To say that Gothenburg lost a pillar when Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg of At The Gates passed away is a massive understatement. In a recent conversation with Argentina’s Cuero Y Metal, Dark Tranquillity/The Halo Effect frontman Mikael Stanne offered a grounded, heartfelt view of the friend who helped turn a tight circle of tape-traders into a scene that changed extreme music.
“We kind of grew up in the same part of town; he was a very close neighbor to me. And he was two years older, and he had a lot of experience. He started in the metal scene early. He had a fanzine. He had a band when he was 15. And he was just such a dedicated and passionate music fan, and it was really contagious. The way that he spoke about music and the way that he thought about music, and kind of lived through music, was infectious,” he recalled (via Blabbermouth).
“Everybody around him kind of started to feel the same way, and he loved to kind of spread the music that he loved. So we spent a lot of time just at home in his room listening to demos and cassettes and live tapes and things that he got through his fanzine or that he would collect or buy from all over the world. And I was a collector as well, and we bonded over that,” Stanne added.
They were not simply neighbors, but also collaborators in curiosity. Then came the duality that so many in Gothenburg recognized: Tompa the soft-spoken friend and Tompa the onstage catalyst.
“He had Grotesque, his first band, and it was this insane black metal band. And I went to see them all the time. And I couldn’t believe it because he was such a nice, gentle, very courteous and well-mannered, soft-spoken guy, but on stage he was an absolute beast,” Stanne continued.
“And it was pentagrams and inverted crosses and blood and skulls and shit, and it was the coolest thing in the world. And I was 15, 16, as I went to these shows, and it was the coolest thing in the world. And, of course, once At The Gates started, that inspired us a lot, but I think in general he was kind of the hub that we all gathered around. The metal community was small but very, very passionate at the time.”
Here, Stanne articulates a familiar truth to extreme-music lifers: scenes coalesce around people who show up, share relentlessly, and push standards higher. In Gothenburg, that force was Tompa. The geography of their lives even plotted it out.
“There was this bus line that went from the suburb where we lived to the city, and me and Tompa got on the first stop, then the next stop was Anders Fridén and the other guys from Dark Tranquillity. Two more stops and there were the guys from Tiamat and Peter Iwers from In Flames. And two more stops were Anders and Jonas [Björler] from At The Gates. And then we were in town. And then we would sit in a park with a tape recorder and listen to music and drink beer, basically. That’s how we grew up and how we all became friends and how this scene kind of started and how the Gothenburg metal scene started to come alive. And he was the kind of hub that brought people together because of his passion and his kind of serious… He took it very seriously,” Stanne explained.
“This music should be serious, even though it was all about very random stuff, like anything from grisly death metal, like Autopsy, or political punk or whatever, he was into it and he took it seriously. And so did we, because of him. And he started working at the local record store, and he would always recommend stuff. And then I started working there as well. And it was just one of those things that he inspired and encouraged. And, of course, we always went to their rehearsal room, and then we had rehearsal rooms next to each other for years, so we were hanging out in each other’s rooms and talking about music, listening to whatever new songs they were cooking, and while we were writing. And it was the same for all the bands in Gothenburg.”
“And then, of course, the way that he was on stage and the way he sang was also for me, as a wannabe singer at the time, that’s everything I wanted. Even though at the time it was just black metal, it was deadly serious, and it was incredible to see how into it he was, and that inspired me to become a vocalist as well. And then, of course, in the last 20 years or so, it’s been something else. We’ve just been friends, going to shows together and going out to drink together, and hanging out, but he’s always been an incredibly important part of the Swedish metal scene, because everybody knows him and he knows everybody. It’s that simple.”
Stanne words paint a vivid map of an era: a few bus stops, a handful of rehearsal rooms, and a network of ears pricked for the next demo. Lindberg was a connector, the kind of person who drags a whole city forward by insisting the music matters.
“Of course, I’ve known that he was sick for years, or a year and a half, and so it’s been really difficult to kind of live with that and knowing that the worst might happen. But we always kind of remained very hopeful and positive up until the end. So, yeah, it’s been really difficult, but, fortunately, all of his friends are also my friends, of course. And so it’s been a good community to kind of talk to and hang out with them. We have a lot of kinds of gatherings planned that we can just sit and talk about him and kind of remember the good stuff,” he concluded.
