Kerrang! #1170
/august 2007/

Childhood
I had a lively family and I’m happy to have a mother and father who are still together and who we can share a dinner with. It’s kind of rare, unfortunately. I’m still with my oldest mates with the band, so it’s like touring with your childhood, too. But it was a hell raiser. I beat up a lot of kids. Always the bigger ones! They would try to bully me, and you’ve got to do something about it. I was a bully to a certain extent as well, which makes me really, really blush and makes me disappointed in myself. But as a kid you didn’t know any better. You learn by your mistakes, that’s the only way to grow up.

Death
Paolo Coelho, the guy who wrote “The Alchemist”, I borrowed one of his lines from a book called “Veronika Decides To Die” for the new album – ‘Death frees you from the fear of dying . And seeing a bit of death around me. I’m not preferring it either, it’s not my first opinion. I don’t believe in the afterlife, there is nothing. You’ve got to do everything now. I don’t believe in any spiritual life outside of this existence.

Jealousy
I’ve kind of grown out of it. Jealousy’s for kids. I think that jealousy, that’s the fucking serpent in Eden. Why would you be jealous of somebody or something? It sounds stupid. If you can’t do it yourself, you can’t. If you try your best, and you can’t do it, the let somebody else do it. You can only do so much, and if you stress yourself because of jealousy it just makes you weaker as a person. It just drains you out.

The smoking ban
I would rise to the barricades just for the fact that it’s such a c**ty idea! I understand totally if restaurants where you eat would be totally smoke-free. But imagine you can’t sit at the pub, smoke a fag and meet new people? What the fuck are you going to do? Onstage it doesn’t really matter because I haven’t the artistic licence of claiming that it’s part of my performance. I’ll just build my own bar at home. You can smoke whatever you want in my bar!

Love
Love is so many different things for different people. And love is very different with different people. With some people it’s more spiritual, more platonic and with some people it’s more sexual. I think, it’s about sharing, caring and hanging out, having a sense of humor and suddenly having the feeling that you belong. It’s a tough topic because everybody seems to see it in a different way.

Growing old
It’s beautiful! I’ve always preferred older women. It’ just the aura around them. It’s just the same with guys, I’ve always been hanging out with older people. There’s more experience. I love wrinkles, they’re all stories. They’re all there for a reason. I want to be like Neil Young. Have a couple of kids and wooden cabin somewhere in Lapland, playing my guitar and whining about how fucked my whole life is! I love growing older. It’s very challenging, though. In your teens you think that things become simpler when you grow older, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen that way. The puzzle just keeps having more and more pieces added to it, and it seems to be more and more intricate every second.

Regrets
Unfortunately your magazine doesn’t have enough pages for them! Hanging around with the wrong people, doing the wrong drugs… Everybody does stupid things, but it’s all a learning process. I don’t believe that anybody in this world does everything right. If he or she would, he or she would be fucking alien. You don’t make mistakes on purpose, but you do make mistakes each and every fucking day. I try to start with good manners, and when I’m drunk that’s always my excuse!