By one reason or another; this Swedish band has always evaded my attention. To my eternal shame; I have never heard any of their three previous records. Destiny have returned after a seven years break with their "The Undiscovered Country" opus, released on Gothenburg Noiseworks (GNW); a division of Black Sun. We contacted Destiny's founder Stefan Bjornshog for a full explanation.
1. When and where was Destiny started ?
- The story of Destiny actually starts way back in 1980 when John Prodén, Peter Lundgren (drums) and me played together in a band that sometimes was called Destiny and some times Presence. After this band I played with a band called Refug that played instrumental seventies hard rock. The band split when I had to join the Swedish army in 1981. When I left the army in 1982 I joined a terrible band called Midnight. This band featured Magnus Osterman and we soon fired the other members and formed Hexagon, shortly to become Destiny. Apart from a first demo we never really recorded any real demo tapes before the first album. In 1983 John Prodén joined again and was followed in 1984 by Hakan Ring (vocals) and Peter Lundgren (drums). This line up just recorded a couple of songs now and then when we managed to get some free studio time. All these recordings were well received at the time by the few people we played them to. We never sent them to any labels but managed to get some of them played on a local radio show. Anyway, I was working in a record store in 1984 and the owners had just started the label Musik Bolaget. They knew I was playing in a band and asked if we wanted to record an album. Of course they wanted to hear us play and after a visit in the rehearsal room we agreed to record Beyond All Sense. The band paid for half of the album and the label for the other half.
2. What would you call your brand of metal ?
- Dark metal was a term that I came up with to describe our music when we recorded our first album in 1984 as I thought and still think that we are pretty original. What I was referring to at the time was a special suggestive mood that we tried to create. Kind of like when you're standing on a big cliff by the sea on a stormy day. Lots of power that kind of moves you. Quite similar to the way that some movie soundtracks or classical music is affecting you. It has nothing to do with Black Metal or demons. These days a lot of bands use the term for a very different kind of music that has nothing to do with what Destiny is about. Still, it's quite fun to come up with a term that is now used all over the world even if it's not how I meant it.
We are not just influenced by metal or hard rock. Any song or piece of music that is good can inspire us. We think of Destiny as a metal band but we don't compose music to be just metal. We just write the songs based on whatever we come up with. We never thought of
ourselves as a band limited to the style of metal from the eighties. We just happened to form the band during that period. We have always had influences from the Seventies as well as the eighties and now the nineties. That is if you talk about metal. Apart from that a jazz song or folk music as well as classical music can inspire us. The same goes for the lyrics. Some times they are fantasy related and some times they are based upon historical or current events. Our motto is to never limit us...
The sound of Destiny is kind of hard to describe with words. I believe that Destiny have a very special sound of its own. The best way to describe it is probably "Progressive Power Thrash Metal for the 21:st Century"…he he....
3. As I shamefully have to admit; I have never heard your three previous albums. I guess you would not believe my excuses about Scottish midges. Could you please run through these albums for us? Which labels were they released on? Are they still available ?
- We recorded the first album Beyond All Sense (Musik Bolaget-1985) live in the studio, apart from the solos, vocals and the few keyboards, live in just one day. If I remember correctly, the solos and acoustic guitars were recorded the next day and the vocals over four days. The mixing just took a couple of hours on the seventh day. All in all we got a week in the studio. I really like the songs from this album but the engineer really screwed everything up. He knew nothing about metal and acted as if he was the producer. It was a war between him and me and when he didn't get his way he threatened to go home. Some times he did just that. The sound of the album was not even close to the metal sound that we had achieved on our demo tapes. Of course some of the blame was ours too. We just weren't good enough to record a proper album in such a short period. When the album was finally released the label decided to handle the distribution themselves, which was a disaster. The album was printed in just 2000 copies
and was only available in 13 stores all over Sweden. We did however get big articles in the two major pop/rock magazines in Sweden and quite a few good reviews both in and outside of Sweden. I usually say that this album worked as a demo for us, ha ha... We later re-recorded three of the songs from Beyond All Sense for Atomic Winter and Nothing Left To Fear.
We were all very pleased with the second album, Atomic Winter (US Metal-1988). It was such a major improvement compared to Beyond All Sense. This time we sounded really heavy and furious. The biggest improvement was the vocals, even though I know that Zenny himself is not that pleased with his performance, as he really wanted to sing more in the style of what he achieved on the demo tape. We called our music Dark Metal but were labeled as a thrash or speed metal band. I felt that it was important to get a very good cover to make people notice the new album. I had already sent Iron Maidens management information about Destiny, as I wanted them to
manage Destiny. Unfortunately they declined but they helped me to get in contact with Derek Riggs. He is a wonderful person who laughs a lot. He's really interested in art and he's also a musician himself. He has a recording studio in his house and plays the keyboards. It was a real privilege to meet him and to be able to use his talent for the Atomic Winter cover. At the time he had only done Iron Maiden and a Budgie cover. When I asked him if he would like to do the cover he said that, as he liked the name Destiny, he was interested but that he had to hear the album and read the lyrics before he said yes. Thankfully he really liked us and soon we had this excellent cover that gave us quite a bit of publicity. A couple of years later I went to London to discuss the cover for Nothing Left To Fear and then he gave me the original painting of Atomic Winter as a gift. Unfortunately Active Records didn't want to pay Derek for the next cover so we had to find a new idea for Nothing Left To Fear. This was very
unfortunate, as Derek had already done some sketches for the cover. Anyway I remembered that a friend of mine had this cool statue of a medieval hatchet man so I asked him if I could borrow it. I went to a photographer, Kenneth Johansson, at Hasselblads, and we put the statue on a black velvet table with a black velvet backdrop. Then we put green and blue light on the statue and I put the Destiny triangle that I have around my neck on his finger and voila ! A new quite good cover. A lot of people have actually told me that that cover is their favorite cover.
The cover for The Undiscovered Country is a painting that my best friend Johan Holm has drawn. If you listen to the lyrics from the album and look at the cover you will find that they are all represented somehow. Originally Derek Riggs was to paint this cover too, as he really loved the concept that I gave him but unfortunately I lost contact with him. I don't know where he lives any more.
The third album, Nothing Left To Fear (Active-1991) was
actually recorded in 1989/1990. The change in style was just a natural development towards the style that we wanted to achieve from the beginning but never quite succeeded with. Nothing Left To Fear is the first album that really sounds the way I always wanted Destiny to sound. It was real Dark Metal! The reason that we changed to Active from US Metal was that the latter never paid for the recording of the album. When they first heard the demo we had recorded they were 100 % pleased with what they got. They told us to start recording the album and that the money was in the mail but we never got them so I had to pay for the studio myself. Later, when they got a copy of the recording, they wanted us to re-record everything in Germany but still refused to pay for the recording that we had done. They said that we should look at it as learning money and that if we couldn't accept that, we should try another label. When we did that they said that we had broken the contract and that they would keep all our
royalties as they had made Destiny famous !!!! Can you believe that ?
Anyway, Active Records were real keen and promised us a lot of support and promotion so we signed with them. After a remix by Ken Olsson the album sounded really good and we were ready for the October release that Active had planned. The album came out in June 1991 and we started to realize that we had gotten out of the frying pan into to the fire.
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