Interview with Fred Estby of Dismember
March 2006: Interview and photos by Chris Kee

You’ve used Dan Seagrave for the cover artwork again this time. How does that relationship work?
It’s mainly Matti who has the contact with him, but I have talked to him a couple of times too. I really like him and I think he likes us too. He listens to our ideas and then just does his own thing. We respect him enough to do that and I think that’s why things always turn out good. 

Will you be using him again next time?
Hopefully, yes. Things seem to be working out really well with him.

Does the cover artwork relate to any song on the album in particular?
Yes, the first song, ‘The God That Never Was’. Matti had this idea when he was writing the lyrics for that one. 

How’s the tour going so far?
Great. Really good. We’ve done Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Holland, Austria…it feels like we’re getting a better response than ever. 

Does it feel like the momentum is still building from the …Iron Crosses… album?
Absolutely. And the promotion for this album has been much better than for the last one. 

How has the whole touring experience changed since the early days?
Oh, it is very different. I have got three kids and a wife so it’s a different story. It’s not fun in the same way. It’s fun to be on stage and it’s fun to meet people, fun to travel and see the world but still you have something back home that is giving you a kind of bad conscience about the whole thing. Being away you miss so many responsibilities, so when I am home I really concentrate on catching up on everything I missed, trying to make up for everything that I haven’t done at home while I’ve been away. We have tried to make the tours shorter. Also with the longer tours you don’t feel you are getting a better financial agreement. On shorter tours you can concentrate on playing better venues, venues you really want to play at, where the people really want to see you. The venues that show the most interest are the ones where the band most wants to play and that makes it fair for the band and the audience. 

Last time I saw you was at the Arnhem Metal Meeting. How was that show and the whole day for you guys?
Great. It was very well organised and it was great fun to be there. Sometimes it is fun to have a festival like that where you meet up with all the Swedish bands and all the German bands, English bands. You meet up with old friends that you haven’t seen for a while. 

And how was the Australian tour that you did last year?
Great. Awesome. I didn’t actually realise there were so many old school, hard core fans there, but it was amazing. We made lots of cool new friends and had a really good time. I think they were the easiest two weeks I’ve ever had to be away from home because we played such great shows and met so many cool people.

I tend to find that your name commands a great deal of respect within the metal scene but that respect hasn’t really translated into album sales over the years. Is that situation frustrating for you?
No. I think it is better to be respected and to have a small but hard core and enthusiastic audience than to be a band that is always going up and down – sometimes playing halls, sometimes playing shitty clubs, never knowing what your next release will bring. Offspring is a very good example. When they started out they were a band that had some respect within the hardcore scene and then, hey, everybody loved them but they lost their credibility. That’s too bad because I don’t think they ever intended to just do music to be on MTV. They’ve been a real roller-coaster band…I guess they’re not unhappy about it because they’ve probably made enough money not to be. 

I always felt that around the time of the Death Metal album you should really have been taking that step up the ladder…
Yes. I think the problem then was that had we been on a different label, one that actually appreciated us… I’m not saying it was only down to the label but the thing was they weren’t supporting us, there were no ads and I don’t think they were happy about the whole style. They actually thought that death metal was commercially dead, you know? The album before was actually in the charts in Germany. In fact they had all the bands on their label in the charts for like a year. Then when this album came out they just said ‘fuck off’ to everybody and became interested in something else. Then other smaller labels came in. It’s not all about the labels but…

How much ambition is there still in the band to take things to a higher level?
Of course we would like to be bigger but not at the cost of being a band that plays for people who actually don’t care. I would like to expose the band to a wider spectrum so that people could realise that this kind of music has a lot of potential. Not only that but this isn’t the kind of music that is going to disappear in a couple of years. We’ve been here for eighteen years.

And what would you say have been the happiest and most enjoyable parts of those eighteen years?
I think now. We have more time and we are actually living from our music right now. We managed to a bit in the early ‘90s but not much. That was when we actually built the credibility that we have now. We did a lot of touring, we had debts, we just lived the life and there was no other way. For many years we had very bad financial status so we had to work, we had to have day jobs. Then we have had families and member changes, we’ve been through a lot of harsh periods. Apart from now there was the time when we actually got to put out an album, to tour and we actually sold albums too. That was also a very exciting.

After Hate Campaign you guys virtually disappeared. What actually happened then?
We actually went to the US and did a one month tour which didn’t go too bad, but the thing was we didn’t get much money for it. We’d been slaving for a contract that we wanted to get out of, we didn’t have much money, went on tour and didn’t make much money, we barely survived. We had to have jobs in between and we had member changes which didn’t really work out. Then me and Matti both had kids coming and we really needed money and couldn’t be away much. We went away even though we had kids. Matti went on tour when his son was only one week old. I went to Japan when my middle son was only like five weeks old, because we felt we had to take the chances. We just never got any European tours, just a few Swedish gigs, the US tour and the Japan tour.

How is your relationship with Regain?
It’s great; they are absolutely the best so far. We talk a lot over the phone, we see each other occasionally. With a German label it was a different story. We had to fly down there maybe once a year, once every second year, and there has been so much in between, they have so many bands, that of course it’s not going to be that interesting to have a meeting with us. 

What actually went wrong with Karmageddon Media?

They were a cool label also but they did a very big mistake and lost financial credibility with the magazines, as I understand it. Also they signed too many shitty bands. Some bands that deserved to be lifted up, but not at that time, I think personally. There were too many bands that they could have waited for and put there energy into the few good bands that they had. 

You’ve had a lot of line-up changes since the Death Metal album, how confident are you of the stability of the current line-up?
Very, because Martin the new guitar player has been very involved in everything. Nowadays we do all our business stuff ourselves and me and him have been working together on all that since the …Iron Crosses… album. We’ve been doing all the e-mails and booking the shows, he takes one territory and I take another. Now everyone in the band is really involved in all the different areas of this band’s obligations. Now we work more as a company and as friends. A really tight unit. The new bassist Tobias, he’s also very nice and laid back.

Why did previous bassist Johan Bergeback actually leave?
Well since the …Iron Crosses… album he didn’t seem to have the time for rehearsing. We always rehearse five days a week now, this is our job now. He is a boat mechanic during the summer and it was too much – full-time band, full-time job…and a girlfriend.

Your music has remained undiluted by all the passing trends in metal, but do you still keep up with the metal scene?
Yes absolutely. I’m still very much interested in metal and try to read all the metal magazines every month. I like some things, I dislike some things, but at least I want to try and stay connected to it. Sometimes as you get older you can get very comfortable and very conservative. We are conservative when it comes to death metal I think, but also you have to know what you are talking about.

Fred did go on to reveal to me exactly how Dismember get that wonderful guitar sound but his explanation is totally obliterated on my tape by the sound checking support bands, so I guess that’s a question to be re-asked another day. The show that followed this interview was fantastic and if you haven’t heard The God That Never Was yet you should rectify that immediately.