VII Gates Bio

Autumn 1999. JJ Rockford (guitars) moves to Halmstad to study. He meet David Agnsviks (bass) and they decides to form a heavy metal band. They rehearse a few times with some of David's classmates, but nothing more. David and JJ have to rehearse with a drum machine (not only a drawback... :)) for a couple of months.


Spring 2000. After a lot of searching, David and JJ finally finds a drummer in their taste, Mick van Slowfoot. Mick recruits his old friends Criss Blackburn (vocals) and Nicklas Cederfeldt (guitars). They start to rehearse in a rehearsal room in David's school, but after three rehearsals and three reports to the police (too loud volume…) they where kicked out. Then they started to rebuild Mick's old car repair shop to a rehearsal room. This took a lot of their time for several months.


Late summer 2000. David Agnsviks dies in a car accident. But the rest of the band take the decision to carry on as quick as possible, and they soon finds a new bass player, Magnus Jacobsson.


Autumn/winter 2000. Most of their time is dedicated with the building of the rehearsal room. Sometime in december, Nicklas decides to leave the band.


Spring 2001. After auditions by several guitarists, Basti joins the band. Directly after that, they starts to record the first demo, called "When Gates Are Opening". The demo sells pretty well in the local area, and a German record company ask them for more material.


Autumn 2001. In a very limited amount of time, the second demo "A Dark Room Of My Mind" is recorded. Tim Diaz, who did the piano on "Memory Of A Friend" on the first demo joins the band as a permanent member. The band are offered a record deal by the company mentioned before, but decides not to accept it.


Spring 2002. A Japanese record company buys a bunch of records to sell on the Japanese market. The demo has also got some good reviews in different magazines, like Rock Brigade (Brazil) and Burrn! (Japan), as well as some online-magazines.


Summer/autumn 2002. A third demo, "The Madman Inside" is recorded.


Autumn/winter 2002/spring 2003: Moe A:son replaces Magnus as a bassplayer. We got a lot of very positve reviews from different zines and webzines all around the world. Also got some proposals from different record companies. After a lot of discussions, Sound Riot and it's very friendly crew stands out as the best suggestion. And here we are right now. When I am writing this, the recordings of the debut album will start in a few days...