Massgrav in Linköping 2011

A few months back, Kaj sent out a message that he was looking for bands for shows in Linköping so we dropped him an email and got the offer to open for Discharge as they did a one-off show.

Might as well get this straight from the beginning: with the possible exception of Fenok, Discharge never meant shit to Massgrav. We've never listened to them, they never inspired us and all the lies we spread about having glued their Why 12" to our turntables were just Sika Äpäre-inspired lies. We still accepted, figuring it would probably draw a good crowd (and Linköping has been good to us in the past). Since we are greedy motherfuckers, we ordered a shitload of new shirts from Andy, planning to make a kill, but unfortunately they showed up one day too late, so we drove south with only a handful of leftover old shirts and a pretty diverse mix-CD of Norse's ("what's this - New Model Army?" "It's Garth Brooks").

Before heading over to the venue (some sort of oriental restaurant, come night club, come dance class room, come gig venue), we hooked up with our friend Pelle at a suburbian pizza place that he claimed was the best in town, who's owner boasted about how his pizzas would make us want to move there. Well... let's just say we're still living in Stockholm and have no plans to move south anytime soon (and if we WOULD move for the sake of food, we'd move to a place with good Döner).

For some reason, there would be six bands playing this nigt. Yes, six. This was even harder to understand when you heard and saw the first band. On a night of fairly brutal-ish music, with studded crust punks making up a majority of the crowd, the first band played extremely poppy, Ramonesy music. Two of their friends were on the floor watching, the rest of the people moved back as far as possible from the stage and ignored the band. That can't have been a fun gig to play. Geesh...

We met up with the Makabert Fynd guys and set up the merch table, same as always (except a bit less well stocked), listened to the five billion other bands, laughed at Ruwe and Kalle when they talked about the dangers of exercise and so on. Studs and spikes all around, it was like Finland! People too drunk to understand anything you said, buying our shirts. Like it should be. Unnamed members of Makabert Fynd provided great entertainment with their discussions about the dangers of excersise and their underage fans complaining about not getting a glimpse of the Discharge guys, after having sat right next to them for 45 minutes.

And then it was our turn. As we set up our stuff on stage and Norse decided to disappear for about two years, a guy came up and showed us his Massgrav tattoo. Good start for a gig. And the rest wasn't bad either. Very enthusiastic crowd. Lots of ass-shaking, fist-pumping and helping us sing. We did a couple of new ones ("Brallorna nere igen" and "Auktoritetsproblem" and they went down a storm.

And then we went home. Well... we hung around to watch about half a song of Discharge and let the sweat dry a bit before we went home. Yeah, we had a great crowd, but Discharge had a maniac crowd, at least for the first songs - crazy! Again, Linköping has demonstrated that it's one of the best places to play. Thanks for having us, we'd love to come back. Fuck off!

Oh, one more things: those new shirts - we have them now and we'll upload photos of them too soon, but it's basically reprints of the old "Ärans och hjältarnas band" bullet ring shirts with front- and backprints, on black and red shirts (that's black shirts and red shirts, not shirts that are black AND red at the same time, that would suck).