Mikael Akerfeldt’s Funniest Stage Banter
Opeth's music is serious stuff. The band prides themselves on their textures of light and shade wrapped in a highly progressive package. In the studio and onstage, it's all business, but between the songs is where Mikael Akerfeldt makes some room for hilarity.
His jokes would never make it to the script in a writers room, but that's why he plays music and doesn't work in television. "We are Opeth and we come from Stockholm. Do you know where Stockholm is? That is correct — in Sweden. We are from Stockholm, which is in Sweden," Akerfeldt says to a crowd, monotone as can be, going on to strum a chord on his guitar. "Do you hear that? That is the sound of a tuned down guitar." Painful. Dry. Yes, somehow funny.
In another clip in this Loud List dedicated to Akerfeldt's banter, he instructs a crowd to headbang without any music. "Nice. That looks pretty fucking stupid from here," he says after they've all followed his command.
The stage is always a perfect setting for storytelling, like the time a stage-crasher wound up nearly exposing himself in the middle of an Opeth set. Morningrise? More like morning wood! (That's our pun, not Akerfeldt's — we had to get one in).
Watch and see what other absurdities have been spewed from Akerfeldt's mouth in the video above.
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