PRIDE AND FALL, rock and roll?

It is Edinburgh, Easter weekend - Dark City, a new EBM/Industrial/Goth festival for the UK. It is Friday night, the club night, Ascension is on.. Up on the balcony I spy Sigve and Per from Pride and Fall. Stefan Herwig, their manager and label owner (Dependent) is also in tow. It is to be a legendary night of drinking and dancing and much laughter. They are in their element: dancing like nutters, drinking for Norway and admiring pretty Cyber-Goths at Ascension.. No ego, no façade. What you see is what you get. And Pride And Fall look like a boyband – yes, they are THAT pretty. They look about 18 if they’re a day, still, they produced one of the most talked about albums of last year – “Nephesh”. Hotly tipped as the ‘next big thing’, the boys are a band to watch.
Dark City could be a tough crowd, how do they feel about this? How do they cope with the pressure of being a ‘hot new talent’? I give Sigve, Per and Svein (their live guitarist and third member of the band) the opportunity to reply to people accusing them of being VNV copy band, and tell us in their own words what the future holds for the trio..

It is a sweaty, post gig state that I find the boys. Breaking tables trying to get the tops off beer bottles, the boys are euphoric… The gig was good, and they are ecstatic and ready to talk…

S = Sigve  P = Per  SV = Svein  J = Jo (DJ Cyberchrist)

J – So first question.. Can you describe the history of Pride and Fall? Because for me you just came out of nowhere! There was nothing, no early releases or anything and then suddenly you are signed to Dependent, and releasing an excellent debut…and whoof! There is this big band Pride and Fall.. tell me where it all began…

[Cue Sigve.. Pride and Fall front man and vocalist. Handsome and sickeningly irresistible to women, he is the wild one of the group. He has a long swept over fringe that he likes to hide behind, deep, dark eyes.. oh, and he likes his vices]
S – We started out with this Goth project. We kind of felt stuck needed to do something new, so in the fall of 2000 we started Pride and Fall.
And we made a few songs, made a demo and sent it around to check out what people thought of it, and it went surprisingly well… so we started doing some gigs. For us it has always been about gigging. We love playing live. And the rest is history!

J – Sure, it’s history for you guys, but us out here, we don’t know much about you, so give us some more details - you sent some demos out.. then what?

[Svein pipes up; there is a confidence in him, and a delightful Norwegian lilt to his voice.. If Sigve is the handsome, sexy front man ... Then Svein is the pretty boy, the vulnerable one, the one that girls love to look after.]
SV – I will tell you… The first label that approached us was Metropolis records.
S – Actually we had a nice small label called Synapse Records that was interested in us first...SV – Yes, we spent a lot of time talking to them, they were OK, but it fell apart towards the end since we had kept a good relationship with Metropolis records in the USA, and they needed someone to release a record in Europe, they knew Stefan.. (continues on next page)