Now the dust has settled on Transatlantic’s long-awaited comeback, Roine Stolt is back with his main band, The Flower Kings. New double album By Royal Decree reunites the founder with original band member, and brother, Michael. We discuss their new material, the upcoming reissues campaign and why Stolt’s keeping an open mind on the future.

Words: Grant Moon

The Flower Kings, L-R: Michael Stolt, Jonas Reingold, Mirko DeMaio, Roine Stolt, Hasse Fröberg, Zach Kamins.

Images: Lilian Forsberg

“[My brother] Michael was about 16 when I drafted him into my band Fantasia in 1979… With our common musical history I can say, ‘Remember that Joni Mitchell album where Jaco Pastorius plays this nice little thing?’, and he knows instantly. And we can talk about Chris Squire’s bass sound on Awaken, things like that.”

Roine Stolt has been reheating some of his old music of late. He’s been working 15-hour days in the lead-up to both the release of The Flower Kings’ sprawling new double album, By Royal Decree, and the impending reissue campaign that will eventually see the band’s entire back catalogue back in print. That’s where the cooking comes in.

“I have the old reel-to-reel tapes,” Stolt tells Prog from his studio in Uppsala, Sweden. “They degrade over time, so what you do is put them in the oven. I know it sounds weird, but you sort of bake them for about 24 hours on a low temperature, and that makes it possible to play the reels again. Then you can transfer the tracks to the digital medium, and from there you can do anything. But it’s like a Cinderella thing – you can only play them once after baking them. Then they start to fall apart.”

So far he has delivered remasters of the band’s 1995 debut, Back In The World Of Adventures, and the follow-up, Retropolis. He already had the stems – the separate master tracks – for those records backed up onto hard drives, but as we speak to him those old reels for Stardust We Are (1997) and Flower Power (’99) are being lovingly prepared, in the Stolt family cooker.