DISMEMBER’s FRED ESTBY Explains Why They Chose To Reunite & Why They’re Not Touring

Dismember originally reunited to play Scandinavia Deathfest in October 2019 and has been playing live ever since. So why did Dismember get back together after breaking up in 2011? According to drummer Fred Estby in an interview with 69 Faces Of Rock, people asked about it for years. Then in 2017, Estby realized that there was genuine interest in a Dismember reunion, which prompted him to contact his bandmates.

“I moved to the United States in 2016. I toured — I’m a sound engineer, so I did a lot of front-of-house jobs for other bands, touring with other bands. And people sometimes came up to me and would be, like, ‘Are you Fred from Dismember?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, why?’ ‘You guys should tour again. You guys should play again.’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’

“People say that and they don’t really mean it. But after a couple of years, like around 2017, I was, like, ‘Oh, maybe there is a real interest that is big enough for us to maybe think about playing together.’ And we were not all on the same page then, but we let it go. So we kind of forgot about it. But then around 2018, we started getting real offers to do festivals and so on. And people were actually saying that, like, ‘Whatever you want, whatever you need within reason, we want you to play.’ So, we finally got on the same page, all of us, and we were, like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it again. Let’s see how this goes.'”

Estby later clarified that Dismember isn’t going to be doing any long tours anytime soon, as he feels it’ll probably have a negative effect on the band. Estby also notes that everyone in Dismember agrees that touring wouldn’t be fun, and why the hell would they do something that’s not fun? They’re Dismember. They’re legends who hardly need to prove themselves out there.

“We do not do any long tours. We don’t do more than two shows in one weekend. If we start touring again, you’re gonna start seeing the bad sides of being away from your family and your home and your work, and you can’t take off from work. We all have careers that we don’t wanna give up. So, that’s number one. Number two is that we promised each other that any show or any decision that we do for the band is gonna be — everybody has to be in, all five of us. If that’s not happening, then it’s not gonna happen.

“And number two was that we said that if it’s not fun, we shouldn’t do it. We need to know that we’re having as much fun as we did when we started out, so that we’re laughing, there’s more positivity than negativity around the shows we’re doing. That was really important to us. And that’s why we keep it like this. People are, like, ‘Oh, you should come tour.’ Or, ‘If you could be on the road instead, we could pay a little less for you guys to come play. And then you can play more shows and all that.’

“Yeah, but that is the problem. Then you start compromising on your own terms. So we’re never gonna do that. We’re never gonna tour. If we play more than two shows in one week, that’s gonna be very rare, and it has to be very special. Otherwise, we keep it like this. And that makes it fun for us, for the audience, and we also know that there’s gonna be good quality for all the shows that we’re playing.”