Stand on Visby’s rocky beach and gaze out across the roiling sea, and it’s easy to imagine a fleet of wooden ships heaving into view over the horizon, bearing an army of snarling invaders ready to subjugate its inhabitants, or worse.
Dating from the Viking Age, this picture-postcard medieval town is the biggest settlement on the Swedish island of Gotland – ahunk of rock measuring 100 miles by 30 miles, located halfway between mainland Sweden to the west and Latvia to the east. Visby has been fought over down the centuries by the Swedes, the Danes, the Hanseatic League and more, and it has the ruined city walls to prove it.
Another army has invaded Gotland today. This one numbers just five people, and furs and armour have been replaced by puffer jackets and beanie hats to protect against the fearsome wind battering them. They’ve been standing with their backs to the waves for the last 15 minutes for a photoshoot, and the cold is getting to them. Sabaton may be the most successful Swedish metal band of the 21st century, but they clearly haven’t inherited their ancestors’ hardy genes.
“I think we’ve done enough,” says the band’s usually laidback bassist and Joint Chief Of Staff Pär Sundström tetchily. “We have a show to play.”
A gig is fairly unusual in Gotland. In a few hours, Sabaton will play the local ice hockey arena, the fourth gig of a 20-date tour of some of Sweden’s furthest-flung outposts. The last vaguely famous rock group to come to Visby were Swedish glam-metal C-listers Hardcore Superstar. That was in 2021. The next one is… well, there is no ‘next one’, beyond a few low-level Swedish bar acts.
“We called the people who ran the venue and said, ‘We want to do a show ,’” says Pär, grumpiness gone. “They said, ‘When?’ and we said, ‘February.’ They said, ‘Why would you want to be here in February? Nothing happens!’” So why do you want to be here in February? “Why not?” he says, with the grin of man who has made it this far without other people telling him how to do things, and isn’t about to start listening to them now.
A2,000-capacity ice hockey hall on a windswept Baltic island is a long way from the kind of places that Sabaton normally play these days. In April, they kick off a full European
