Interview and show photos by Katrin Malt

When PAIN is in town, it’s kind of sin not to have a little chat with Peter Tägtgren. Pain started a second part of the `Coming Home` tour in the middle of April. They arrived to Tallinn on April 17th and Metal Shock Finland’s new freelancer Katrin Malt had an opportunity to talk with Peter about recent and upcoming touring, as well as work done in his studio. Sorry folks, conspiracy therories did not come up this time, but do check out some of what Peter revealed below, along with the full interview on the audio player below.

Peter always seems so comfortable on stage. He’s been doing it for over 20 years and feels like the stage is his second home, but when asked whether he feels anxiety before shows, Peter said:

“You know, when you work with the computers and stuff like that, anything can go wrong, cause we have the keyboard tone on computer and also some of the light programming. Now we don’t have the same big stage as we had in Finland, on the first part, but there’s always something that can go wrong. If it’s not only drums and guitar amps and rock’n’roll. So you always think, is everything gonna work, and also with the monitors we have, our sounds and headphones and stuff, anything can go wrong or break at any time. Even for big bands, shit happens.”

Speaking of touring, in February Pain played in USA, on a cruise 70000 Tons of Metal:

“It was good. We had some technical problems, but in the end, I think it was ok. The first gig was like 3 o’clock in the morning, American time, that means we’d been up for 45 hours. So you went on stage, really tried to give everything, and you feel after the second song like, oh my god, I’m so tired I can hardly sing anymore. The second gig went much better!”

He also stated, when speaking about the American tour that didn’t happen:

“Hopefully now we can do it in September instead!”

Besides recording new Immortal album in his Abyss studio and being involved in other different projects (that we will talk about in the future), Peter and his son Sebastian are working together on a new project:

“Me and my son have done like 20 songs, we started in January. We’re just spitting out ideas, we document them and put them on the side, and when we have enough ideas, we start making them into songs.”

I asked, if it is easy to work with Sebastian, and Peter said without any hesitation:

“Yeah, really easy!”

Instead of having typical father-son relationship, they’re more like friends. Well, with some exceptions to seldom bitching which he really tries to avoid. So we ended up talking about Peter’s own youth:

“My mom was on her knees, going like: „Please, for once, let me not have a phone call from the school every week.” Cause I did something fucked up you know. But then I started playing drums and I really slowed down!”

We spoke more about Peter’s work as a producer, challenges and risks he has taken. I also asked whether there is some professional critique as well, regarding to music he hasn’t produced himself:

“Yeah, sometimes. It’s both, good and bad, but for me it’s like: I would have done it differently. I also do that with albums I listened 20 years back and I’m like, oh my god, what was I thinking. So that’s just how it is.”

To sum up the interview, I asked one big question: What is Peter’s next big adventure?

“I don’t know. I don’t have any real goals. I think my goal is to do this with my kid. To finish that off and get it out and see what people think. I don’t really know, how it’s gonna sound, so I can’t really tell you it’s gonna sound like this or that. It’ll be more modern I think, metal you know. Not Hypocrisy, but a little bit more newer or fresher. And we don’t know yet, who’s gonna sing, cause he’s practicing now singing, he’s never done it before in his whole life.”

The full interview can be heard on the audio player below: