Saying Goodbye To The ‘80s & Embarking On A 'New Journey'

It's August 2009 at the annual Bloodstock Open Air festival in Derbyshire, England. The predominantly metal festival is headlined by Swedish rockers Europe and, despite scepticism upon the initial announcement, thousands of punters restlessly await that song. When it arrives during the encore, a field of hardened metal fans completely lose their composure.

This scribe witnessed firsthand the aforementioned rabid reaction for The Final Countdown (from the 1986 album of the same name), and asks frontman Joey Tempest what it's like to have an international anthem in their catalogue that is so transcendental of genre, language and age barriers. "Yeah, it is amazing. We don't need to rehearse it, we don't sing it in the shower or anything," he says. "We do love playing it live, it does bring people together. It's an amazing journey, melodically... It's kind of melancholic, yet uplifting. It's a juxtaposing song and people use it for weddings and stuff, and I'm wondering, 'Ok, it's more, like, it's a very melancholic lyric and a minor key. But it's kind of a weird feeling of uplifting still with melancholic. We love playing it live and it's really important for our set."

Although the singer readily admits that the band air their other '80s and early-'90s hits live - something Australian fans can anticipate when they visit for the first time - they haven't solely rested on past glories. Since reconvening a decade and a half ago, the band has been prolific in the studio, regularly issuing new records and performing a healthy dose of said material at shows.

Europe's post-reunion material has adopted a hard rock bent inspired by the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy, fused with a present-day sheen. The band even recently won a Swedish Grammis Award in the Best Hard Rock/Metal category for latest LP Walk The Earth. Tempest is accepting of being dubbed a "classic rock" band these days. "Yeah, we see ourselves as a rock band... I suppose classic rock's good. It's a good description. I think in 200, 300 or 400 years we're gonna have an era. We had classical music, so we're going to have an era called classic rock. And that's going to be encompassing pretty much all rock music. So I suppose it's a good expression.

"We don't really have a plan of what we're doing," he laughs. "We just go in the studio and try to express ourselves... 'Cause between 15 and 25, you're very - you take impressions in your life and those impressions that we got was [from] the artists Led Zeppelin, it could be Gary Moore, UFO, Uli Jon Roth, the first two Queen albums, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin - all that stuff. And then you go on with your lives, but then at this stage in our career those influences come out automatically; we don't even have to try. So when we write now it's just something that happens."

Songs like the autobiographical Not Supposed To Sing The Blues were a key part of segueing into the next phase of their career. The vocalist - based in London while Europe's other members are in Stockholm - and cohorts even formally bid farewell to a bygone period. "I remember doing [2012's] Bag Of Bones and that was the album where we definitely said goodbye to the past, and we were moving forward. [With] Bag Of Bones, all of a sudden we were finding a deeper expression, we were recording completely live again in the studio.

"Not Supposed To Sing The Blues was kind of a reaction to a lot of people in the media as well that thought... 'They can only do - they're an '80s band, they're not supposed to be able to dig deeper and do something like this.' And that album was more like two fingers to some of the people, you know? It was, 'This is it, this is the new Europe, we're moving on.'

"We had an instrumental piece on that album that Mic [Michaeli, keyboards] came up with in the studio, before My Woman My Friend. And we had a silent minute for the '80s, because we were trying some '80s keyboards and we said, 'No, they don't fit, we can't do that. Let's use organs, let's use Mellotron.' We had a minute where we said goodbye, basically," he laughs. "Everybody having their hands on their hearts and their head tilted forward and, 'Ok, we're saying goodbye.' And since then it's been a new journey."