Interview

It's been a while... almost five years. But they are back. THERION is back with a huge gift: "Beloved Antichrist". A true three hours opera. Rich and complex is this work and Christofer, the mastermind behind it, is kindly Ok to discuss about it. To many questions, so few time. Let's go!

SBM: Hello Christofer! Thank you for your time! It's really been a while!
And first of all congratulation for your chart position.

Christofer: Yeah that was not expected!

You weren’t expecting it at all?

Not that we would be charted higher than ever, no. Actually I don’t really care about these charts. They just show how much better or worse you’ve been in relation to other releases that week.
I care about how the sales look like half a year after the release, but it’s an indicator. If you don’t go on the charts at all that probably means your sales are not going to be that great. But if you chart higher than you ever did, that shows a bigger interest than usual.

Yeah and it’s more impressive because it’s not a “regular” album, it’s a three and a half hours masterpiece! And apparently it was a long time dream for you, so how did you feel when you wrote or recorded the last note?

Just relieved… Because it was so much work… Just to give you an example: the guitars. Every time you hear a guitar rhythm, there’s actually eighteen guitars. It’s a trick from the 80s when you pull down the distortion from extreme to nothing and then you can mix different guitars, different amplifiers and create a new sound.
And even if we’re a professional band, that doesn’t mean the first take we do is perfect. So to get those eighteen takes you miss a few times so it’s maybe fifty to sixty takes for those eighteen. That’s quite massive, so of course it was an extremely heavy work and once that we’re done with the guitars I had to continue again with the vocals. There’s fifteen vocalists and you start from scratch, you have to set everything up, telling them the story, making them getting into their role, you need half an hour before they start singing good and again and again with fifteen singers.
And then it’s bass, drums and the orchestration, but we never planned it to be this long, it just grew: the story needed more music to be told and suddenly we had four hours. But I realized we could never record four hours, so we recorded three and a half hour but the final release is just three hours and four minutes; we had to cut it down more, there’s a lot of unreleased material.
So well I’m just happy to get out of here alive, I’m so exhausted that I didn’t feel happy or anything, just relieved.

You just need a few time to process all this and finally see how people react to the songs.

We’ve had good reactions to the new songs. This is so typical: if you look on comments on the history of internet, since about 2001, it would appear like we never released a successful album. Because people who are unhappy are more likely to express themselves then people who just liked it.
Somebody who like it would not feel the urge to just write “great”, but the ones who don’t like it have some sort of forced behaviour, they must write “Oh I don’t like it” (He’s talking with a funny voice).
So when we posted the pre songs on YouTube, 90% of people would click that they liked it, but 50% of the comments would be negative. So it’s quite symptomatic, if you would read on internet you’d say “Oh nobody likes it!” but then we chart higher than ever so… typical from our times.

Those previews of the record you posted on You Tube; did you choose to do it or was it a request from the record company? Because actually I think it doesn’t make really sense to give ten minutes of music when the album lasts three hours.

It was the company. They wanted little singles and we didn’t have anything against it. But unfortunately we didn’t have time to make a video so we just got a few amount of money and they sent it to a guy who did it. We did an… iphone action game. We thought “Let’s do it like that, people will talk”.

And you chose a very good song, it’s a perfect epic ending to the story!

And it’s a song that make sense to be taken separately because it’s the theme of Antichrist, so it’s kind of… not related to the story, it’s something that comes afterwards. It’s like when the subtitles go down in a movie or in an opera when all the actors come back on stage, it’s more like “Yeah we’re the guys who did the opera”.
It’s weird anyway to release the audio version first, because it’s not an album, it’s like “Jesus Christ Superstar”, you can buy it on CD but nobody would say “Jesus Christ Superstar” is an album. Normally you make the stage play first and so if they like it and say “Oh I’d like to listen to it at home” they can buy the CD as well. Now we’re releasing the soundtrack first and the movie later (Laugh).
Economically it makes sense because in order to sell the stage production we need to show how the music sounds like and I don’t have 100,000 € out of my pocket so we need the record company and if they pay for it they need a product they can sell.

That seems fair, it’s a good deal. Even though I was intrigued the first time I saw the title of the opera: “Beloved Antichrist” because THERION has always written about different mythologies or cultures so why have you chosen Christianity and the text of Vladimir Soloviev to settle you story.

An opera needs to have a good story. If we’d make a weird holocaust opera would your mother go to see it?

Probably not that’s sure!

Exactly. People don’t want to see something abstract. If you make a movie, sure. We can make a movie like “Holy Mountain”, it’s one of my favourite movie, we can make some really obscure subcultural movie where lots of people would say “Wow it’s the best”. But if you want to make a movie, it needs to be big, it needs a story that people can understand. And in the same way if you want to make a rock musical it needs to be comprehensible, you can’t make a jazz album, you can’t be too heavy, it needs to have a lot of variations in the keys, to not be too extreme and you need to have a story otherwise we can make some rock opera the THERION fans would masturbate over in the comments on YouTube but it would never see the stage.
People usually don’t understand how much money you need for a production, we could never do it ourselves, we’ve needed 100,000 € just for the recording. For the stage we’d probably need a million from investors and if one comes with one million euros he or she needs a product he can sell. Nobody’s doing charity just so a couple of fans can be happy on the internet, it’s a capitalistic world and things have to be done realistically and my goal was to create a rock musical that can, in theory, be as popular as some of the big ones.
I’m not saying I believe it will but at least it’s theoretically possible, it’s a little bit longer, it’s very demanding. Maybe we’ll do another cut-down version, this release is a director’s cut version, maybe we’ll shorten it down another half an hour so our mothers can watch it.

You’ve already done a great job musically I have to say, even though I’m still processing… And you also did a great job rewriting the story which is dark, heavy, close and without any woman.

Yeah the first thing I noticed is that it would be a very boring opera without female voices. And an opera needs to have love and an intrigue. The story in the book is a good story but it’s made by a religious person who really thinks he’s telling the real prophecy. So even though we owe our story entirely to Soloviev, it’s more of an inspiration, we took his Antichrist, a few characters. But the beginning for instance would be very difficult to make in an opera with also the geopolitical situation they had in 1800, it’s not really interesting today.

Yeah it’s totally boring in the beginning of the book, with the Pan-Mongolism, wars, I was thinking “Please bring me the Antichrist!!” (Laugh)

It could maybe if you make a big epic movie with an altered reality or whatever, but for an opera it doesn’t make sense and so is the end. You think “What the fuck?”. In opera if you die it’s like “I’m dying ! I’m dying...”. You’re dying for fifteen minutes and you sing about how you’re dying, you pain, your agony, and people will remember you when you’ll go to heaven or hell or whatever. So you need a long epic ending, so his ending was bad for a book and catastrophic for an opera.

Exactly! An earthquake with volcanoes, everybody die!? Come on you can’t end like this!

Yeah that was impossible. An also to give Antichrist a wife makes him more human.

And that’s what I love in your version of the story.

And what I really like also in this story is that Antichrist wasn’t born Antichrist. He accepts the dark gift, which is a different concept, he is a very peculiar religious man who can speaks right to God and Jesus. So he is the superhuman as said in the book but it’s not Antichrist, he had a choice, he could have said “No I don’t want to be Antichrist”.
So he accepts it but his humanity is still preserved and at the end of Act 1 he doubts himself a little bit, “What did I really become?”. He is in love with his wife and he’s not really sure of what he has become or what to do next and then the devil sends Apollonius in the beginning of Act 2, to keep him on track and so on.
And when his wife dies late he really loses his last part of humanity and his mind is completely black.

Yeah but in that way it makes sense. In the book he is mad, megalomaniac, corrupted by his power, he is like that since the beginning. And this is what I loved in your story, his madness comes from sadness and dramatic things like that are perfect for an opera.

Yeah of course. If your wife dies or your child dies, every man would change. But at the death scene, it’s like all these things that happen don’t matter, he becomes a human again, he was born as a human, he becomes the Antichrist and he dies as a human.
And also Johanna who was a fanatic, so sure about her things starts doubting herself when they lie and die. They die as two humans and I like the ending because you don’t really know what happen: did they go to heaven or hell? There’s no answers. It’s not a happy ending, it’s not an unhappy ending or equally unhappy for everybody, no side is winning.
This is not because we want to make a part 2, that would be terrible I hate sequels, they’re never has good as the first one. Look at “Matrix”: everybody loved the first movie.

And the second one is pretty bad.

Yeah especially the second one but also the third one, nobody had the same felling that after the first one. It’s good only if you have a long story from the beginning like “The Lord of The Rings” or “Harry Potter” which have a natural continuation. But to just invented for making people happy or earning more money is not good. Better write something else.

I couldn’t agree more. The story of Soloviev has a moral which is told in the end: “All that glitters is not gold”. What moral have you wanted to express?

There’s no moral, I just wanted entertainment. A Christian, a Satanist, an Atheist can go together and watch this, they’ll have their own thoughts about things and nobody, unless you’re an idiot fanatic will be offended.
Of course you have those Christians fanatic that will be offended by the fact that we changed the story like “Oh this is his prophecy and you make a commercial act out of it”. Sure. You can always step somebody on the foot but it’s like the Islamists: if it’s not exactly how they wanted it’s devil work and everybody has to die. So if you exclude the few crackpots that are not possible to discuss with I would say that 99% of the Christians of the world will have no problems with this.

As a moral he raises the question of “divine values or material values, which one is most worth?”. If you buy the Christian concept then you’ll get your reward in heaven. Is that more worth than having a good life on Earth?
Antichrist really created the perfect world in a material sense but he is the son of the Devil. So is it better that your children are eating, don’t have any diseases and don’t have to worry about war; or is it better to have everything fucked up as it is and have a reward in heaven?
You can ask yourself “What’s the point of living this life?”. Christians say it’s a test but that’s my main problem with Christianity: it’s just invented to control people, like most religions.

Keeping people blind. That’s why I hate religions. Do you have one? Or any beliefs?

No but I’d probably be a Buddhist if I would had chosen a religion. I believe in personal responsibilities for your actions. And that’s the other problem with Christianity: you could ask for forgiveness, you can be a mass murderer and realize what a terrible person you’ve been and you repent, become a good person and you go to heaven. In Buddhism: you’re shit, you create shit, well sorry you’ll be reborn as an ant and maybe somebody will step on you because you don’t deserve anything. And if you’re a good person you reborn as a human again.
I’m not a Buddhist but at least it’s a religion that I find appealing.

I quite agree with you.

I don’t like organized religion at all, I’m spiritual but not religious we could say. Christianity and Islam have a problem: the more a religion is affecting how people live in a material life, the less I like it. Islam has a lot a rules about how to live and also Judaism if you’re a very orthodox Jew like everything has to be kosher, you must not mix the milk and the meat, it’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
If people want to live their lives that way it’s their problem, I’m not criticizing them as long as they don’t affect the society I live in. Concerning Christianity for example in the medieval times if you wouldn’t go to church you would be basically excluded from society, there’s also witch burning obviously. All those three religions have blood on their hands.

That’s why I hate them.

It just corrupt the mind of mankind with some unproven abstract idea of going to heaven.

Some people are ready to blindly believe in it.

I can understand that in the old times when some people had nothing and they ask themselves “Why are we here? Why do I live? Because life is so bad”; I can understand that it could give some hope, like a sort of test. It probably had a social function before for Christianity and maybe also Islam. But in modern society it’s just a waste of everybody’s intellectual capacities.

I like your thinking. Truly! I’d like to talk more about that but it seems that time flies by. Before we end this interview I’d like to ask you about the plans for THERION in the future. A new album in a few years?

No not now… I want vacation.

Well it would be well deserved!

And then I’ll try to sell the production even if it may not be THERION performing it. Let’s be honest now: if you have an audience which will be 90% not THERION fans, why is it so important that I’m sitting in an orchestra and play chords for three hours? Everybody will look at the actors on stage.

Yeah sure, unless you personally want to do this.

No, the first five minutes it would be “Hey down there the band is playing!” and then they would just see what happens on stage, it could be anybody playing guitar. I’d love to seat in the first row with a glass of red wine and enjoy it.
I would love to co-direct it, not entirely it’s too much responsibilities and I don’t have any knowledge. But co-direct it so I can somehow make sure they don’t complex the story up.

Of course, I mean… This is your story now, so you have to keep an eye on it.

I’m very open to different versions, they can perform it with a rock vocalist instead of an opera vocalist, they can absolutely do their own interpretation. The only thing I don’t want is that it should not be a political twist or a religious twist. No religious moral, it should be entertainment for everybody and as long as they keep it in this frame they can do all sorts of versions.
It would also sold a problem for me, because I would be responsible for finding sponsors and I don’t even know exactly what we would need or how much it would cost. It would take me months of research to make a budget and then to try to make the production.
I would rather go the production company: they have the experience, they have the staff, they know what to do and they just make this to the next production. So they buy the production, in best case I can co-direct, my main thing is that it gets staged, that’s why it was written. If this doesn’t get staged it would be my biggest personal failure ever, that’s why I spend all my time on it.

Well I really hope that you could do it. Truly.

I’m sure it will! We have a good story and the music is great.

That’s for sure!
As I said I sadly have to end. So I leave you the final words if you want to say something to the French fans after being absent such a long time.

It’s always nice to come to France, there’s good food, nice people, warm audience, very enthusiastic. We had an amazing show in Paris two days ago and also yesterday in Pratteln where a big part of the audience comes from France and that was the best two shows of the tour so far.

So I hope Lyon will be one of them tonight!

Lyon is good, we never had a bad show.

Let’s not disappoint you then! Thank you very much Christofer and see you on stage tonight!

Thank you very much.