![]() ![]() And it worked! In 1979, Opus Est were complete. Kent's little brother Leif, who was just 14 at the time, had been taking piano lessons for several years, and the band let him have a go at it. Kent remembers one keyboard player who was trying to play with them, but it was just too difficult for him, too much information, and the short-time band member almost fainted during a rehearsal… The songs they were doing were quite complex. The former, and parts of the latter were recorded this way.įinding a keyboard player proved to be very difficult. These songs remained unrecorded professionally, although they sometimes had a tape running during rehearsals. In 1978, the band finished a 23 minute piece of music called The High Mass and a suite in five parts called The Rise And Fall Of The Kingdom Shieldmoor. The band was working on songs mainly written by Kent. This was something that Håkan himself wasn't very sure about, but he let them talk him into joining the band anyway, in 1978. They realized that a friend of theirs, Håkan Nilsson, had a great voice. ![]() ![]() The time had come the band needed a singer. They never knew where he got it from, but they liked it, and adopted it as the band's new name. While on holiday in Spain, in 1979, Kent and Anders met a drunken Dutch guy, who suggested the mane Opus Est for the band. Their main influenced were Genesis, Yes, and ELP. During the first two years they moved more and more towards progressive rock with longer compositions and no improvised parts at all. Kent has to laugh about this now, saying this was probably influenced by them trying to be like Mahavishnu. For the time being, they called themselves Krishna. In those days, the band played mostly improvised jazz-rock music, influenced by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Without a name yet, the three founded the basis for Opus Est in 1977. The story begins in 1975, with Kent Olofsson getting his first guitar, and playing what he calls "simple rock music" with drummer Anders Olofsson (not related) and bass player Torbjörn Svensson, plus some others. He gave me a copy of the LP (of which he still had a few), and I even got to hear some unreleased music. Of course, he was able to tell me a lot about the band, and also got me in contact with the other musicians. In 2002, thanks so the internet, I was able to trace down one of the members of the band: guitarist Kent Olofsson. We got used to the idea that this was all we would ever know about this band - just this one amazing album. The album sleeve didn't have a lot of info on the band: the musicians' names and the name of the guy who recorded the album. The band turned out to be from Sweden and was called Opus Est. ![]() Powerful, not too complex, a good singer with a personal voice, and stunning musical parts. Some lyrics are written by old English poets, like many of the lyrics on the LP "Opus I".Īround 1986, I heard an album at a friend's place, with a kind of progressive rock that I liked instantly, from the first seconds into the first song. The lyrics were mostly written by the drummer Anders Olofsson. Most of the music for Opus Est was composed by Kent Olofsson, with great help from the other members of the band. ![]()
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