EDGE OF SANITY Names Their Favorite Shows They’ve Ever Played

Edge Of Sanity played less than 50 shows throughout their career, but their impact on death metal is nothing short of gargantuan. We caught up members of Edge Of Sanity – namely project mastermind Dan Swanö, vocalist Roberth “Robban” Karlsson, bassist Anders Lindberg, drummer Benny Larsson, and guitarist Andreas “Dread” Axelsson – to discuss their favorite live shows, sparse as they may have been!

Speaking of Edge Of Sanity, you can get all their reissued albums here alongside everything NIghtingale did as well!

Benny Larsson

“An early gig at Skylten in Linköping. We played with Disharmonic Orchestra. The gig went great, but the spotlights above my head was to close and really hot. It was a real pain to play.”

Andreas Axelson

“I guess the early one in Belgium is one of them (Sint-Niklaas December 1991). We got 8 crates of beer (with 30 beers in one crate) for that show, that’s pretty much for 5 guys. Anyway, the show was great and, in many ways, the first of many, many shows and the standard of shows in Europe, Germany and Holland and such have such great places for playing and so great people at the shows, genuine music lovers you know, and going that road has never really stopped! So, I’ll say that one!”

Dan Swanö

“There are so many shows that are special, but there is this one gig we did in Jena (Germany) the autumn of 1992. It was the first gig on our first proper tour. We were headlining all of the gigs except the final one in Zurich, which was the home turf of Assorted Head, that we did the Swing of the Axe tour with.

“First, we had severe problems finding the venue. We only had an address and a big roadmap that wasn’t that very detailed. I still remember driving around in that round about for what felt like an hour, trying every possible exit to see if it would lead us to the right place. When we almost had given up, we started thinking outside the box a bit and at one of the exits there was this big park with a big ‘tree island’ in the middle and a small gravel road that I guess you could drive on when you had too.

“We decided to drive through the park and check out what was happening around there, because we knew that the gig place had to be somewhere close, and to our surprise, the venue was located in that ‘tree island’ and it turned out to be an amazing show. Even the neck of Anders Lindberg‘s bass snapping in the middle of the gig couldn’t take me down from the performers high I was experiencing, and because the situation was so absurd, I remember laughingly screaming back at him ‘Who the fuck cares? No one will hear the difference any way!!

“Anders played the rest of the gig just making a lot of noise!! After the last song we went backstage and I was covered in sweat and my head was pounding and I re member thinking ‘If played live is like this every time, this is what I want to do with my life!!’ Well, I never had that same on-stage epiphany as a death metal grunter ever again, but I am happy to have had it at least once!”

Roberth Karlsson

“I’ll go for Party San Open Air 1999, so much craziness, drunkenness and a great headline show. It was delayed, Amon Amarth played a little too long set before us, so the German cops cut the power in our set! Good times!”

Anders Lindberg

“I have several gigs in mind, but I think Party San Open Air 1999 is one of them. I saw that Robban also chose this gig. It was a night to remember. The police stormed the stage while we were playing, and they managed to turn off the electricity so only the drums could be heard. Plus, I had managed to cut my throat with a can that I had bitten into, so I was bleeding profusely on-stage ha, ha ,ha!”