We’re speaking musically, of course, as he dusts off his long suffering stoner rock outfit Spiritual Beggars. In the five years since the Demons album Amott has focused his energy on recording and touring with Arch Enemy – sandwiching brief forays with Carcass here and there – but during a bout of rare downtime he felt it was time to sit back, relax, and get back to business. The end result is the aptly named Return To Zero, a meaty groove-and-doom outing that serves to remind people there’s a completely different side to Amott’s legacy of shred. There are moments on the album, in fact, where one wonders if it really is the same guy heading up both outfits, or if Amott had problems switching gears when he finally decided to slow things down.
“I was away from it for five years, so it is different,” Amott agrees, “but somehow I just morph into that role. It’s always obvious to me where the music is going to go when I’m sitting there with a guitar jamming. It’s very clear whether it’s going to be an Arch Enemy thing or a Spiritual Beggars thing. It’s fun because these guys are great musicians. There’s a great vibe between me and Ludwig (Witt / drums). He lives close by so there’s a place we go to jam, and now Sharlee (D’Angelo / bass) is in the band as well, so it’s very comfortable.”
“It’s mostly my writing, so everybody kind of waits until I’m ready,” he adds. “The problem was, with Per (Wilberg / keyboards) playing in Opeth, Ludwig’s involved in a number of things including Firebird, me and Sharlee doing Arch Enemy, it’s a bit crazy trying to synchronize our schedules. It’s quite obvious that I need to do this band as well, although when everyone else goes on vacation I go into the studio to do pre-production (laughs).”
Having surfaced in 1994, Spiritual Beggars pre-dates Amott’s rise with Arch Enemy by two years, yet he’s best known for the latter’s death thrash sound over his comparatively sedate rock side. There’s always been a need for the Beggars as his other musical outlet, even if it can take up to half a decade to get around to putting an album together.
“When I quit Carcass, Spiritual Beggars was my only band for a couple years. I never planned it that way. I just thought that if I quit Carcass I didn’t want to jump into something similar, so I decided to take music from a different angle. I’m just a big fan of traditional hard rock and early heavy metal, ‘70s rock and I guess what you’d call classic or vintage rock,” says Amott. “I got into that later, though, because I was listening to Slayer before I was listening to UFO. I completely missed out, so I basically went backwards. When I started to seriously get into music it started with ’82 punk rock, hard core, thrash metal, death metal, and by the time I was in Carcass I started to become curious about the origins of hard rock and metal. I loved Black Sabbath, but somebody gave me a tape of stuff like Cactus and Captain Beyond that opened my mind. I had no idea that there was this whole scene. It was a treasure chest of music, and after a while I got greedy and said ‘I want to do that’ (laughs).”
Spiritual Beggars gives Amott the opportunity to explore music as a solo guitarist of sorts. Where he and his brother Chris propel Arch Enemy forward, Amott is “forced” to step up and fill any potential holes on his own. He makes it clear, however, that Wilberg plays an important role as his second.
“In the late ’90s we brought in Per on keyboards, so he kind of fills that role of a second guitarist. We do some harmonizing, he does a lot of chords, so that really fills out the sound. It’s a lot of fun, because if I did something too similar to Arch Enemy it wouldn’t be invigorating at all.”
Return To Zero is trademark ‘70s-flavoured Spiritual Beggars, but the announcement prior to the recording sessions that vocalist Janne “JB” Christofferson had been replaced by Firewind frontman Apollo Papathanasio suggested this wouldn’t be the case. Up to this point Papathanasio has been known as a power metal singer, all bombast and polish, making his performance on Return To Zero a pleasant surprise. Amott says bringing him on board was indeed a case of getting past preconceived notions and hearing Papathanasio in a completely different environment.
“Apollo is a local guy, which is weird because everyone thinks he’s from Greece. His parents are Greek, but he was raised in Sweden. I’ve been aware of him forever, long before Firewind. When it became clear that JB couldn’t sing on the new record I was really disappointed and I seriously began thinking maybe that was it. Ludwig called me and suggested Apollo because the two of them play in a bar band doing cover songs. Apollo had in fact offered his help to get the ball rolling, get the songs done, rather than stepping in as a full time vocalist. I thought no, he’s too metal, but I thought ‘What the hell…’ and asked him to learn a few songs, then come down and jam."
“I was so surprised because he sounded like our first vocalist (Christian "Spice" Sjöstrand), he could really hit that pitch from the Ad Astra album. Apollo has this grit and attitude in his voice that I wasn’t aware he had. It was very cool, but I knew people were going to be very skeptical (laughs). When he did some JB stuff from On Fire and Demons it sounded great; I was really surprised by his range. Then we started working on a new song idea I had and Apollo threw out some vocal melodies and improvised, which is something Spiritual Beggars used to do. I really missed that whole jamming aspect of our songwriting, because JB lived eight hours away which made that impossible, so working with Apollo felt good. I felt there was some real potential.”
So much so that Amott had no issues with letting Papathansio contribute to Return To Zero even though the songs were complete by the time he was brought in.
“I’d written most of it already. I wrote the lyrics early on, there were a few co-writes, but it was mostly my stuff, so I had a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to go. The cool thing was even though I didn’t know Apollo that well on a creative level, he had all these ideas. It’s cool working with new people anyway, but it was fun working with him. He sinks his teeth into a song and might throw a hundred ideas at me (laughs). It became evident to me that he had a lot of experience in developing songs. In the studio as well, he came up with so many variations. It was great.”
But he hasn’t reached the point where he feels comfortable saying “Michael, I think that song idea sucks…”
“(Laughs) That’s always the problem, isn’t it? That’s like what happened to Deep Purple. They did the Burn album with Coverdale and it was all good, then they do Stormbringer and Glenn Hughes wants to have his soul music on it. It was like, ‘We’ll discuss it in the corner some time…’”
Another advantage to having Papathansio in Spiritual Beggars – which will likely result in an open schedule for touring – is Firewind guitarist Gus G. replacing Zakk Wylde as Ozzy Osbourne’s right hand man for the forseeable future. At least as long as Ozzy’s new Scream album has legs.
“That was part of it,” Amott says of the decision to bring Papathansio on board. “The stuff with Gus getting the Ozzy gig had already happened when we started working on this album, so it was really cool for Gus but it left Apollo hanging to some degree. Firewind wasn’t doing as many shows as Apollo had been expecting, so it really opened up a window for him to work with Spiritual Beggars. It was good timing since Arch Enemy is also having a slow year, at least by our standards (laughs), so it made sense to do this.”
