INTERVIEW: Ivar Bjørnson – Enslaved

Ahead of their upcoming UK tour with HIGH ON FIRE, Distorted Sound sat down with ENSLAVED bassist Ivar Bjørnson to discuss touring in all its shapes and forms and the award-winning E record from last year. Along the way, we discovered why flower gardens are highly recommended, OPETH‘s wind problem and why hunger doesn’t wait for anyone, even in the middle of a show…

Ivar, thank you very much for joining me today! Let’s have a quick re-cap first: how has 2018 been so far for ENSLAVED?

Ivar: It’s been great, man! We did a really good US tour at the beginning of the year, we’ve done a couple of really good festivals, we’ve just come back from an Australia/Asia/Japan tour and now we’re about to hit the UK with HIGH ON FIRE so it’s been really good!

Do you know the HIGH ON FIRE guys well at all?

Ivar: We know them a little bit from hanging out at Roadburn and such events; our singer’s the one who probably knows them best in terms of friendship, so it’s going to be a good one!

And it’ll have been nearly a year since you were last on tour in the UK when you opened for OPETH; are you looking forward to coming back?

Ivar: Absolutely – touring the UK is always good for us. There’s always a ‘coming home’ feeling about it: it was one of the countries we started touring the earliest so I’m looking forward to it!

Is there any reason why you decided to come back with a co-headline tour?

Ivar: Actually, it’s been a plan in the working for a long time that we wanted to go out on tour but share the stage with a band who would help present a package that would relate to what we do with our scene and our genre. We feel that we have a lot of potential fans in the so called ‘doom’ or ‘alternative metal’ scene and we’re one of the extreme metal bands that have been lucky to incorporate those elements into our sound, so we wanted to do a tour which presented that to our fans. We know they’re very open-minded so maybe they can experience some of the stuff that we enjoy a lot and, in return, we really hope to play in front of HIGH ON FIRE’s audience and show that we can offer them something too.

It’s also the first time in the UK with your new drummer – how’s he settling in?

Ivar: Just amazing, of course, it’s always a bit of heartache to, for lack of a better term, ‘break up’ with a guy who’s been in the band for such a long time. Cato [Bekkevold, former ENSLAVED drummer] really brought the band up several notches and put so much into the band, so when he decided it was time for him to retire we really couldn’t have been luckier. Iver [Sandøy, new ENSLAVED drummer] has been co-producing our albums since 2010, he’s been stepping in for Cato on occasions before when needed and whilst it’s still rough and emotional, I don’t think we could have had a better transition. We’ve done some summer shows and the Australia/Asia tour with him and I really feel we’re sounding better than ever.

And it would stand to reason that Cato retiring as opposed to leaving because of musical differences made things easier?

Ivar: Exactly. It was the same with (former member) Herbrand Larsen before that as well. You know, I still consider myself fairly young at 40 but we’re so lucky to have such a stable lineup and when these guys have left it’s always been on the best of terms possible and we’re still in touch with Cato weekly if not daily and he still ‘harasses’ us when he sees we’re having a rough time (chuckles) so it’s all good.

Good to hear! What’s your favourite touring memory so far?

Ivar: Oh man, there’s so many so I’m going to go with the one that popped into my head just now; the 2009 tour we did with OPETH in the US was a lot of fun and that was also the beginning of reaching further into an audience that we wanted to reach. It was also the tour where we played in Washington DC and the OPETH guys had rigged a fart machine into our monitor system; that proved a bit of a challenge to keep a straight face whilst you’re playing a rough, dark song and there are farts going off in your monitors!

That’s so childish and yet so funny at the same time! What sort of things do you get up to on your days off?

Ivar: We do like to see things and take in various sights. For example, we had a day off in Singapore and went to visit their flower gardens which was special. We’ve been in cities where they’ve had particular museums revolving around science and specific cultures so they’ve been interesting, but also days off allow us to sample some of the local breweries; we do like finding a nice brewery with good food! The best story came from Canada, in a city called Regina, we did everything we could to pronounce it so it didn’t sound like ‘vagina’ and everyone assured us that was how it was meant to be said, and they had this fantastic local brewery serving wild boar burgers and the best beer around. And of course, we love meeting the locals!

That’s really cool! What’s the craziest or most unusual thing you’ve ever seen at an ENSLAVED show?

Ivar: I think the weirdest was in San Francisco when we had a guy pulling out his lunch pack and enjoying his lunch in the front row of our show. It was a sold out, 900 capacity venue and everyone around was going mental, moshing, circle-pitting, etc, and here was this one guy really enjoying his sandwich. [laughs]

That’s amazing. Are there any surprises in store for when you come back to the UK?

Ivar: Yes, there are. I won’t ruin the surprise of course, but we are listening to what people are asking for and I think we’re going to bring something in the setlist that I think people are really going to be pleasantly surprised about this time around.

So there could be songs in there that fans have been asking you to play for a while?

Ivar: Yes, exactly.

Awesome, looking forward to it! And also, we’re getting ever closer to 2021 which is your 30th anniversary. Has doing an anniversary tour ever appealed to you as a band?

Ivar: It didn’t previously, we never considered ourselves as an anniversary type band, but then we did a few one-off shows to celebrate our 25th anniversary in 2016 where we did these ‘historical’ sets: multiple dates in the same city and we divided the set up to cover the first four albums and that really appealed because seeing the same people coming to the shows, getting very involved and singing along was a lot of fun so I think we’ve come to accept that we’re a band who has been around for a long time and delivering what people want in terms of an ‘old school’ set doesn’t feel weird anymore so we’ll definitely be doing something for the 30th anniversary in a couple of years.

Cool! Talking of albums. I know it’s been nearly a year since you released E, but there’s one aspect of the record that would be cool to touch on and that’s the fact that you won the Spellmanprisen Award (the Norwegian equivalent of the Grammys) for Best Metal Album. We in the UK can take quite a dim view on awards ceremonies, particularly within the metal scene, but how important is it for you to win this?

Ivar: It’s very important, I would say the nomination is the most important thing though. We’ve had nine nominations and won five of them but to have the nomination is probably more important because the awards have such a broad base of voting. There are journalists, other musicians, bloggers and other individuals in the industry nominating what they think is the best album of the year so being part of the shortlist is the big thing. The actual winning is of course lovely because you get the trophy and people remember you for it but of course I think that we have to be realistic and appreciate that there’s a lot of other factors involved. Norway is obviously known for its black and extreme metal but there are many bands playing melodic metal, AOR, hard rock, thrash metal etc, so maybe ENSLAVED has won more than any other band because we have so many areas that we cross into. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are the highest quality or most liked band or anything like that! That said, every time we’ve been nominated has felt like a huge acknowledgement and a big pat on the shoulder, we just have to ensure that it doesn’t mean we’re better than anyone else or already at the finish line, it has to be motivation.

Exactly, and it was also noted that you won the award for four consecutive albums between 2004 and 2010. Was there that part of you, when you won it last year, that was ever so slightly relieved to have picked up the award after an extended period without one?

Ivar: [laughs] the first three were great and we were very happy with the hat-trick of awards, but the fourth one really shocked us. I think when the fifth happened we were prepared for it in a way, but the eight year gap between them was also a good sign that there were a lot of young bands coming up with different genres and taking over, so we definitely saw a really healthy metal scene develop over time. It didn’t become habitual or anything but we always hoped to win it and winning the fifth one felt really good as a result. We also felt that E was a big achievement for us because we incorporated so much of our history into it and still felt like we were moving forward with our sound: as a result, winning the award both felt deserved and lucky that we could still compete with the bands coming through.

Awesome. Finally, once the UK tour’s finished, what’s next?

Ivar: We’re going to focus a little bit on our home turf, there’ll be a Scandinavian tour for most of November with dates all around Norway, Sweden and even a Danish one which is going to be fun. 2019 is going to be dedicated to songwriting because it already feels like a long time since we did the last record!

So by the reckoning we’d be looking at a new ENSLAVED record in 2020, 2021 then?

Ivar: I wouldn’t be surprised, no.

We very much look forward to that then. Ivar, thank you for chatting with me today and enjoy the tour!

Ivar: Thank you man, it’s been a pleasure!

ENSLAVED are currently touring across mainland Europe and the UK with HIGH ON FIRE. Tour dates can be found here.

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