Shining Interview

Interview partner: Niklas Kvarforth (vocals)
Questions by: Claudia & Twilightheart,
put by Twilightheart
Time: September 8, 2007
Place: Hellflame festival venue

This interview was recorded before the Shining gig at Hellflame festival in September 2007 already. Sorry for the belated publishing!
((Comments in double brackets are additional information added by Twilightheart.))

Twi > …can you tell me something about the setlist (will you play songs from all 5 albums), will there be any guest musicians etc.?

Kvarforth > No, the band does. My band does decide which songs we’re going to play. And there probably won’t be any guest musicians tonight. Like, last week we played in Tchechoslovakia and I heared that Attila was on stage. The problem was, I was with Attila a few days before, you know, he’s like my best friend, so we always hang out when he’s in Norway with Mayhem. And he was like “Oh, I’m gonna be on a Shining show” and I was like “What!?” So, guest musicians today…. no… I don’t think so at all.

Kvarforth > You should stand in the front row, and you can tell me afterwards if there was any blood. I gladly kick your teeth.

Twi > There’s this female voice on the 3^rd song of the latest full-length album…

Kvarforth > No, the girl on the cover is every girl who buys a Shining album, eventually in the end. Because our goal is to get all the girls who are tired of HIM, who are like “Okay, I heared this hard Metal too much now”, so they go for Shining and eventually they will hopefully sit with a shotgun in their fucking mouth and blow their fucking brains out. So we don’t have so much women in this world. Wouldn’t that be beautiful!?

Twi > The female voice on the album, did you take it from any movie, or did you record it any other way?

Twi > The line-up of Shining changed a lot in the past. Do you think you have a stabil line-up now?

Phil A. Cirone > The thing is, hopefully the band will be stable now, but things change all the time. Sometimes people can’t cope with the things and then they leave.

Twi (to Cirone) > In past interviews Niklas said, you are all just tools. How does it feel to be “just a tool”?

Kvarforth > He’s not a tool in that matter. Shining is changing a lot now. I’m actually making the rest of the members to write music for the new album. Because now we have like a perfect line up, you know. And I really want people to contribute to Shining. The reason why people haven’t done that in the past is because people suck and people aren’t able to do anything. Now we are actually six members in the band; there’s the band and we have this other guy called Conny, he’s our manager. Without him we wouldn’t have survived playing live at all, because we were really fucked up in the beginning. We existed for 10 years and all of a sudden we were like “Yeah, let’s play live, let’s try it and let’s see what happens”. We played in Rotterdam, we had to cancel the show after one song, we were fucked by authorities…

Kvarforth > Because our guitarist decided to throw the guitar into the face of a fucking girl in the audience. It was her own fault. If you go to a fucking Shining concert, you should know what the fuck is happening, you know. You’re not going there and say “Yeah, I just wanna see a nice show” and bla bla bla. If you go there, you will see death, you will see fire, you will see blood. It maybe not happens all the time, you know, but usually it does. And that’s what I think should be an experience of all these fucking mongoloid Black Metal fans that come like “Oh, we’re so fucking evil, and we live like pandas in the forest”. What the fuck is evil about that? Real evil is not in this fucking venue with all the fucking Black Metal mongoloids. Real evil is out in the streets. And that’s what I want to incorporate into the BM scene. I want people to get fucked up. And I want to fuck up people. And I want people to die. Very very simple.

Kvarforth > I had a lot of menthal problems and the band wasn’t stable, because all the people involved in the band got fucked up. Just look at this guy ((Phil)), he played with Shining for like 7 years or something. Before that his bigger brother did. What happened with your bigger brother?

Kvarforth > He doesn’t even exist as a human being anymore, you know. And we got this cunt, Hallander, the bassist we used in the meantime, which was a very unwise decision, but pretty funny as well. I heared he was going in pain therapy nowadays. You know, he didn’t have a single scar in his body when he started playing in this band. I pretty much fucked up that little boy. If he only was a girl, it would have been even better, you know. It’s the same with the line-up, it’s always unstable, because people get into this band and they think: “Yeah, fucking darkness is cool, self-destruction that’s fucking cool stuff”. But there is a problem when it gets real. Like perhaps they think that it’s real, and then they play along with the playing rules, and then perhaps half a year passes and then they find out: “Oh fuck, I’m in a real bad situation right now and I can’t get out of it, thanks to Shining”. Of course they run away. Fuck them all! Fuck all previous members, they are all fucking idiots. Fuck them all!

Kvarforth > One of my good friends, Maniac, his band, Skitliv, will play support. The other band, I have no idea who they are. As long as Maniac is on the tour, I’m happy. It’s fun to have friends on the tour, because usually it’s only like the Shining guys and a couple of Black Metal mongoloids from the forests, you know.

Kvarforth > Yes, two times per day. I’m a hard working man, or hard working boy, depending on how you put it.

Twi > You also do something in a German band called Bethlehem. How do you manage to record anything with them via the distance?

Kvarforth > The only thing I do with Bethlehem is, we are gonna re-record the “S.U.i.Z.i.D.” album now and I am doing the vocals for that. And I translate the German vocals to Swedish for that one. And then we don’t really have a clue for the future, but hopefully we will do a new album. I have no idea and you have to speak to Bethlehem about it because I am not the person to talk about Bethlehem.

((Update on the matter as per end of 2007: for the vocals of the re-recording also Jonathan Théry of "Ataraxie” and Herr Morbid of “Forgotten Tomb” showed interest, so it seems like it’s not finally decided yet, who or how many people will contribute to the vocals or to the album in the end. At the moment 2 "new" tracks are pre-released on MySpace, taken from the "S.U.i.Z.i.D." album, having additional guitars by Herr Morbid and new vocals by Jonathan Théry. Both songs are not yet finished and only very rough mixed exclusively for MySpace and never will be released like that. The "S.U.i.Z.i.D." album will be re-recorded, re-mixed and re-mastered in 2008 and released by "Red Stream, Inc.".))

Kvarforth > But I love Bethlehem since my early days. I released the first albums on vinyls when I was like 14 years old.

Kvarforth > I found them, because I have been in contact with Bartsch since I was 15, 16 or 14 years old, I don’t remember. I was a kid, I had a small dick, I still have a small dick, but it’s a bit bigger. I don’t know. I’ve had contact with Jürgen for many years. And Bethlehem is actually the only good thing that comes from this fucking piece of shit country.

Kvarforth > You should ask your German buddies at Perverted Taste why they fucked it up. And I could also say that if we will ever meet Perverted Taste on tour, we will slice their fucking throats. You can print that in your magazine. These fucking idiots were doing all those patches and T-shirts without our allowance.

Kvarforth > “Ett steg I helt fel riktning” will be released some day. The problem is, it’s too much 16 Horsepower feeling over it, you know. Maybe we’ll release it one day.

Kvarforth > We’re doing a split with Katatonia probably, as they are recording a Shining cover right now, and we’re recording a Katatonia cover. And then we do the same stuff with Urgehal, which by the way is the best Black Metal band from Norway in my opinion. We’ll see what happens. We have lots of stuff that is currently being negotiated, and I’m probably saying too much right now.

Twi > As you mentioned Urgehal… you appeared on stage with them at Inferno festival.

Kvarforth > I remember that me and Attila were sitting at Elm Street ((pub)) and I got a phone call from Trondr from Urgehal: “We should do this thing…” and I was like “Yeah, I can sing a song! Cool!”. And I was supposed to sing in Norwegian. The problem is: I’m Swedish. So I didn’t understand shit. But on the other hand I heared some people saying that nigth, that is was pretty good. You know.

Kvarforth > We did a tour with Urgehal, and we gladly would tour with them again, because Urgehal are our brothers and I love them, the persons. And I love the band as well. And we get along which is very seldom actually for Shining, because we usually want to beat up every fucking support band because they’re idiots, you know.
By the way, what shoe size do you have?

Kvarforth > You should be more open about the sexuality. We’re living in the fucking 21^st century.

Kvarforth > Conny, our manager, lives in Halmstad, you should ask him. Why the fuck do you think we call a Shining album “Halmstad”, because it’s a nice place? You’re fucking stupid. You should go to Halmstad, I can show you the fishing sites.

Twi > Have you ever thought about channelling your negative feelings through any other art than music, like painting or a book?

Kvarforth > I’ve been thinking about becoming a bank robber, or a murderer or something. I don’t know, maybe I’ve done those things. What the fuck!? This is just music. I can at least enjoy the fact that I can beat some fucking ugly German faces tonight. That’s one thing. I don’t give a fuck. You all suck. You are all fucking worthless, you should all be fucking killed...