Interview
Interview
Stage Times: Sabaton
From playing to an audience of one in France to playing to 400,000 in Poland, Pär Sundström walks us through his most memorable performances
Known for their bombastic retellings of real-life military events, there are few bands who know how to put on a show quite like Sabaton. Expect tales of war and heroism accompanied by everything from pyrotechnics, fireworks, and lighting spectaculars to actual tanks used as stage props… the Swedish power metal titans have long upheld their reputation as one of the finest live acts in the game.
“I was always a live person, and it was the idea of playing live that made me start playing music,” bassist Pär Sundström recalls.
“Growing up with bands like KISS and seeing their shows, I knew that I wanted to do cool shows with fireworks and all these special effects, but now I love to play without the special effects too. Those shows where there’s nothing to hide behind, and it’s just a band and an audience enjoying it together… It’s important to know that we’re good enough when we just have our songs and ourselves, and everything else is an addition to that. We can’t make ourselves dependent on the special effects, we need to just be a good heavy metal band.”
Resonating on the biggest and smallest of stages across the globe, Sabaton spent 2024 celebrating 25 years of storytelling across the US and Canada. The festivities have continued throughout 2025, conquering 20 European cities as part of the groundbreaking Legendary Tour, which lands in the UK this December.
“There’s a lot to be told of this story, and we have not yet revealed even a portion of it,” Sundström smiles.
With plenty more surprises and spectacles still to be unveiled, we sat down with Sundström to reflect on 25 years of Sabaton shows. From icy cold nights spent playing at their local museum to recording a live album in front of 400,000 metal fans, he runs us through some of the Swedish band’s most memorable onstage moments.
The gig that made you want to play music
There were two bands that were with me very early on, Metallica and Skid Row. What attracted me to them was the energy that they had on stage, and the attitude. I was like, ‘Wow’. There was so much expression coming out of these guys when they were on the stage, and [the energy] from the audience was insane. The Skid Row video that I was watching back then (Road Kill, 1993) was from Latin America, and the fans were so enthusiastic and wild. There was a lot of stage diving, crowd surfing and mosh pits, and the band was completely mental. I can’t tell you exactly what it was – or which song really hit me – because I watched it a lot, but it was those two bands.
The first
It would have been a local music competition. Joakim [Brodén, vocalist] and I played together with some other band members before that, but we were not called Sabaton. We were called Aeon, and we played some songs that would later be for Sabaton, but the first show we played as what we are now was on the Swedish Lucia [a festival of light honouring Saint Lucia]. It was 13 December, and it was in the local museum in Falun. They had a music night to give the kids something to do instead of being out and drinking in the cold winter night. It was an alcohol-free gig for 50 people or something, and that would be the first gig where we played Sabaton songs.
Back then, did you have any idea of what it could become?
No. We lacked visions, but we had dreams.
The smallest
The one that comes to mind was in Poitiers, France. In 2007, we were on the Metalized tour, and the promoter in Poitiers had forgotten about Sabaton and gone on holiday. He came back at the same time [as the show], and we showed up at the venue where nobody locally had any idea that we were playing. In 2007, we were not able to reach our fans on social media. Today, we are able to reach a lot of our fans there, but back then not so much, especially not in Poitiers, France! We were hoping that the promoter had put up some posters and made it exciting for people to come, but no, there was almost nobody there. There was one super fan, and maybe three more people who had showed up but had no idea what Sabaton was. They were shocked when they walked in. They must have thought, ‘Oh my God, this must be the most horrible band… There’s no one here!’
The promoter told us we could go home because he screwed up. He said, ‘I’ll give you food and the money, you don’t need to play the show’, but we said we would still play. I asked the promoter to lock the door so that nobody else would come in, took the little money that we were paid for the show, and gave it to the promoter. I said, ‘This is for the drinks of the people who are in here tonight, including you. Let’s have a good party’. It took a while because the communication was not that great, but after a while, he understood what I meant. He was probably thinking that I was a bit crazy, but he got into it. He started to mix drinks for the band and the fans, and we had a good party. He cooked for us too, and I think even the fans were eating with us. We played the longest set of the whole tour, just for this one person who was a fan, and it was a great night in the end. It wasn’t a good night economically though…
The biggest
That would be the one that we filmed for our Swedish Empire live album. The show was in Poland, at the 2012 Przystanek Woodstock, and the figures vary but there were up to 400,000 people there. The crowd was as far as you can see, and beyond, in the trees, in the forest, everywhere… It was a lot of people. You can see that on the DVD we put out from that gig. It’s something spectacular.
As someone who grew up watching big shows from the likes of Metallica and KISS… How does it feel to put on one of your own?
I try to distance myself from it because we in the band need to have fun. When we are having fun, we do it better. It’s important for us to take that into consideration, but we also must not review ourselves from [the perspective of] the people that we are today. We have seen a lot, I’ve been to most of the festivals, and I’m a very experienced concert goer. I analyse a lot, and if I look at other bands there’s one part of me that can analyse how they did things, and it ruins a little bit of the magic. I have to take away those glasses when I’m thinking of how our show should be, and I have to imagine that I’m standing there somewhere in the crowd or sitting in a seat. I have to think, ‘What am I seeing? Am I having fun? Am I entertained?’
The weirdest
In the summers of 2005 and 2006, we played tiny festivals in Germany a lot, and some small clubs. Sometimes, we had to stay and spend our days there because it was so expensive to travel home. We stayed in a costume theatre somewhere in Frankfurt, and next door was a little rock bar. There we would appear, not as Sabaton, and we’d play some covers. We wouldn’t tell anybody who we were, we’d be in regular clothes, and we’d just play for beer and food to keep us going.
In the early years of touring when you’re coming to grips with the realities of the admin and finances entailed, does that take any of the magic out of it?
I think it makes it more special. I see the rewards, I see the costs, and I see where it leads… I see the full spectrum of it. We do a lot of tours, and a lot of shows where we lose money, but that doesn’t take away anything. It just adds to it. We know there’s a reason why we lost money that night, we just have to be there more often. We have to play harder and play better.
The worst
“When we opened for Dragonforce in London in 2006, we were supposed to start playing when the doors opened. It was at the old Astoria where nobody was able to get into the venue in time anyway, and it was in January, so everyone had to go and hang up their coats. When the doors opened, there was not a single person in the building, so we waited five minutes until there were about 20 people in the audience. We started to play, but we were cut down very badly in our playing time that night. We played one and a half songs. We wanted to make sure nobody cut ‘Primo Victoria’, so we started with that, and then we played ‘Panzer Battalion’ as the second song. After half the song, the stage manager came on, lifted me up, and carried me offstage. They turned off the electricity, and that was the end of the show. We paid a lot of money [to be there], there were maybe 20 people in the audience, and they were probably the most die-hard Dragonforce fans who didn’t even care about Sabaton. Most of the people who came to see Sabaton were not even able to see us that night.
The best
This is tricky. Our last tour was phenomenal, I loved it, and the show that we put out in cinemas from Amsterdam was one of the best shows we’ve ever played. As well as that though, for our 20-year anniversary, we headlined the two main stages at Wacken at the same time for two hours. Those shows are the pinnacle, but I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it that much. There are a couple of reasons why, including the enormous pressure. The Wacken one was really difficult to pull off with how much we wanted to do, and our Sweden Rock Festival headline set in 2016 was the biggest show I had ever dreamed of in my head… It was the climb to Mount Everest. It was the biggest thing in the world I could ever think of doing, but the pressure was enormous, and it was difficult to enjoy the show until afterwards. Obviously, I thought back on it with a big smile though.
I like the shows that are somewhere in the middle of a tour where there’s not so much pressure. We can just relax and enjoy the concert, and Amsterdam on the last tour was one of those. We were in the middle of the tour, everything was set, and we could play the songs very well. We’re tight as a band by then, the production is there, and everything flows. It’s super fun, it’s enjoyable, but it’s still a big arena. With 16,000 people in the audience, you can’t see everybody. It’s difficult.
Taking it down to a room which takes maybe 1,000 to 1,500 people… Then you can see and feel the energy of everybody. Then I’d like to go pre mobile phones, where you can have the full attention of everybody in there. Somewhere around there, that would be the ideal show. I can’t explain which one in particular, but we had something like that during the tour of 2012. We played lots of shows in England, and Manchester was a great one. The venue was perfection, it was a Saturday night, and the audience was awesome.
Sabaton play London, Manchester and Nottingham this December. Find tickets here
Photo credit: Scott Legato / Getty
