Hand of Fate

Norwegian art-rockers Gazpacho stare fate in the face with their latest album, Magic 8-Ball, but things could have turned out very differently had it not been for Hollywood script-writers. Songwriter, producer and keyboard player Thomas Andersen discusses kismet, creating great art and never being afraid to rip things up and start again.

- Johnny Sharp

The best art often involves some sort of sacrifice, but for Thomas Andersen and his bandmates, it seemed to border on self-harm.

And “it hurt like hell,” he says.

And maybe one reason it was so painful was because it’s hard to imagine many other artists making the same decision.

Rewind to the end of 2021. The band’s 11th album, Fireworker, had been enthusiastically received the previous year, and they were all but ready to wrap up recording on its followup. While the rest of the music world was still trying to restart stalled operations after Covid, keyboard player and producer Andersen, along with founding bandmates Jan-Henrik Ohme (vocals) and Jon-Arne Vilbo (guitar), plus co-producer Mikael Kromer and rhythm section Kristian Torp (bass) and Robert Johansen (drums), had found the restrictions “didn’t really stop us at all”. But that was when they switched on their TVs to find news of something altogether more alarming.

They saw a trailer for a new film, released globally via Netflix, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, called Don’t Look Up. And the core premise of its story was that a giant comet was on its way to Earth, set to wipe out the planet within six months. All good, clean satirical fun, perhaps, but for Gazpacho, an all too familiar story.

“We had just finished making an album about a comet hitting Earth,” Andersen explains. “A long, long, very complicated piece, which was nonetheless going well – then Don’t Look Up came out, and it was the exact same story!

“We were maybe six months, a year from release, and we thought, ‘Well, we have to drop this.’ So we made this new album instead. And that’s what caused the five-year gap between albums – we lost a year when we first decided to drop it, and then another year trying to get to grips with losing an album that was almost done.”