Interview: The Hives

I’m good, rehearsing for the shows. During the whole pandemic, let’s say, we did it less. Less of everything. Just a downtime, really. But lately we have been working on new material and rehearsing for this shows...

 
So, The Hives' (and the world's) First World Wide Web World Tour... How did you come up with this idea and what are your expectations for this event?

Well, we miss it too much, playing live. It’s on our DNA, so we just miss playing live. And we wanted to do something that was as close as a live show as possible. And this means playing in the same time that we would have in another country, and have crowd participation. So, with this, they can send voice messages, call in… So, that will be a bit weird, but also, that kind of happens on a normal show. Often Pelle talks to people and stuff and helps the show move forward a little bit. So the idea came from trying to do something as close as a live show as possible.

Most of our roadies have different jobs as well. So, we talked to them and made sure they were doing OK. But we did one show and one live stream in about a year and a half now. So, the best part of it is that it was so much fun to see each other again, you know? I mean, the crew and the people that we work with. That was so much fun, so yeah. I’m really looking forward to that. And also, we want to do shows back to back as well. You wanna be tired, you wanna have that in your system. It’s what it’s supposed to be. 

I’m not sure I can tell you that [laughs]. It will be a safe, underground, sealed, pandemic-safe bunker. But in order for us not to have millions of people travelling there, we can’t reveal it. It’s not our usual studio or rehearsal space, it’s a place designed specifically for doing the First World Wide Web World Tour.

It will be different. It will be as much as a real concert as possible, but we’ve seen some examples where you put everything up as you would in a normal concert, and it doesn’t look really good when you film it. So, we took some inspiration from filmed performances and videos in order to do it. 

We’ve been rehearsing the songs as if it were a usual concert. Of course, we will have these segments where we will have to, you know, have some audience participation in there, so we’ll have to figure that out. I mean, we didn’t rehearse with someone calling in. We should have though.

Hopefully that’s going to be better. And also, it will be more like a tour, where we play in different timezones, so we’ll have sleep deprivation as a usual tour… So with that, we hope to achieve something that hasn’t already been done before.  

I mean, who doesn’t want to play São Paulo, to begin with? That’s the reason [laughs]. We’ve had great shows in São Paulo and in other parts of Brazil as well. We definitely wanted to have a South America show, and we’ve had great shows there in Argentina, Mexico, Peru. So, we wanted to stop by.

Ehh… I mean, if you wanna see the greatest rock show on Earth, then buy a ticket. It’s as simple as that. I don’t wanna get into people’s economy. If you feel like you can’t afford it, and instead you wanna buy food, then you should do that. Food will be better than a Hives’ show. I mean, it will be equally great. I can’t put pressure on people to buy a ticket, but it will be a great show.

Like I said, we put out this effort to have the callers, the crowd noise from recorded shows from where we have previously played. With that, hopefully - and I say that because we haven’t played the first one yet - that will give both to us and the crowd the feeling of a usual concert. 

Yeah, there’ll be new tunes. People can vote for your favourite songs, and also new songs that maybe they haven’t heard before.

Yeah, definitely. If this turns out well and we don’t lose all ur money doing it and the pandemic keeps dragging on, then definitely we’ll be looking into doing more shows. It’s already fun and we haven’t even played yet.

I didn't know that. I mean, I probably heard about it, but The Hives have always been making records. Right now we’re working on two records. We have two pretty much done, ready to rehearse and record. And then we’re working on a third record as well simultaneously. For us it’s always been about making records, we want to release our music as records. But if we get together with the record and company and they tell us, ‘well, everything will be so much better if you just release a song at a time’, maybe we’ll do that. And if we release one song a month from now on, I think we can go on for about four years almost. We have a lot of material.  

We have the whole summer booked for festivals. But if this tour goes well, we might do more virtual shows if the summer and fall dates don’t happen. We have an European tour planned for the summer already booked, with the European festivals booked as well. So, if we’re allowed to do that, we’ll do it. That’s wishful thinking, perhaps, but that’s where we wanna go. 

Yeah, it will be great seeing you guys again. It’s been way too long since we saw some São Paulo faces. Tune in and let’s make this thing explode together.