Swedish band Europe are finally coming to Australia and you can expect The Final Countdown

THEIR Australian tour has been decades in the making, but fans of Europe can now start counting down the days until the band make it here

Swedish rock band Europe.

As former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say, there’s an old Europe and a new Europe.

The old Europe burst on to the “hair metal” scene in the late ’80s, with a handful of hits including The Final Countdown, for which they shall forever be known. Then they went away for a while.

Enter the new Europe.

“We started in 2004 and we’ve done six albums since we started again, and we’ve been together longer this period than the first period,” the Swedish group’s frontman Joey Tempest says on the phone from the UK.

“The new era is different: We’re more adventurous, we’re exploring our musical universe more, we take chances with our writing, we don’t want to repeat any albums we do, and we’re on a new journey basically.

“And that was the decision when we started again, not to do anything like we’d done before in the ’80s, but to move on and hopefully people will follow us and connect with us in a new way.”

It’s impossible to overstate how overdue their upcoming tour of Australia is: It’s actually the first in the band’s 39-year history.

“It’s been a long time,” Tempest admits.

“From what I remember there was a tour planned in the late ’80s, but it got cancelled for some reason – I don’t remember.

“But everyone’s so excited to finally, finally get to do this … this is something that we’ve been talking about for years.”

Europe frontman Joey Tempest.

They’ll be touring on the back of their latest album Walk the Earth, released in late 2017 and recorded in the famed Abbey Road studios.

“I wanted to get the guys to the UK. We hadn’t been here since the Out of This World record in ’88, and I’d been trying for years,” Tempest recalls.

“There was an opening at Abbey Road – it’s not so easy to get in there, it’s a very popular studio still, but it was an opening through some friends.

“And I called the guys up, ‘So maybe you can come to the UK this time, I have this studio you may know about, Abbey Road’. And they were really, really keen. It was like a bucket list thing to do, Abbey Road, and we were in studio three where they recorded Dark Side of the Moon with Pink Floyd, and it was very inspirational.

“But it’s just part of our journey. Every album these days we try to find the right engineer, studio, producer, consoles, compressors … we’re a bit nerdy with gear, and we want to learn and record music the right way. It was perfected in the ’70s, and a lot of the greatest engineers and bands these days are using those methods, together with the new world, to create music.

Europe in their full-glam glory.

“And that’s very important to us, to adventure in sound.”

Of course Europe’s upcoming tour will feature old stuff as well as new stuff.

“We don’t have a problem live to mix in some nostalgia,” Tempest says. “I think it works well live, but in the studio we don’t think like that, we try to push boundaries and go forward. In this instance we will bring some great old tracks and mix it with some new tracks for Australia.”

Of The Final Countdown, he says: “Yes, it’s our biggest song, it was on our third album and it sort of opened the doors for us. We don’t mind playing it live, we actually love playing it live. I wouldn’t say we listen to it at home or sing it in the shower or anything, but we don’t have a problem playing that live. We don’t need to rehearse it either, obviously.”

Europe wrap up their first Australian tour at The Tivoli, Brisbane, May 23, $96.71–$129.30, Ticketmaster

Originally published as Swedish band Europe are finally coming to Australia and you can expect The Final Countdown