Anthony Morgan of Metal Forces recently conducted an interview with HAMMERFALL guitarist Oscar Dronjak.
On whether a verbal altercation occurred between the band and former drummer Anders Johansson:
Oscar: “No, no. I mean, I still haven’t talked to him, believe it or not. [Laughs] He didn’t answer any calls at that time. The thing is with Anders, he’s a very unique person, and the way he went about doing this thing was he didn’t tell anybody what he was doing. He told our booking agency, because we had a tour booked for Latin America which included visas for Brazil. I know we had a show in Russia before that, and I think it had a name and everything. He told our booking agency that he wasn’t going to be doing the tour, so they didn’t have to book anything for him. Our booking agency came back to us and said ‘Okay, so Anders isn’t going to do the tour. He’s out of the band. Who’s going to be your drummer? So I know what name to put down on everything.’ We were like ‘Wait, what? What are you saying?’ So, that’s how he informed us. He didn’t inform us, really. He just let us find out from a third party, which I think was a bullshit way of doing it. I told him this many times. It felt like after 15 years, we deserved better than we got. I think 15 years is something you don’t just throw away like that, so I was really angry with him, or upset rather for a long time. The thing is, when this happened, the same day that I got the e-mail from our booking agency, I had just had my first child. We were at the hospital. I think this was the day after, actually, so I was a little bit preoccupied. My main focus was on my kid, obviously, my family, at that time.”
