.: Posted by Christofer Johnsson :: March 21, 2006 :.

As was announced on the Metal Mania festivals, I am going to retire from vocals. The reasons for this are two. One is that I feel it's not fun to sing anymore (even though I have enjoyed playing the old songs on guitar), the voice is getting weaker over the years and I experienced problems at the end of the US/Canada tour. The problem isn't only getting older, but rather that we basically never rehearse as a band and therefore I don't keep my throat "warm". It simply doesn't work to not sing for half a year and then go on tour for 2 months and shout every evening. It used to work when I was younger, but now I feel it's not comfortable anymore and when it doesn't feel right, it's definatly time to stop.
The second reason is that we anyway would like to stop playing old songs. By old I mean Lepaca Klifffoth and older. We are now working on our 13:th studio album and it is getting harder and harder to choose which songs to play live. The number of "classics" - songs that we more or less must play - is growing all the time and we don't want to end up like one of those bands where you know beforehand 95% for sure what songs that are going to be played. We want to be able to have space to play a couple of unexpected songs each new tour.
We of course realize that many fans will miss those brutal songs, but we are convinced that those fans also will prefer to hear something new each time from the Theli album and onwards.
Besides old songs, this will have an effect on the choice on some newer songs. For example, I'd normally sing in To Mega Therion, Invocation of Naamah, In The Desert Of Set and Typhon. I guess I in normal cases seldomly have to sing in To Mega Therion anyway - good crowds tends to do that for me! :)
Typhon would anyway not be on the set list on the next tour, there's so many songs we haven't played from that album. Personally I would rather do An Arrow From The Sun and the title track Lemuria next time.
As for Desert Of Set I guess we're not gonna play it and regarding Invocation Of Naamah, we might not play it or we could experiment with Mats doing some harsher type of voice on my parts, he's a pretty flexible singer as you might know by now (and he has said he don't have any principles against doing some growling type of vocals as long as it's just some few parts). So time shall tell what happens around that.

The ProgPower festival in England will be the final show where I do vocals on stage!

The Metal Mania Festivals was a total different Therion on stage. We are working with pre-production for the new album, so we didn't have the time to do festivals. We said no to do them 3 times, the fourth time they got in touch, the conditions was so good that we simply had to agree. Plus that Tommy who organize them is a guy that havs been organizing shows for Therion in Poland since 1992, so we felt we could do it as a favour.
Nevertheless. Karin was busy in this time period for an audition for the opera academy in Gothenburg and Mats was already booked for singing backing vocals for a hard rock band called The Poodles that took part of the swedish outtake to the Eurovision Song Contest (they actually made it to the final!). So if we were to do it, we had to do it as some sort of special event. First thing I did was to call Sarah Jezebel Deva (from Cradle of Filth), who as most of you know have worked with us on several tours before and who also is a good friend of the band. We thought it could be fun for the audience to see her with Therion again for 3 shows. As for replecing Mats, it would have been bad to replace him with some other lead vocalist, I think most people would have felt dissapointed with that. So we thought of making something really special, something that will never be seen again. Petter is not only a very talented drummer, he is also an excellent lead voclist. So we bought him a head set microphone and tried the idea of him singing Mats lead parts in the rehearsal room and it sounded totally fine, even though Petter never singed while playing drums like this before.
Another thing was the choice of songs. We decided to focus pretty much around the Vovin album and barely didn't play any new songs at all. And as I'm going to stop singing, we played 3 really old songs as we know the fans in the east perticulary, are fond of the old material.

The festivals went fine (though I broke a string on stage for the first time since 1996 and had to play half of Wine of Aluqah on Gibson Flying-V!) and we hope that the fans appreciated to have the opportunity to see this different kind of Therion event.

On the ProgPower festival, we will do a regular set again though, with both new and old songs (and Mats and Karin is with us again). This will be our 106:th and final show supporting Lemuria/Sirius B. We will not be on stage again until 2007. I have planned a special surprise for this festival (not even the other band members know it), so don't miss this festival if you live in the UK! :)

.: Posted by Christofer Johnsson :: March 21, 2006 :.