Motorpsycho

Motorpsycho was founded in October 1989 in Trondheim, a small industrial city on the mid-western coast of Norway. The first line-up was Bent Saether (vocals, bass), Hans Magnus "Snah" Ryan (guitar, vocals) and Kjell Runar "Killer" Jenssen (drums). They came up with their band name while watching a Russ Meyer triple-feature in London. Two of the film titles ("Mudhoney" and "Faster Pussycat") were already taken by other bands, the name "Motorpsycho" was still available. Their first album was "Lobotomizer" in 1991, after which Killer quit and Hakon Gebhardt took over on drums, forming the nucleus of Motorpsycho still existing today. But it was the release of their third album "Demon Box" which finally brought them acknowledgement and amazing reviews all across Scandinavia and Europe. Demon Box contains everything from brutal pop to long, gliding progressive themes and industrial terror visions. It was voted best album by the norwegian press and was later nominated for a Grammy. Motorpsycho toured extensively across Germany, Belenux and Italy, gaining fans wherever they went. They released two EPs (Mountain and Another Ugly EP), each which showed an amazing diversity of styles, Motorpsycho's trademark. After playing big-name festivals like Roskilde and Lowlands, the band went into the studio to record the follow-up album to Demon Box, released on EMI/Harvest in Norway and on the newly-founded Stickman Records for the rest of the world. "Timothy's Monster" contains almost two hours of passionate rock, heavy psychedelia and even a couple of sweet pop ditties and due to it's monster-length was released as a double-CD and a three-LP box-set with a full-color poster and a vinyl etching on the sixth side (!). Since the release of Timothy's Monster, Motorpsycho switched from EMI to Sony Records in Norway. And they've written and recorded such an amazing amount of music as to be almost frightening. You can set your clock to these guys: every year they release an album (or in the case of Trust Us, a double-album), countless singles, tracks for compilations, even entire country-n-western-soundtracks! And their perhaps most strange release to date was their split-single with the old-school-rocker Alice Cooper on Musical Tragedies Records. As if that isn't enough, Motorpsycho has also started up a series of live albums, under the name of "Roadwork". Volume 1 with the wonderful sub-title "Heavy Metall iz a poze, hardt rock iz a laifschteil" was released in March 1999. Volume 2, "The MotorSource Massacre", was released at the end of 2000 and is a recording of Motorpsycho's performance together with The Source and Deathprod at the Kongsberg Jazzfestival in 1995. The year 2000 was the most successful to date for the band, with their album "Let Them Eat Cake" going into the norwegian charts at #1 as well as entering the german charts - a first for both Motorpsycho and Stickman. They are currently recording the material for their upcoming album, due for release in September 2001. When at home in Trondheim, Motorpsycho practice at least 4 hours a day, 6 days a week. And when not at home, they can be found in the studio or on the road, somewhere in this galaxy, playing at top volume to a sold-out club.