EUROPE Trivia — 77 Entries
77 sourced facts about EUROPE.
Trivia
Europe reached Japan by way of a single piece of vinyl. The critic Masanori Ito was sent the band's debut — a Swedish pressing on the independent Hot Records — by an acquaintance in the Netherlands, and carried it into Victor insisting it was worth their time. Two men, the A&R director and his boss, played "Seven Doors Hotel" on a turntable in a cramped storeroom of a meeting room in the corner of the international department, on the fourth floor of Victor's building in Harajuku. That was where the band's Japanese career began.
The Japanese debut shipped an initial run of about 3,000 copies and sold, excluding the many later reissues, somewhere around 5,000 — or just short of it. Victor had been aiming at 5,000 to 10,000, so the album itself did not move. The single of "Seven Doors Hotel" was another matter. It sold well on the back of heavy play at the rock nights held in Shinjuku discos such as Tsubaki House, where the song became known before the band did. Their director is clear about why: this one spread on the strength of the song, and had nothing to do with how the members looked.
The Japanese "Seven Doors Hotel" single does not carry the album mix. Victor asked Hot Records to send a master for the single, and what came back turned out to be mixed differently from the version on the record. That request came after the album was already out, which settles the single's status: it was a single cut from the album, not an advance release ahead of it.
The single drawn from the second album came out the other way round in Japan. The Swedish Hot Records pressing led with "Lyin' Eyes" and put "Dreamer" on the B-side; Japan flipped the two and issued it as the "Dreamer" single instead, on the reasoning that Japanese listeners took more readily to a ballad.
Which song should lead the third album in Japan was an open question inside Victor. It came down to two — "The Final Countdown" or "Rock The Night" — and the title track won. Their director places the discussion around the time a cassette of the full album arrived from overseas.
The first Japanese tour came in September 1986, behind The Final Countdown. Tokyo's Nakano Sun Plaza was booked for it, a hall that — as Victor's director puts it — placed them among the big names of the day. Udo Artists promoted the run. Outside Tokyo, though, it went only to Osaka and Nagoya. The visit had been long awaited, but the band still had exactly one hit single to their name, and for a promoter that made the draw very hard to read.
Near the end of that first Japanese tour the keyboard player, Mic Michaeli, came down with pneumonia. A television taping was still outstanding, and he got through it before the band flew home to Sweden. Victor's director remembers him coughing badly.
"Love Chaser", from The Final Countdown, had a second life in Japan: it was taken as the theme song of the domestic feature 『プライド・ワン』 and cut as a single on the back of it. The film did less well. Victor's director recalls a picture about motor racing with no star names attached, and no success to speak of.
Europe saw in 1992 on the stage of the Tokyo Dome — not, however, at a show of their own. It was the fourth edition of the year-end rock festival that the promoter Udo Artists had made an annual fixture, and it was called Final Countdown '91. Metallica headlined; Europe, Tesla and Thunder filled out the bill. The band who wrote the song were playing a New Year's Eve event named after it.
Secret Society came out in Japan on 18 November 2006 through Victor Entertainment, catalogue number VICP-63631, with a bonus track exclusive to that edition: "Start From The Dark (Live at SHIBUYA-AX)", recorded at the band's Tokyo show. Japanese rights, which had passed to Epic with the fifth album, were back with Victor by this point.
The Japanese edition of Last Look at Eden appeared on 21 October 2009 through Victor Entertainment, catalogue number VICP-64772. Its exclusive bonus track is "Scream Of Anger (Live from Sweden Rock Festival 2009)", running 4:54 and credited to J. Tempest and M. Jacobs — a live reading of a song first heard on 1984's Wings of Tomorrow.
Joey Tempest's own account of how it started: Masanori Ito found the band in 1983, and a promotional visit the following year let them introduce Wings of Tomorrow in Japan. Of the period before The Final Countdown he has put it plainly — there were two countries supporting them, Sweden and Japan.
Joey Tempest first came to Japan in 1984, aged 21, and by 2013 he reckoned he had been back twenty or thirty times. In the same interview he mentioned that he uses chopsticks at home, and is teaching his son to use them too.
Joey Tempest credits Iron Maiden with opening the door for Europe in Japan — without meaning to, he says, but the early band benefited all the same. He also names Steve Harris as the source of the best advice he ever received: that keeping a band going means being prepared to part ways with old friends and colleagues.
In April 2019 Europe played three consecutive nights at Club Citta' in Kawasaki, on the 26th, 27th and 28th. What made the run unusual was the programming: twenty-one songs each night, and a substantially different set every time. Tempest laughed that changing the set nightly was fairly crazy and that few other bands do it, but said that was exactly the challenge and the excitement of it.
At the Tokyo Dome City Hall show on 1 February 2024, Mic Michaeli introduced "Carrie" as the first song he ever wrote with Joey Tempest. Tempest, for his part, altered a line of the lyric that night to sing "Again... Tokyo Again...".
In December 1982 Europe won Rock-SM, the Swedish Rock Championships, a nationwide contest whose final was broadcast live across Sweden. Alongside the main prize the band collected two individual awards — best singer for Joey Tempest, best guitarist for John Norum. They had entered as Force, and not on their own initiative: the demo tape went in without them, sent by Tempest's girlfriend. By the time they reached the live rounds they were already billed as Europe.
Hot Records, the label that issued Europe's debut, was not an outside company at all: it was set up by their own manager, Thomas Erdtman. He was at the same time a product manager at CBS Records in Sweden, and ran a contest for Swedish bands more or less as a sideline — the contest Force entered. The band therefore won a competition staged by the man who owned the label, and made their first album for that label.
Signing the band proved harder than hearing them. Hot Records was a label in name only, and no industry directory anywhere listed a contact for it. So Victor's director wrote a letter — to the fan-club post office box printed on the back of the sleeve. It explained that a Japanese record company wanted to release the album in Japan, and asked whoever opened it to pass the message to the band's office or manager. About a month later Erdtman replied by fax, and the deal moved quickly from there.
The advance Victor paid to license the debut for Japan was three thousand US dollars — about 700,000 yen at the exchange rate of the day, roughly 230 yen to the dollar. Their director puts that close to the floor of what a new rock act was offered at the time, and explains the caution simply enough: it was an unknown band arriving from a company they had never dealt with before.
The Japanese edition did not use the sleeve the rest of the world got. The Swedish original was a photograph of the four members, and Victor rejected it outright — a straightforward group snapshot that sat badly against the music. The director and Victor's in-house design team built a new cover instead from two transparencies hired from a stock library: a palace for the background, and the statues that flank it. The pair of statues is in fact one photograph, mirrored. The Japanese artwork was later adopted as the album's worldwide sleeve.
The Japanese title given to the debut, 『幻想交響詩』, came out of a conversation with Yasushi Sakai, then deputy editor of the magazine Music Life. The obi strip wrapped around the Japanese sleeve went further, promising the return of the essence of British hard rock — an odd thing to say about a Swedish band, and deliberately so. There was as yet no such phrase in Japanese as "Scandinavian metal"; Scandinavian music meant ABBA. Metal came in two varieties, British or German, and the lyrical, formal cast of the debut put it nearer the first.
The American breakthrough had a good deal to do with who was working behind it. Europe's US management was Herbie Herbert, who managed Journey — and the introduction came through Japan. April Music, which handled Europe's publishing there, employed Akio Morishita, a former CBS director on Journey, and it was Morishita who pitched the band to Herbert. Herbert carried real weight with American radio, and working with Epic's product manager in New York he went at radio systematically. That was the answer to the problem of a band nobody in America had heard of.
The vocals for The Final Countdown ran past their schedule, for the simple reason that touring had left Joey Tempest's voice half gone. The release date could not move, so he flew to Los Angeles at short notice to finish them. Unfortunately that was the same week a Japanese party — the critic Masanori Ito and Victor's director — was flying to Stockholm to interview him. Nobody from the management mentioned it. They found out he was not there after they arrived. The interview went ahead anyway: a phone call placed from a Stockholm hotel to America, with Victor's own director sitting in the middle as interpreter.
The video for "The Final Countdown" was shot in Stockholm because of what it cost. Epic and Victor were preparing the album's release jointly, and the question of what could be filmed on a limited budget was settled by staying home. That the clip looks expensive anyway comes down largely to the helicopter aerials — a result Victor's director credits squarely to Epic's planning.
Victor's Japanese rights ran to four albums and no further, the debut included — a limit already fixed while the second album was still being recorded. From the fifth, Prisoners in Paradise, Europe were released in Japan by Epic, under CBS, like everywhere else. Their first Japanese director describes it as something nobody could have done anything about, and regrets it anyway.
Accounts of when John Norum left Europe do not agree, but he was there for the band's first Japanese tour in September 1986. His own official site gives an exact end point: his last performance with Europe was in Amsterdam on 31 October 1986, and from 1 November he was on his own. The reasons are similarly plural. Tempest has said the trouble was never the song itself but Kevin Elson's radio mix; Norum has cited that mix burying the rhythm guitar, a falling-out with manager Thomas Erdtman, and his loathing of the teen-idol image the band had acquired.
The mixing was done at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California — the room where Kevin Elson had mixed Journey — and the trip was the band's first time in the United States. The 1986 sleeve, however, prints the credit as "Fantasy Studios, San Francisco, CA". The studio itself gave its address as 2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, throughout the period; the same sleeve line also puts Powerplay Studios in Zurich rather than in Maur where it actually stands, so the nearest-big-city convention is applied to both.
The sixth album, Secret Society, was produced by the band themselves and recorded at Kingside Studios in Stockholm with Lennart Östlund engineering. Stefan Glaumann mixed it at Toytown Studios, and George Marino mastered it at Sterling Sound in New York. Tempest put numbers to the sessions: around seventeen demos, of which eleven were recorded, over roughly sixty days in the studio.
Europe's own official biography calls the Secret Society sleeve the best album cover they had made to that point, and credits it to Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis. The album's own credits name not the man but the company he led: the cover design and photography go to StormStudios, with artwork by Lee Baker and illustrations by Dan Abbott.
Last Look at Eden was produced by Tobias Lindell, who also mixed and engineered it, with additional production credits for Tempest and Mic Michaeli. It was recorded and mixed at Bohus Sound Studios in Gothenburg, with further recording at two Stockholm studios. The orchestra heard on the record is the Czech National Symphony Orchestra under Tomáš Brauner, taped at The Gallery Studios in Prague, from arrangements by Michaeli and Tommy Hansson.
The reunited Europe have collected a number of awards. In 2015 they took Comeback Of The Year at the Classic Rock Roll Of Honour, and in 2018 a Swedish Grammis for Best Hard Rock / Metal Album for Walk the Earth. The same year they were inducted into the Swedish Music Hall Of Fame.
In 2024 Europe played India for the first time since 1988, appearing at the Me'Gong Festival in Meghalaya before a crowd the band's own biography puts at more than 100,000.
Europe's twelfth studio album, Come This Madness, is released on 25 September 2026 through Silver Lining Music / Hell & Back Recordings — nine years on from Walk the Earth. It was recorded at RMV Studio in Stockholm, a facility founded by Benny Andersson and Ludvig Andersson, produced by Tom Dalgety and mixed by Mike Fraser.
Joey Tempest describes producer Tom Dalgety as having become so involved in the writing and recording of Come This Madness that the band regard him as a sixth member — brought in not merely to record them but into the making of the songs themselves.
Come This Madness carries two fellow Swedes on backing vocals: Tobias Forge of Ghost and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth.
"The Cult of Ignorance" started as an idea Mic Michaeli brought to Joey Tempest while the band were touring South America. Its title was taken from a phrase coined by the writer Isaac Asimov.
The video for "The Cult of Ignorance" is built around cameos by friends of the band — among them the actress Malin Åkerman, the former world No. 1 tennis player Stefan Edberg, the astronaut Christer Fuglesang, and Howlin' Pelle of The Hives.
In 2022 Europe were presented with a special award by YouTube: per the announcement, they were the first Swedish band to pass a billion views with a single song. The song, inevitably, was "The Final Countdown".
The band took its name from a pair of Deep Purple live albums. Speaking in 2015, Joey Tempest explained that Purple followed Made In Japan with Made In Europe, that the band had worn out both records, and that this was where the name came from. Breaking the idea to John Levén and John Norum was another matter: by Tempest's own account he had to get a few beers into them first.
On the Oricon weekly album chart, the highest position Europe hold in the data Oricon publishes is No. 4, for their fourth album Out of This World. It was released in Japan on 31 August 1988 and spent twelve weeks on the chart. Prisoners in Paradise follows at No. 12 (released 30 September 1991, four weeks), then Start from the Dark at No. 38 and Walk the Earth at No. 46. These are chart placings, not sales figures.
The keyboard fanfare predates Europe's first album. Joey Tempest, still at college, asked a young man he knew called Mic Michaeli — then playing in a band named Avalon, and not yet a member of Europe — whether he could borrow his keyboard. Fooling about on the borrowed Korg PolySix, he found the sweeping figure that would open the song. He could hear that it had something and could not build a song around it, so the minute-long fragment sat unused. What moved it on was a nightclub directly across the road from the band's management office: their manager suggested the club play Tempest's one-minute piece as the music for its laser show. Standing at the bar, Tempest and bassist John Levén began talking about how much further the thing could be taken.
How the recorded intro was actually built has been described two different ways by two members. Keyboard player Mic Michaeli, interviewed in 2006, laid it out as a layer of two sounds: a brassy patch he made on a Roland JX-8P, and a factory sound from a Yamaha TX-816 — a rack he describes in the same breath as being essentially eight DX7s in a module. Joey Tempest, for his part, has said the recording chained eleven synthesizers together over MIDI. The writing itself had been done years earlier on a Korg PolySix.
In the studio the song came close to falling apart over its tempo, and for one day it went under the working title "The Final Breakdown". Slower, straighter takes were recorded, closer to AC/DC. Tempest held out for keeping the Iron Maiden gallop, and the original rhythm and title were the ones that survived — because, as he tells it, that bounce is what makes you want to jump up and down.
Why, of all destinations, does "The Final Countdown" head for Venus? Joey Tempest's answer is disarmingly plain: he wanted the rhyme. "Seen us" and "Venus" — that was the whole of it. For where the idea came from in the first place he points to the first single he ever bought, David Bowie's "Space Oddity".
The Final Countdown was not made in Sweden. After roughly two weeks of pre-production at home with producer Kevin Elson, the band moved to Powerplay Studios outside Zurich and stayed about five weeks. The studio had bedrooms, so they lived there while they worked. John Norum remembers it as somewhere out in the countryside with no outside distractions at all — nothing to do but the record.
The last song written for The Final Countdown was "Cherokee", and its subject arrived by accident. Tempest happened to see a book lying around the studio — it belonged to producer Kevin Elson's wife at the time — and the song came out of that.
There was no Carrie. Asked outright whether a real person stood behind the song, Joey Tempest said there was not — it was written in general terms, drawing on the ordinary breakups going on around the band when they were young rather than on one particular romance.
On the German television show Peter's Pop Show, Billy Idol declined to follow Europe. "The Final Countdown" was enormous in Germany at the time, and when the band ran it at the afternoon soundcheck the audience went wild. Europe were down to open and Idol to go on second — the order he had taken in rehearsal — but come the actual filming he said he simply could not go on after that song.
Around the time of The Final Countdown, Europe met Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, who went out of their way to offer one piece of advice: put the time into the actual recording, and do not bother so much with touring. Europe, in Tempest's telling, took the advice on board and then did precisely the opposite. They spent most of the next three years on the road.
The second album, Wings of Tomorrow, was cut at Polar Studios in Stockholm — ABBA's own studio, and the room where Led Zeppelin made In Through The Out Door. Europe could not afford it properly, so they worked the gaps: late shifts and weekends. Tempest, nineteen or twenty at the time, remembers engineer Leif Mases threading up one-inch Zeppelin tapes to play them.
"Open Your Heart", from Wings of Tomorrow, opened a number of doors for Europe. It was the song that got New York to sit up, and it also brought an approach from Dieter Dierks — the producer behind Scorpions — who contacted the band directly after hearing it to say he wanted to work with them.
The fourth album, Out of This World, was made in London with Ron Nevison, and the band's reason for choosing him was specific rather than general: he had produced UFO's Lights Out and Obsession, and the early Michael Schenker Group records.
During the Out of This World sessions Europe managed to annoy Freddie Mercury. They were at Townhouse Studios in London, getting a sound on Ian Haugland's drums with Ron Nevison, and had not shut the door properly. Mercury was next door recording opera. He came in to point out that their drums were going straight into his mixing console, and to ask whether they would please keep it down — very posh and very eloquent, in Tempest's recollection, and quite annoyed.
The guitar solo in "Superstitious" began life on a Joey Tempest demo. John Norum had left the band by this point, and Tempest recorded the solo's main melody himself and played it to the others; Kee Marcello then built the scales and runs around it.
Prisoners in Paradise was to have been produced by Bob Rock. He left to work with Metallica on the Black Album instead, and Beau Hill took the record on.
The listening party at which Europe played the finished Prisoners in Paradise to their label stayed with them. Ian Haugland's account is that the band arrived proud of the record and got the usual line back — the label could not hear a single — along with an instruction for Tempest to go away and write another half-dozen songs with Jim Vallance, then Bryan Adams's writing partner.
The last stage the first incarnation of Europe stood on was Portsmouth Guildhall, on 15 March 1992, at the end of a UK tour. The band had already decided to stop, and no announcement was ever made. The decision had been taken at a meeting after the Portsmouth show, where Tempest proposed a sabbatical and said he wanted to make a solo record; the others resisted. By his own account nothing was formally dissolved — they agreed to stop for now and talk later. It was seven years before the five of them were on a stage together again.
What restarted Europe was a single night: New Year's Eve 1999 in Stockholm, on a large barge moored in the middle of the city. Just before midnight they played two songs, "Rock The Night" and "The Final Countdown". It remains the only Europe concert at which both of the band's lead guitarists, John Norum and Kee Marcello, have shared a stage. Tempest says the moment that settled it was not the show but the rehearsal for it, after which everyone came away thinking they had to do this properly.
John Norum set one condition for coming back in 2003: on any studio album he would be the band's only guitarist. He was comfortable enough with Kee Marcello playing some shows, but not with sharing the guitars on a record. He was weighing the offer against another one at the time — Phil Mogg had asked him to replace Michael Schenker in UFO.
The comeback album, Start from the Dark, was deliberately made at speed and left rough. Tempest's account: six months of writing, then rehearsals, recording and mixing inside what he calls forty days and forty nights. The model was their own first album — raw, fresh and to the point — and the aim was to catch the excitement of being back together and then move on from it.
"Hero", the ballad on Start from the Dark, is a dedication to Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. Tempest has described meeting Lynott at sixteen or seventeen and being treated warmly by him — an encounter he has spoken of as formative.
Partway through the Bag of Bones sessions the control room observed a minute's silence. It was not for a person. It was for the 1980s — that decade's sound and its production techniques — and everyone present, producer Kevin Shirley included, bowed their heads and said goodbye to it for good. After that, in Tempest's words, a new band was born.
Bag of Bones was released on 27 April 2012 through earMUSIC/Edel, produced by Kevin Shirley, and carries a guest appearance by the blues-rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa.
The title track of War of Kings goes back to a book Joey Tempest read as a child: Röde Orm by Frans G. Bengtsson, published in English as The Long Ships, a novel about the power struggles of the early Viking age.
War of Kings was cut at PanGaia Studios in Stockholm when the room was still brand new — which is exactly the problem the band set out to solve. To stop a new studio sounding new, they hired in vintage microphones, compressors and effects units and brought them along. Dave Cobb produced.
Europe went after Dave Cobb because of what they had heard him do with Rival Sons. Their management made the approach cold, and got an unexpected reply: as a kid, Cobb had played drums along to Europe records.
The Walk the Earth sleeve exists because of a T-shirt. Producer Dave Cobb turned up to a session wearing one carrying a design by the Los Angeles artist Mike Sportes; the band liked it enough to commission Sportes to make an original piece for the album.
Walk the Earth was made at Abbey Road Studios in London inside a two-week window that a friend of Tempest's managed to secure, with Dave Cobb producing. The band worked on old equipment and cut the songs close to live, running them through and picking the best takes afterwards.
In 2015 Europe appeared in a television commercial for the American insurer GEICO — but on their own terms. They refused to let the 1986 recording be used and supplied a freshly recorded version instead, taken from a German live show in 2013 or 2014 with the audience stripped out and the track remixed. They also insisted on appearing as they look now. Had GEICO wanted the original recording and the band dressed as they were thirty years earlier, Tempest says, they would not have done it.
That GEICO commercial handed Europe their first American chart-topper. After the ad debuted in September 2015, "The Final Countdown" spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hard Rock Digital Songs chart — the band's first No. 1 on any Billboard chart — with Billboard reporting 37,000 downloads and 6.8 million streams over the following weeks. The song was twenty-nine years old.
The wrestler Bryan Danielson used "The Final Countdown" as his entrance music for years. Ring of Honor gave it up when the promotion took a television deal, stating publicly that it could find no economically feasible way to keep paying for it. When Danielson moved to AEW in 2021 the terms were again prohibitive — on his account, several hundred thousand dollars for around twenty plays a year — so he had an original theme written instead. In June 2023 he did walk out to it once more, against Kazuchika Okada at Forbidden Door, AEW's joint show with New Japan Pro-Wrestling; AEW's Tony Khan said he had been negotiating for years and got the best rate he had ever had.
In November 2019, during the UK general election campaign, Europe asked the Conservative Party to stop playing "The Final Countdown". The song had reportedly been used at Conservative headquarters to motivate staff. The band's manager, Adam Parsons, said Joey Tempest wanted the party to cease and desist.
At the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles, a couple of the band were once introduced to Lemmy. He was at the pinball machine, as usual. Somebody said they were from the rock band Europe, and Lemmy — without looking up — replied that Europe were not a rock band. Tempest calls it a supremely cool answer; the band were stunned, laughed it off, and got on fine with him afterwards. A few weeks later they got their own back when Kerrang! reviewed a Europe show and called them louder than Motörhead.
Europe were special guests on the American leg of Def Leppard's Hysteria tour — a summer when "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was a US No. 1 and every date was sold out. Joe Elliott, Tempest says, has since described Europe as the wildest partying band he has known.
Asked to name the low point of his career, Joey Tempest points to the stretch when he and John Norum stopped speaking. They travelled in separate limousines and passed messages through the band's road manager. He says he learned a great deal from it, and that these days the two of them are always talking.
Upplands Väsby, the Stockholm suburb Joey Tempest grew up in, also housed Leif Edling of Candlemass and Yngwie Malmsteen. Before the band had a deal Tempest paid his bills with a cleaning job at a printing company — where, one day, the presses ran off a music magazine with him in it.