time.’

In fact ‘The Moon Looked On’ sounds very different to her last album (‘What Was Left’), it uses blue grass, some brass even a bit of country, I ask Clare what she love about making this album and she quickly says, ‘Working with Mick Turner was fantastic…I’m a massive Dirty Three fan…and he was pure professionalism…it was so exciting.’ So working with Mick Turner was fun but what’s it like recording and songwriting with her now husband, Marty? ‘It can be intense and have hardcore moments but he is one of the few people who is completely honest with… if it’s shit he says it’s shit.’

One thing is for sure nothing that could be described that way has made it onto ‘The Moon Looked On’, an album with such an intriguing title I just had to ask what it was about, ‘Well the album is all about intimate stories, there is a naughtiness in the songs… and even we people think they are isolated. And the moon is a witness to all of that…us stuck in our own world, but mostly the album is about lust and temptation.’

It’s not surprising that the album tells stories; it has become very apparent that Clare Bowditch is one of the greatest story-telling songwriters around. She is embarrassed when I tell her this but she happily tells me where she gets her ‘stories’ from, ‘Some of the songs are from my life…this album is definitely a step into fiction. Other stories I get from watching people and asking personal questions from people I don’t know all that well.’

As our talk goes back to songwriters we both respect we talk about artists that Clare has covered in the past, Crowded House and Leonard Cohen are two stand-outs so I ask her if she could cover any song what would it be. She laughs, ‘It’s funny we were talking about Paul Kelly before because I’d cover Paul Kelly’s ‘Look So Fine, Feel So Low’.’ She then breaks into song and sings part of the song to me. Even down a phone line a performance from Clare Bowditch sounds so intimate and I end the interview by asking how she manages to capture such an intimate sound on her albums, ‘It’s the way we record. We use reels and decks because we love he format. Marty talks about the warmth of the recording on analogue.’

Dave Griffiths

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