Talking exclusively with Metal Hammer, Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson has looked back on the time he declined Type O Negative lynchpin Peter Steele’s invitation to support his thrash band Carnivore on tour.
The 48-year-old progressive black metal player was 17 when he met Steele during Enslaved’s first tour of the US in 1994. The person who booked Enslaved’s tour happened to be a friend of the revered goth metal singer/bassist, who died of sepsis aged 48 in 2010, and knew that Steele was a fan, to the point that he had a CD copy of Enslaved’s second album Frost on his tour bus.
“[Steele] was really nice, super friendly,” Bjørnson recalls. “Some weeks later came the offer: ‘If you want to hang out for another month after the tour, you can support Carnivore.’ I was like, ‘Umm, I think I need to go back to high school.’”
When asked if he regrets that decision, Bjørnson quickly says yes. He adds: “Then again, I was 17, so we were barely allowed to go on tour in the first place! And we’d already stayed two weeks longer than we were supposed to. We made up a story that we were staying with a friend in Dallas, but we actually spent two weeks touring Mexico. I didn’t tell my mum about it until I was 26.”
Bjørnson (real name Ivar Peersen) co-founded Enslaved with bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson (Kjetil Grutle) in 1991, when he was just 13 years old. The band were closely associated with the ‘inner circle’ of the Norwegian black metal scene, considering founding Mayhem guitarist Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth a mentor, but never joined because their lyrics focussed on Norse mythology rather than Satanism.
Bjørnson recalls another amusing anecdote from the ’94 US tour elsewhere in the interview, explaining that Enslaved’s van was so uncomfortable that he and Kjellson had to drink vodka to be able to sleep.
“Our van broke down while we were driving through the Bronx, so we were told to stay in the van at the garage,” he continues. “When we broke down, we were already quite far into our nightly ritual of getting dozy. At some point, it was like, ‘Where’s Grutle?’ He was running around, with no t-shirt, screaming, ‘I’m Santa Claus!’ Some of the other guys had to go get him.”
Enslaved are currently preparing to release their 17th album Mið, out on October 30 via their longtime home of Nuclear Blast. The band will tour Europe with Icelandic post-rockers Sólstafir in February. See dates and get tickets via their website.
