Bjorn Gelotte talked to us last night on the telephone. It was a 15 minutes long conversation which will be published on our website by the end of the week.

Last month, the band announced that the U.K. and Ireland tour will not happen as planned because the other guitarist - Jesper Strömblad had to go at an alcohol rehabilitation clinic. So we asked Bjorn about this

WAS IT REALLY THAT BAD?
Well. As with every problem of this kind. It’s not something that you want to tell everybody. It is something that you are sort of embarrassed about, but we’ve been living around this problem now for many many years.

The thing is that with something like this you can’t really force anybody to go to the doctor or to feel better. You have to wait until this person realizes that himself. And what happened is that it got to be too much and he had a breakdown and he realized when his body said – “this is it” he had to go and get medication, get some treatment and lock himself in for a couple of weeks and take it easy and take care of himself.

And this is the only way of waking up I think. I don’t know how it is with other abuses, but with this one – it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s tough for him to realize it, but when he finally did it, now he’s doing something about it. But it takes time to get back. And this is what we are waiting for now.