Turbonegro

Thrasher Magazine, August, 2003

Turbonegro are more exciting and crazy-perfect than any rock band playing today. Formed in Oslo, Norway in the early **90s, the group is legendary as much for its hardcore-by-way-of-arena-rock sound as it is for its denim fetish and on-stage anal pyrotechnics. Back after four years apart, Turbonegro return with the album Scandinavian Leather, a grandiose instant classic that flips rock on its dull corporate branded ass and spanks the hell out of it. Also, because your record collection is weak without them, Epitaph has re-released the classic Ass Cobra and Apocalypse Dudes albums. Turbonegro's slick riffs and flamboyant classic guitar Wailing are so potent they had to invent their own genre: death-punk. Like his band, singer Hank von Helvete pulls no punches when he discusses the sad, drug-induced split of the band and their joyful return. He even gives a skating tip and advice on how to avoid being mauled by a bear.

Michael Coyle

Why did Turbonegro split up in 1998?

Well, I was addicted to heroin and I had a serious mental condition, On the **oad, we were in Milan in Italy and I suddenly got really psychotic and that was the end of the band. The last year had been just a struggle. My health was deteriorating completely. So we just had to stop and I had to go to rehab. Now I'm on Methadone. I had to move out of town for four years and up to a small village and gather myself together. And now I'm fine and we got all these offers to come back. Last year we got offered to play some comeback shows at festivals and I was ready to do it. My health was better and we were able to do those shows. We realized we were sounding great together, still, and we had gotten many more fans since '98. So we wanted to do a new album and get together again and start touring.

How, much of what happened was a result of the rock and roil lifestyle?

No, quite the opposite. I never did drugs with the band. It was when the **and was not playing and I had lots of spare time and mental illness and no expectations around me. It was between touring and working with the band when I did these drugs. I tried as hard as I could to keep it separated. When I started showing up stoned at gigs and rehearsals, we had to stop the band. It's just a myth, you can't play in a band and be on drugs. It's an old rock and **oll myth that I personally think sucks. Lots of good bands are breaking up because of drug addiction. They don't get more famous, they don't get better **y doing drugs. They just hick up the band and break up their bands.

Did the band remain friends with you while going through this?

We didn't have much contact during those four years. It was kind of important that I stayed away from everything, from old friends. When I came back I had to choose what friends I wanted to keep. It was not that we were enemies or anything like that, but it was very scary for the others to see how **] I became. They supported me, wanted me to do the rehab, and welcomed me back. There's no bad blood, there never was bad blood in the band.

At your show last February at the Troubadour in LA, Happy Tom introduced you as "The strongest man in the world," and you all looked so happy to be playing.

We love each other in the band and we're happy that we survived the dark period. That was the last show of an awesome tour. The tour was great, no bad shows. We were just very happy when we played the Troubadour show and the response we got, especially in LA, was overwhelming. We were amazed. To play in LA is always a challenge because all bands play there and the audiences are so used to good bands so you can never expect a total awesome crowd that dances and sings along. That is very rare in LA, so when we got that response we were extremely satisfied.

Was it hard to get back in the studio and record Scandinavian Leather?

No. Nothing had changed in four years. Well, everything that had changed, changed for the better. We felt we were mastering our own deathpunk concept much better this time. A lot of stuff we discovered during the recording of Apocalypse Dudes we were able to use more effectively.

Scandinavian Leather seems to continue a movement from a more hardcore sound to an almost glam-rock sound.

We have a lot of heavy metal, '80s glam-metal, rock straight-on, AC/DC rock references. But we are less of a retro band. I think we are actually keeping a lot of good stuff from the hardcore punk scene, that hardcore punk sound that we've always been playing. We've been playing in punk bands for

20 years but we realized that a lot of our big heroes were rock and rollers, not only punkers. So we wanted to show we have clear references and heroes from our childhood. We used to listen to KISS and Alice Cooper when we were kids, before we became punk rockers. Bringing that back just adds to the punk sound. Naming it deathpunk is actually an innovation, a signal that you can like punk rock and still be a good musician and be visual and give a good show. A journalist from The Independent, the English daily newspaper, told me we are the only band who play better than our own idols. We are not looking back, we are looking forward. We are very innovative. Does (keyboardist) Pal Pot still own the pizza place you sang about on "The Age of Pamparius?"