The prog's bollocks
Ten years in, Swedish prog metallers Opeth were tired of toiling in obscurity. Then Blackwater Park put them on the map and changed extreme metal forever
WORDS: RICH HOBSON
PRESS
Martín Méndez, Martin Lopez, Peter Lindgren, Mikael Åkerfeldt
Opeth’s Blackwater Park line-up
PRESS
when Mikael Åkerfeldt joined Opeth in 1990, his head was filled with dreams. Though he gorged on a diet of death metal and “hopelessly obscure” prog records, he spent his formative years starry eyed as heavy metal conquered the world one stadium at a time.
But 10 years later, Opeth weren’t conquering stadiums – they weren’t even winning over pubs. “Our first headline show was at the White Horse in High Wycombe – it was like Bad News, an old guy and his dog showed up!” Mikael says.
It was 2001 and Opeth were working on album number five, their previous albums having achieved a positive critical reception and earning them a cult reputation for boundarypushing extreme metal. As nice as that was, it didn’t compete with Mikael’s childhood dreams of “swimming pools filled with cash” and “a couple of Rolls-Royces”.
“But then, I probably should have been suspicious when we signed our first contract and it was done in a boiler room!” he chuckles. “We were nobodies and we were hungry.”
Unencumbered by fame and glory, Opeth spent much of their first decade in their native Stockholm, writing music, going to parties and playing the occasional show. But on the opposite coast, in Gothenburg, melodic death metal was brewing up a storm.