AVATAR spent the European leg of METALLICA's "M72" tour opening for the band that made them want to exist. Then METALLICA said publicly that the Swedes had "raised the bar" — and frontman Johannes Eckerström is still working out how to hold that.
Asked about it by Andrew Slaidins on The Rockpit's "50 Shades Of Slaids", Eckerström began by noting that the band's foundations were built without any such validation. "We spent a couple of decades not getting very loud, amazing public praise from our childhood heroes, which I think is healthy. So the fundamentals of what we build our confidence on and our drive on lies elsewhere."
Then he admitted what it actually did to him. "That being said, it's a total bizarre childhood dream version of success to have it. It really brings me back to — the kind of happiness I felt for it is this almost, as an adult, goofy…"
He traced the feeling to a specific night. "I remember my first real hard rock concert was, I was 14. I went with a friend to see AC/DC. And with that came these daydreams of, what if we would meet? What if they would think I'm cool? Like meeting your heroes and then having this exaggerated version of how nice they would be to you kind of thing. And that was kind of what the METALLICA thing now felt like."
What made it land was that it kept escalating. "The first show, yeah, we got a cake, a signed card, and got to meet two of them briefly, and we thought, 'Oh, this is so cool. Doesn't get better than this.' But then they stepped it up show after show. We were invited. We got to meet more and interact more, and James was out there checking out our set, enjoying it, came back for more the second day, the third day. He really seemed to truly dig what we're doing."
Eckerström landed on an image for it. "You can't build a band around hoping that one of your heroes will end up being a fan for it, but when it happens… It feels like sometimes that we grow trees in layers, and somewhere hidden inside of us is whoever we were in the past. That never goes fully away, and it reached through the layers, and there's some guys in their early teens who had an amazing summer now with METALLICA."
He had flagged the debt in advance. Speaking to Radioactive MikeZ of 96.7 KCAL-FM last November, ahead of the run, he said: "We have watched and learned from METALLICA for a long time. There is no AVATAR without METALLICA."
Source: blabbermouth.net