Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt: The Last Will And Testam…
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Of all the encounters Mikael Åkerfeldt has had with his heroes over the years, it’s the night he got pissed and danced with the blonde one from ABBA that sticks in his mind.
It was 2011, and Åkerfeldt’s band Opeth were working on their tenth album, Heritage, at Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios. In the 70s, when it was called Metronome, ABBA had recorded their first five albums there. The same guy still owned the studio, and was still in touch with Agnetha Fältskog, one of their singers. As huge ABBA fans – mandatory in Sweden, punishable by prison for anyone who isn’t – Opeth would bring up her name every so often. “I’d joke: ‘How’s Agnetha doing? When’s she coming down to do guest vocals?’” says Åkerfeldt now.
On the last day of recording, the studio owner invited Opeth for dinner in the flat they owned on top of the studio. Who should open the door while offering a tray of champagne but Agnetha.
“I lost it,” says Åkerfeldt. “I went straight back outside and smoked five cigarettes in a row down to the butt.”
Once he’d got over his nerves, he went in and tried to hold it together. The free-flowing alcohol helped. Over food and booze, Agnetha happily regaled the members of Opeth with old ABBA war stories. The owner and his wife had a jukebox filled with old 1950s singles, which is how, at some point in the evening, Åkerfeldt found himself grooving along to some long-forgotten number with Agnetha from ABBA.
“I danced with the Dancing Queen,” he beams. “Not to Dancing Queen, sadly. The studio owner used to hang out with her, and he said the Heritage record was always out by the stereo in her house – and it wasn’t in the shrink-wrap.” He beams again. “She definitely listened to it.”
Sadly, a fantasy Opeth/ABBA collaboration never happened, although it’s a mark of Opeth’s standing in 2024 that they can still reel in some big names when they need to. Their new album, The Last Will And Testament, features cameo appearances from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and, more bizarrely, Europe singer Joey Tempest.
It’s a concept record, set in the 1920s and centred around the reading of a wealthy patriarch’s will and the response his odious, venal children have to their inheritance, or lack of it. Each song represents a section in the will, with seven of its eight tracks dispensing with traditional titles in favour of the chapter sign, §, and a number (§1, §2, etc). It’s Succession as scripted by Edgar Allan Poe.
“I loved Succession,” says Åkerfeldt. “And I love Poe, so that’s perfect. I need a story to give me focus. I’ve never written good lyrics. They’re a necessary evil to me. You could write about death and Satan and evil and ghosts so many times, and I have written about them many times.”
We’re talking in the downstairs cinema of the Sanctum, London’s most upmarket rock’n’roll hotel. Åkerfeldt sits on a sofa with his legs crossed, wearing an on-brand Jethro Tull T-shirt, while guitarist Fredrik Åkesson leans back in the chair next to him. Åkerfeldt is the king of self-deprecation, a hairier Hugh Grant. “When did I become comfortable with being a singer? Well, never,” he says at one point.
The Last Will And Testament is a mini-tour of Opeth’s musical journey to this point, touching on everything from the knotty prog metal of the late 90s and early 2000s, to the more pastoral, corduroy-jacketed vibes of the past decade or so. Åkerfeldt even sparingly unleashes his old-school death metal growl for the first time on record in 15 years. “People were apparently crying that it was back,” he says, looking equally bemused and pleased at the fact. “I still get criticised because you can actually hear what I’m singing.”
And then there are those cameos. Ian Anderson appears on several tracks, providing some richly thespy narration as the late patriarch and also some strategically deployed flute. It only took Opeth 14 years to get him on one of their records.
“I emailed him in 2010 to ask if he would appear on the Heritage album, and he didn’t reply,” says Åkerfeldt. “Then a few years ago I did a filmed interview at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles. I told this story: ‘I sent an email to Ian Anderson, and that fucker didn’t reply.’ It was tongue-in-cheek, but somebody must have seen it because I got this email: ‘Ian would love to play the flute on your album.’ So of course I asked him to do the narration instead. And somewhere in the process, he asked: ‘[polite voice] Do you need some flute?’”
In the most unlikely hook-up since Lemmy and The Nolans, the track §2 sees Anderson and Joey Tempest trading lines in a kind of call-and-response. Anderson makes sense on an Opeth record. But Tempest?
“Joey Tempest is fucking awesome,” Åkerfeldt says, without irony or hesitation. “We had lunch at my house when I popped the question, so to speak: ‘I have this part, would you be interested?’ And he goes: ‘Let’s do it, turn on the microphone.’ Here’s Joey Tempest saying he’ll record his vocals in my fucking basement.”
But Joey Tempest and Opeth?
“He’s my idol. I always thought Europe were awesome, even during those years when you’re not supposed to listen to bands like that.”
Do you sing The Final Countdown at karaoke?
“I hate karaoke,” he says vehemently. “If you’re a singer, people expect you to be fucking awesome at it. Fredrik is much better at it than I am.”
“Only when I’m pissed,” says Fredrik. “Judas Priest’s Painkiller, I can do that. Full screams.”
During the pandemic, Åkerfeldt almost bought a record shop, called Mickes Skivor (Mike’s Discs) in Stockholm. He and Fredrik are regular customers there. When Mike the owner told Mikael the musician he was selling it, he suggested Åkerfeldt might want to take it on. If nothing else, he wouldn’t have to change the sign.
“I was actually thinking about it,” he says. “I worked in there to learn the ropes, just to see if it was worth buying.”
What were you like as a salesman?
“I was great,” he says, as Fredrik nods in agreement. “Sometimes it felt like I was doing social work. A lot of record collectors are on the spectrum. People didn’t come in to buy, they came in to talk. I felt like their therapist.”
In the end he didn’t buy it. Partly because the owner didn’t really want to sell it. But also, as a man who views old vinyl LPs as holy relics to be revered, actually buying unwanted records depressed the hell out of him.
“It was usually some guy who had passed away and left this huge record collection that his children would never look at, so suddenly it’s become this fucking burden,” he says. “It was such a sad thing. These people had been collecting for years and years, and the kids were just: ‘Fuck this shit.’”
That neatly ties in The Last Will And Testament’s themes of toxic inheritance and internecine family warfare, though Åkerfeldt’s own kids presumably wouldn’t have quite the same unsentimental approach to his own vast record collection. One of them, his 16-year-old daughter Mirjam, appears on the new album, adding ghostly vocals to opening track §1. It’s a sweet touch but a slightly strange one too. Kids are supposed to rebel against their parents’ music, not appear on their records.
“I asked her and she said: [adopts air of distracted teenage nonchalance] ‘Sure,’” says Åkerfeldt Sr. “Apparently we’re big on TikTok, so we’re cool,” he adds with the air of a man who views TikTok with the same fondness as a medieval peasant views leprosy.
On the day she was to do the recording, Mirjam had gone off the idea. “I had to drag her down to the studio. She sat there looking at Snapchat while she was doing it, then she pissed off back to her room. But now she knows the response to it has been good I can tell she’s chuffed.”
Åkerfeldt himself was the same age as Mirjam is now when he joined Opeth in 1990. He was just the guitarist back then, stepping up as vocalist only when original growler David Isberg left in 1992. He’s the sole remaining member left from those days, steering the band from their original extreme-metal incarnation through to their more intricate, inspiring current incarnation. Along the way they’ve lost some of their older, gnarlier fans and gained some newer, less gnarly ones. But still: 34 years and 14 albums. How the hell did that happen?
“Perseverance and stupidity and not bailing out when it gets tough,” he says. “But I don’t sit and wonder where the time went. The thing that depresses me is when I look at other bands’ discographies. Most of my favourite bands, their fourteenth album was shit, and their thirteenth album, and the twelfth one. Maybe only the first three were good. Part of me thinks: ‘Have we been doing shit albums for years?’”
You don’t mean that, though, do you?
“No, I think our fourteenth album is fucking awesome. But so did my favourite bands with their shit fourteenth album.”
If Opeth are anything, they’re proudly out of time. A few years ago, Åkerfeldt was sent into a fit of apoplexy when he was asked to hawk a Nokia phone on stage at a gig in India that was being sponsored by the phone company. “I already used a Nokia phone, but I got home and brought a different one,” he says, still narked.
They may have got trollied with one of ABBA, but don’t expect a holographic Opeth show. And don’t even get them started on AI. “I’m a little scared of it,” says Fredrik, like AI is a creepy doll that’s suddenly appeared in the attic.
Inevitably, the internet has already thrown up a host of AI songs written in the style of Opeth. Åkerfeldt says he’s not seen them, but sounds curious enough to check them out. Mind you, it sounds like he’s already had a go at it himself.
“We were at a dinner party when Chat GPT had just come about,” he says. “We were a bit drunk and my girlfriend put ‘write a lyric in the vein of Mikael Åkerfeldt’ into it.” How was it? “It was shit. ‘There are ghosts in the trees…’”
Actually, that does sound like an Opeth lyric.
“My friend who is in [Swedish gumby metallers] Grand Magus was at the same dinner party, and did the same thing. His lyrics came back and he was, like: ‘Superb!’”
Technology aside, Åkerfeldt has learned to hate a few other things during his 34 years in Opeth. Chief among these is the arduous grind of touring. At 50 he’s no longer one of nature’s travellers.
“I hate it. I don’t like to go away from my family and my cats,” he says, effortlessly slipping into Young(ish) Fogey mode. “People who say their interests are ‘travelling and globetrotting’? You fucking idiots. It’s the worst thing.”
He says he harbours a fantasy of working in a grocery store again, something he did a long, long time ago. “I romanticise normal jobs. I know people have tough jobs, but just to have a normal routine instead of an abnormal routine… The record shop, that was a little bit of seeing if there was a way out of touring for me. So I could tour when I wanted to rather than when I had to. But there’s a responsibility to the other guys in the band and the people we work with and the people around us. [A pause] But I’d like to have that option.”
Whether music’s loss ever becomes the retail industry’s gain remains to be seen, although it seems unlikely. Opeth long ago made the transition from surly underground malcontents to latter-day rock mainstays. The logical next step is elder statesmen, a role that seems to be tailormade for Åkerfeldt. It’s hard to imagine him quitting to sell baked beans this far into the game. And anyway, Agnetha from ABBA may have something to say about it.
The Last Will & Testament is out now. Opeth tour Europe in February and March 2025. Get tickets.
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