I remember the first time I heard Fireside. It was late 1994 and a friend brought their debut album Fantastic Four when he visited me in London, and as I soaked up everything popular music culture had to offer at the time because I felt lost in Britpop country, it was much needed. Let’s say Fireside saved me from falling victim to Britpop music.

A few months later, in April 1995, famed for its crunchy guitars, quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, and big riffs, Fireside’s epic second album Do Not Tailgate was released. The album won them a Swedish Grammy, saw them get signed to Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, and turned their track “Kilotin” into a monster hit, and Fireside did several US tours that culminated with the prestigious Lollapalooza tour.

The band toured frequently in Europe with three albums being released between 1997 and 2003, and after their tour with the 2003 album Get Shot the band left the tour van and never returned to the scene (save for a few one-offs) until now – nineteen years later.

Messed!Up met up with Fireside’s frontman Kristofer Åström at Fyrens Ölkafé in Gothenburg and ended up in a chat about the challenges of being nineteen years older and touring and restarting the band with two new band members.

A Nineteen-Year-Long Journey

On our way here I tried to explain Fireside’s influence on the Swedish music scene to our photographer – it’s a generational gap – and I boiled it down to the poster in High Fidelity just to get some sort of common cultural reference.
Yeah, that story is still fun to think about (laugh). Our American label had connections to the film industry and managed to squeeze it into one of the scenes in the movie. I still remember us going to the premiere in Stockholm only to see the poster, like “Check it out, there it is! Now we can leave” (laugh). It didn’t get us anywhere, no American tour or anything, but it’s still fun to see it when you watch the movie today, especially as the book and the movie have a cult following.

Almost thirty years after your debut EP Softboy and nineteen years after the latest album Get Shot, Fireside resurrected and released Bin Juice. I read in the album promo from the label that you left the tour bus after your latest tour and Pelle said that you all should meet up to work on new songs as soon as possible, and then it took nineteen years for it to happen.
(laugh) It’s not entirely true of course, we have worked on new music during the years that have passed. It took us nineteen years to get the new album ready for release, but we have worked on it next to our other projects. Pelle and I started writing demos in 2006 and talked about releasing something back then already, but it never happened. Life happened instead, and we got entangled in our other projects and in family life.

I had some sort of breakthrough with my solo project and wanted to work on that at the time, and Pelle recorded lots of bands in his studio, like The Hives and Sahara Hotnights. But it was never about us putting everything on hold, we have worked on other music projects, just not as Fireside.

I listened to a podcast recently where you talk about working on Bin Juice and that it was more fun to meet up for rehearsals than doing live shows. I get the impression that Bin Juice may just be a temporary comeback for the band because you had these songs to release.
We really don’t know what will happen. Fireside isn’t the band it used to be because two of our original members left the band, and we don’t know how it will continue. But we’re talking about the band as something that will stay in the scene for a few more years, and we have even more songs, actually many enough to release another album today.

But we also need energy to continue, we’re not twenty anymore (laugh). Just look at the release gig we did in Stockholm a few weeks ago; I was completely exhausted after the show. It’s very different from my solo shows where I stand still and pluck the guitar strings for an hour. Fireside is something else, it’s this raw power.

But don’t all bands evolve over time and calm down a bit when band members grow older? Just look at old punk bands that return to the scene; they don’t have the energy they had forty years ago, but fans don’t care.
Maybe it is like that, and it’s also one of the reasons Pär and Frans [former original band members] left the band. When you are a group of people that have stayed together for such a long time as Fireside, you get stuck in routines that are hard to change even if you’ve been on hiatus for fourteen years. The routines are still there.

For instance, if you say “I won’t have more than one beer before the show” you’ll keep that promise for one show and then you’re back to how it used to be when you had five or six beers before the gig starts, but you forget that life has changed and that you can’t handle it anymore and will be super tired the next day. You have to break with old routines and accept that you have changed, but it’s hard when you’ve done something in a certain way for twenty years.

It was a lot different when we were young. We didn’t have problems with anything because we didn’t have anything to care about the next day, it was never a problem to drink and play shows. Today, you’re slowly dying the next day if you don’t cut it out (laugh).

I guess that as life changes off stage when people start families and have job careers next to being in a band, tensions arise in a band when you get new goals.
Exactly, at least there’s a potential conflict, but you have mixed feelings about it because the reason you started the band was to have fun together and behave like total pricks (laughs), and not have to worry about family and work. And then you realize it was something you did back then and nothing you can or want to do today. The problem is that it never happens at the same time for everyone, and that can cause problems.

But how important is Fireside today? You have it all worked out with your solo career and Pelle does lots of studio work. But at the same time, Fireside is your brainchild.
Sure it is! I love what’s happening with the band right now and have put my solo career on hold for a while to see what happens with Fireside the next year. Well, I’ll probably do some one-off gigs and write new songs but it’s not my primary focus, it’s all about Fireside.

Something we’ve reflected on lately is how relevant Fireside is in the 2020s. We know our limitations and that most people come out for our shows for nostalgic reasons – most people are between 35 and 55 – but we’re fine with that. If you look at the crowd at the release show in Stockholm it was mostly people that have followed us since ’93, and that’s great. Just to know you’re still relevant for some people is amazing. We’re not stupid and understand that we won’t have a major breakthrough with Fireside, we won’t do an American tour, but it’s not what it is about anymore. For us, it was important to release Bin Juice just because we didn’t want Get Shot to be the last album we released.

New Blood Rejuvenation

If you were looking to exorcise a little aggression, anger, and frustration back in the nineties, you would listen to any band from the north of Sweden, and Fireside were a major player in that scene with records like Fantastic Four and, especially, Do Not Tailgate. The band’s reputation brought them across the Atlantic and they even had the guts to turn down an offer from one of the scenes’ star producers at the time, Rick Rubin.

At the end of October, Bin Juice was released nineteen years after Get Shot, and although they have evolved as songwriters it’s an album tainted with references to Do Not Tailgate. However, Åström points out that whatever music they write today, it will turn out a lot poppier than it used to be because they’re older.

Bin Juice was released a month ago and many reviews point out that the album is a mix of Do Not Tailgate and Uomini D’onore, your nineties albums.
We actually had it in mind when we started working on the album, to write songs that could have been on Do Not Tailgate, but it wasn’t any fun at all. We have evolved as songwriters and whatever we write today turns out to be poppier than we want it to be.

I guess that the Americana influences from your solo project and Pelle’s influences from the bands he works with influence Fireside quite much as well.
Exactly, and we realized it kind of quickly. If I listen to Do Not Tailgate today I still think most songs are awesome, but we didn’t see it like that in the nineties, it was just music to get us live shows. Those songs are amazing even today, but we can’t write that kind of music anymore because we don’t get that type of input anymore or have the same kind of influences today. That was a completely different life, we were young boys with very few things in life other than music. But there are influences of that period on the new album, and I guess it’s what people hear when they listen to it.

We gave up on the attempt to write a follow-up to Do Not Tailgate, it wouldn’t pan out well at all. Instead, we started writing songs that felt relevant today, and that was new to us and is the reason it took a while to get enough songs for a full album. Or maybe I should say that it took a long time before we were happy with the result.

We’ve been through changes as well that extended it even more. In the beginning, we wrote the songs with electronic drums and tried several drummers before Jacob [Douglas] became a permanent band member, and that took quite some time.

I hate to say it and thought I never would, but it has been a really long journey (laugh).

But how has Fireside changed after Kate and Jacob joined the band? Usually, new band members bring new energy and a potential future.
They really want this to continue, and that’s what is great about working in a new band setting. Kate and Jacob have brought lots of new energy and new ideas, and don’t know anything about or past, like minor conflicts in the band. They put loads of time into Fireside and have even printed new band t-shirts, and do those things we don’t have the energy for doing anymore (laugh). Pelle and I would probably just have told our label “We need t-shirts, get it for us” (laugh).

Having new people with that kind of energy makes it a lot more fun to meet up, and it feels like the band has been rejuvenated. I really enjoy rehearsals today, something we hated to do in the past. It was something we had to do before a tour but we usually just did one rehearsal and did the rest during soundcheck (laugh), it was kept to a minimum back then. But Kate and Jacob changed it completely and have had a huge impact on the atmosphere in the band, it’s fun to meet up now.

But don’t for a second think they’re new in the scene. Kate is the oldest in Fireside and has played in several bands before and Jacob has been involved in heaps of other projects – and they still are. What’s important is that they don’t care about our past, it’s here and now for them with Fireside.

If you allow yourself to reflect on the ‘new’ Fireside and compare it to the nineties, how is it different today?
That’s hard to say but we have been reflecting on it quite much ourselves. When I watch videos on YouTube from our release gig in Stockholm I spontaneously think “It’s not bad at all, we still got it” and then I watch older videos from the nineties, especially one gig we did in Lund [note: city in the south of Sweden] in 1996 and think “Fuck, we were amazing”. We were such a good band back then, knew the songs super well, and were such good performers. So, the analysis of Fireside now and then is quite clear, we were heaps better live in the nineties (laugh). Today, we’re a tired version of the young us (laugh). But it’s natural, it happens to all bands with age.

You have a few gigs planned for the spring, especially in Sweden but also a few dates in Germany. But what happens after those gigs? Any plans for doing a festival tour?
Yeah, we have ten dates in Sweden and four in Germany and then we don’t know what will happen, but there’s a rumor about gigs in Japan. Doing the full festival tour would have been awesome, but we haven’t booked anything yet.

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Photos (band): Ekaterina Yakyamseva
Photos (interview): Björn Vallin
Photo gallery

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Fireside pages

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