EUROPE - The Swedish Crown

26. March 2015

Europe

EUROPE - The Swedish Crown

That's what every band secretly dreams of: to add quality to every new album. The Swedish Europeans - apart from a small drop-out shortly after the reunion - have taken exactly this direction: further upwards. Europes frontman Joey Tempest takes our congratulations to the tenth album "War Of Kings" calmly and sees still air upwards.

When Joey Tempest - still when Rolf Magnus Joakim Larsson - and guitarist John Terry Norum founded Force in 1979, from which Europe emerged, they dreamed of producing music at some point that could compete with their role models UFO, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy. They had to travel a great distance to reach this goal. On the way there, after the monster hit "The Final Countdown" from the third album released in 1986, a rift broke out.

Norum left the group because he could no longer identify with their musical direction and image. In 1992 the band finally broke up. After first comeback concerts in the late nineties, the time was finally ripe for a reunion in the "Final Countdown" line-up in 2003, with Norum, Tempest, drummer Ian Haugland, bassist John Levén and keyboarder Mic Michaeli. Today Europe is better than ever.

eclipsed: "War Of Kings" and the predecessor "Bag Of Bones" sound as if the band could finally play the way they wanted to on the first two records, but couldn't do it yet.

Joey Tempest: That's a lot like me. The reason why we can continue to improve after all these years is that the musicality of the band is constantly increasing.

eclipsed: John Norum in particular is likely to benefit from the bluesier orientation of recent times.

Tempest: As a big Gary Moore fan that he is, you can be sure of that. Moore's facets all come into play at Europe: Bluesrock, Hardrock, Ballads, Thin Lizzy.

Lesen Sie mehr im eclipsed Nr. 169 (April 2015).