THERION … THE EARLY DAYS

From the now defunct Therion forum, but you can find bits and pieces through the WayBackMachine. Christofer Johnsson replyied through an administrator to one of the questions about the early days.

Hello, I'm an Wikipedia editor (and of course a huge Therion fan) and I would gather some informations about band. 

My question is about pre-Therion era: Why Blitzkrieg decided to break in early 1988?

Christofer Johnsson replies:

Blitzkrieg had problems with the drummer Oskar. We rehearsed at the school me and him was in (we were only 15 back then). Oskar was a bit of a wild child and we were only allowed to rehearse at the weekends in the schools music room when all of the members of the band had behaved good through the week. As he wasn't really behaving that well all the time (it was just small things, they were pretty strict at our school), we ended up not being able to rehearse very much and I begun to loose my patience with it and after doing our second concert (we only did two - both at the school) I had enough and split up the band. I think this must have been in March 1988. For 3-4 months I was writing songs and thinking what to do and in the end I decided to change to guitar and started to practise a lot at home. Early summer-88 I had become a huge Celtic Frost fans and was thinking weather to name the band Megatherion or Pandemonium and settled for the first. I called Peter and spoke about him being in that band as well, but having no drummer or rehearsal place it took a while before something happened. In July it was getting warmer and I got a drummer called Mika, who had played in a local thrash metal band (mainly playing Slayer covers if I remember it right - but they never left the rehearsal room). We started to jam in my parents garage (now when it was warm outside, we could use it as a temporary rehearsal room), but he seldomly showed up, so it was more me who played the drums and jammed with a new bassplayer I found called Johan "Joppe” Hansson (later in Crematory).

Lineup in early 1989. The band's very first picture ever taken according to Metal Wiki

We would jam with me as a drummer and do Celtic Frost covers and Peter would join in as well. Johan got tired of not much happening and joined another band. Meanwhile I got this singer called Jan and I think we managed to rehearse once with me, Mika, Peter and Jan all together, but it didn't sound too well. Jan just dissapeared and Peter told me that I had become better at playing drums than Mika (no wonder, he was never there and I used to play on the all the time instead). I wasn't too much into the idea of changing instrument again, so in the end I just got tired of it, fired Mika and called Oskar if he would be interested in coming back to the band. At first I always saw Megatherion as a new band, but then in the end, it got back to being me, Peter and Oskar - with the only difference that we had a new name, somewhere to rehearse and I played guitar instead of bass (having no singer again, I was also once more having to do the vocals - something I always just did as a temporary thing, the idea was always to have another vocalist). We even had some material from the Blitzkrieg times left that we played (some of it even survived to the first Therion album, some riffs from "Morbid Reality" is from the Blitzkrieg times).

Then I was running into Erik Gustafsson at a guitar shop when he was still playing with Dismember. I asked if he knew any other bassplayers and we exchanged phone number and stayed in touch.

Shortly after he was fired due to some personal reasons and as I still didn't have a new bassplayer, he joined in. Oskar had by then persuaded his parents to let us rehearse in their garage (which was heated winter time) and by suggestion from Erik, we changed shorted the name to Therion.

Regarding Blitzkrieg, it may also be mentioned that we had a girl singing for 2 songs, she did the second of the shows with us. The idea was to have her as a singer, but she had problems learning the stuff and one of the songs she sang sounded awful. The other song sounded a bit better and can be heard on the Bells of Doom CD. Her name was Regina, but I can't recall her surname.

"Beyond Sanctorum" line-up