Katatonia Frontman Says He’ll Need to “Get a Real Job” if Touring Stays Shut Down for Too Long
“Uncertainty” is the word of the moment. With so much of the world still on lockdown and no clear indication of when life will return to normal — whatever the new “normal” is — it’s nearly impossible to predict the future. That’s especially true in the music industry, which has been upended by a complete halt to its main economic driver, the live show business.
With that in mind, I asked Katatonia frontman Jonas Renkse on our recent episode of The MetalSucks Quarantinecast what the inability to tour any time soon meant for the band and for him personally in terms of financial stability, and here’s how he answered:
“Well, it’s difficult for me to fathom the whole thing right now. We’re so used to everything just going on as normal and everything being alright. So now when we start to see the bigger scale of things, it’s kind of overwhelming.
“Of course this will affect our band in many ways. Not being able to tour, to play gigs, we have to kind of rely on album sales which we all know is not really what any musician would rely on these days.
“I don’t know man, we have to wait and see. In a year’s time if we can go back to touring, I hope we’re still a band. Otherwise we just have to… I don’t know, I have to learn… I’ll have to get a real job.” [laughs]
“I think [the band] has been our income for at least ten years back, so to stop doing this now is going to be a big blow to our little universe that we have created and that we’ve been able to live off. We’ve not been rich from it but we can pay the bills and we love touring, we love to go out there and represent the albums that we have made.
“Right now it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen and it’s hard to even visualize the whole scenario in a couple of months from now. It could be very different.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Jonas revealed that the band’s record label, Peaceville, approached the band with the idea of postponing the release of their new album, City Burials, but the band decided to forge ahead anyway. He explains of that decision:
“When we started planning the release of the album, everything was normal. We had the option to postpone the album release but we said ‘no’ to that because [first] it’s a bit of a bad situation for people that made all the preorders, and also I think that during this time music can be of some importance. If you are a fan of our music and you can get the chance to listen to our new album while being locked up, I think it could be a good thing to have something else on your mind. So we wanted to proceed with the release.
“But of course it affects us. We didn’t have any bigger tours planned, luckily, but we have postponed a lot of festival dates, as have many other bands. So right now we’re all in the same boat, we only can wait and see what happens. It’s a strange, surreal situation that I think nobody in our age has ever been experienced, so it’s something completely new.
“… the option to [postpone the album release] was only [presented to us] a couple of weeks ago. The label said we could release the album in July instead, if we wanted to do that, but we said, ‘I don’t think the situation would be any different then.’ The other option would probably be to release it in the fall, but the album is all ready. It’s better to just… get it over with.” [laughs]
You can listen to the whole Quarantinecast chat with Jonas below via either the audio or YouTube players.
