Decadence Issues Road Report

Swedish metallers Decadence has issued the following road report:

"We are back from the Sweden Rock Festival 2009! This year we had a bigger adventure as a whole, both during the actual travel and also from the whole show itself. We travelled to Solvesborg on the 3rd of June and later that same day, at midnight, we were up on stage. It was a long travel and really awful weather, dull, rainy and cold. Although, we had lots of fun on the road as well!

"We were a bit worried about how we would manage to play in that cold in our thin clothes. We came to Solvesborg around 4 p.m., unloaded our stuff in the backstage area by the Alarm Stage and wandered off into the depths of the Sweden Rock Festival grounds.
Wandering the Sweden Rock Festival grounds

"We walked around, took it easy and hanged out. We met some friends and fans, talked, took some photos, posed for some photos and later ended up in the Rock Stop restaurant to grab some free food for the performers. The time was approaching 9 p.m. so we went to prepare the merch/albums to be sold until the closing hour by a merchant from the Sweden Rock Festival. Then some of us walked to the van to warm ourselves up for a couple of hours before our performance, damn cold! Erik, Nicke and I (Kitty) had a kind of power nap and then we woke up by the ringing of the alarm clock – it was already 11 p.m.

"So, we headed to the backstage area and met up with Kenneth and Jocke. I went to a private area to change into stage wear and the boys and roadie headed to the stage to rig up and prepare. Wearing only those thin clothes in that cold was a new experience!

"The mirror was even useless because it turned all blurry from the steam from my breath (yes, the backstage is outdoors!). I came out, started stretching and warming up. The boys joined in and also started tuning (hard to keep the tuning in shape in that cold!).

"The guys went up on stage, the song started and I was awaiting my vocal line to begin so that I could run up and join them on stage with a violent scream from hell. And so the show began with this new song that will be on our upcoming album. What an amazing start! The crowd instantly went wild and more and more people started pouring in.

"From the stage we could only see a couple of lines of the crowd because of the dark night but as it turned out, the place was packed. The cold was long since gone with that massive adrenalin kick! The set list was brutal in every sense of the word – both for the listeners and for us to perform. There were tough songs, rough playing and a vocal mixture as taken from a blender with high pitch growl, grunts and clean thrash screams varying with each song. People were singing along and one song that got particular reactions was “3rd Stage of Decay” which we have only played live once before (on our release party in 2006).

"The show went on smoothly, only during the planned last song (which was also a new piece were everyone went wild including ourselves) the crash stand fell down by the vibrations and landed straight on Kenneth’s guitar head. I quickly grabbed it and a roadie took it from me and fixed it up. The guitar got completely detuned but we managed to pull it off and we said thank you and goodnight to everyone and walked backstage. But from there we heard people screaming for more and screaming for us. We looked at each other and we all said that we simply couldn’t leave it like this. Kenneth grabbed his spare guitar and we all walked back to the stage. The atmosphere was intense and we exploded into one more unplanned final song, “Wasteland”. The crowd was thrilled, happy and looked satisfied with that ending – and so were we! With a smile we walked off, packed our things and changed into warm clothing. Then we all walked out to the crowd, talked, and met old friends, fans and new contacts for future shows (!). We explained to some people that our name wasn’t “Alarm” as the backdrop indicated and some people thought, but we weren’t allowed to use our own backdrop over the stage logo. We also signed albums, people (!), joined in on photos and simply had a great time. Afterwards some of us went to sleep and some stayed up. The morning after, we packed the last things and headed back on our long trip back up north to Stockholm.

"We took it easy, even stopped at a castle we passed to take some photos (behold our first photos together with Nicke!).

"Once again we have some great memories with us and we thank everyone involved for making this possible. A special thanks to Jimi, Simon, Bella, Mia Moilanen, Camilla Bengtsson, Gustaf Sandholm Andersson and the other photographers and to everyone in the audience for making our first headline show at Sweden Rock Festival, Alarm Stage such a great success!"