The last 30+ years have been a hell of a ride for Biff Malibu, frontman for Norwegian hard rockers Gluecifer. In that span of nearly three and a half decades, he and his gang of rock n’ roll vagabonds dropped a slew of certified hard rock classics, toured the globe, and subsequently imploded, only to reconvene against all odds after a 12 year absence. This endless reunion tour, as one would tend to brand it, has now given way to the obligatory reunion album, which is appropriately titled Same Drug New High. Malibu is the first to acknowledge the irony in all of this, and does so with the wit and wisdom that can only be found in a man who’s been rocking as long as he has. In this brand new interview, Malibu reflects upon Gluecifer’s second life, coexisting alongside the Norwegian black metal scene, and the one and only Lemmy.
Greetings Biff and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Biff Malibu: I’m fine! How are you?
I am fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. We have a lot to talk about, so let’s hop right in. Gluecifer are about to release their first album in 22 year, Same Drug New High. Before we go any further, I must ask. Back in 2005, when the band hung it up, did you in your heart of hearts ever believe the band would get back together, let alone make a new record?
BM: Absolutely not *laughs*. I never did. The breakup of a band is not the best of times, I have to say. A lot of us in the band lost touch with each other and just went separate ways. We live in the same city, but we didn’t see much of each other. I was busy doing other stuff. I never thought we’d get back. It was a great time. I had lots of fun, but then we got back together, did some comeback shows and had a lot of fun. After a while, we had so much fun, we said, “Maybe we can just keep on doing this, but then we need to write some more songs and maybe put a record out so we can have an excuse to go on tour again.” So that’s what we did.
When did the wheels get in motion for the band to reunite? That must’ve been close to a decade ago now.
BM: Yeah, we kept on getting offers from different festivals, asking if we wanted to do a comeback show. People were handing out sums. Someone asked me. Someone asked Arne (Captain Poon), a lot of different people. We just said, “No.” We never had a talk about it. Then, I think someone reached out from a very cool festival called Azkena Festival in the Basque country. I got a phone call from some of the guys saying, “You know, maybe we should just get together and have a chat about this. We’re just saying no. Maybe we can just find out why we’ve been saying no. Maybe we’ll just keep on saying no, but maybe it’s time to have a chat about this.” I was like, “OK, fine by me. I’ll have that chat.” It’s nice to hookup with people again who I haven’t seen in quite a while.
We had the chat and everybody was saying, “OK, if we’re going to do this, how do we need to do it?” Another way of rephrasing it, “In order for it to be cool, don’t get back into old conflicts, all that shit that can happen in a band.” That’s when everybody aired their grievances in a way *laughs*. It was like, “We can work this out.” Then, we were like, “Oh shit, we have to do a couple of rehearsals to see if we can still play together and if we sound decent.” We did a couple of rehearsals and were like, “OK, I think we’ll pull this off.” We just said, “Yeah, we’re coming back!” We rehearsed quite a lot, actually, for half a year, trying to learn the band’s old songs again and get the band up to a standard.
The first show was big. It was a big outdoor event with 10,000 people. We had to look like we’d done nothing else for the last 3 years. After that, a lot of people asked for us to come and play. They wanted to see us again. Old fans, new fans, some people that were too young to catch it when it happened back 20 years ago. It just kept on rolling. Here we are!
At what point during this reunion trek did the discussion come about of, “Hey, maybe we can create some new mojo.”?
BM: Very late at night, I have to say *laughs*. In Madrid, Spain, we had a great show. Lots of fun. We celebrated quite heavily after the show, almost like the old days. Somewhere in the night there, I was talking to Arne like, “God, this is really great. We’re here in Madrid, playing cool shows, hanging out with great people. This is a cool thing we have in our life here. There’s no stress, no pressure. It’s not our main source of income, so there’s just cool things about it. We just do the cool stuff. Wouldn’t it be nice to do that more?” He said, “Yeah, I agree. We have such a great time together. If we’re gonna play more shows, I think we maybe have to write some new songs. We can’t be on an endless farewell tour like KISS and play old stuff.” I was like, “Ah…” He said, “You really wanna try that?” I said, “Yeah, why not?!”
I was a bit in Dutch courage mode that night. Then, the next day, sometime in the afternoon, he came to me and said, “Remember what we talked about last night?” “Yeah.” *laughs* “Do you still mean it?” “I’m a man of my word, man! I’ll do it!” Then, we started throwing some ideas around, playing with ideas, melodies and stuff like that. We wrote some songs, took them to the rehearsal room, forked them out, went to the studio. I was like, “We’ll record 5 or 6 tracks and see if they’re any good. Then, we’ll listen to it, see if we can nail it, and then we’ll ask a couple of trusted friends or people we work with, “Is this really good enough or is it meh?”” They said, “No, this is fucking great!” Then we said, “OK.”, so we just started working. We wrote the album and recorded it. It was very inspiring. That’s how it happened. We rolled on.
How did the band write and assemble this album? Was there anything done differently this time around as opposed to past albums, or were the practices kept the same?
BM: Some of these old albums are a bit of a blur because things happened really fast. Sometimes I don’t remember what was made when we sat around writing, what was made in the rehearsal rooms when we were jamming, and what was made in the studio. It’s kind of blurry. Often we went to the studio and we were half done with songs. Then, we had a producer and we were building this thing in the studio. This time, we spent quite a lot of time, Arne, Rolf (Raldo Useless), and I working out chords, melodies, arrangements, took it to rehearsal room, put the drums and bass on it, adjusted it a little bit, trying to get back into this process of, “How do you write a song?”. You can write a song, but how do you put the pieces together to make it sound right?
Then, we went to the studio. In the studio, we did 3 times, 3 or 4 days each, very fast, almost like live recordings, not a whole lot of overdubs. We kept it simple. The studio and the guy who recorded it, who is also doing our live sound, is a great engineer. He really knows his stuff. He’s fast. He said, “I’ll make you sound the way you’re supposed to sound.” He knows all these tricks with tons of microphones. The sound, I think, sounds really cool and kind of fresh in a way.
It’s raw, but still high-end. It sounds like a band. It maybe doesn’t sound like a big production, but it sounds like a real band with the rough edges, but still not lo-fi or anything. That was it. It was quite easy. We often said, “This is enough. We don’t need anymore.” I was like, “Let’s keep it guitars, bass, drums, vocals. Throw in a shaker or a tambourine here or there.” I think there are some timpani on a song and maybe a weird synthesizer on the last track, but then the rest of it is just the sound of the band.
When I put my headphones on and crank this album up, it sounds as if the band is playing live in my head.
BM: That’s what we wanted. When I listen to record sometimes…I listen to a lot of music, especially when we wrote the songs and recorded the album, you listen crazy to all kinds of music. Every time you hear something good, you’re like, “Ah, what are they doing? Why does this sound so cool? Maybe it’s because they do this and this.” Then, you just try to rip off whatever ideas you find *laughs*. That’s how it is. I’ve often found that records that sound big and cool, often there’s not that much on it, like early AC/DC records. When you listen, it’s like, “Oh, I can hear the guitar.” Next time, “I listen to the bass. I listen to the song.” You can move your ears around a bit within the song instead of getting this industrialized big package, a wall of sound thing like you hear on the radio. That’s what we aim for.
Expanding upon the last question, how does Gluecifer post-reunion compare or contrast to the band’s original run in the ’90s and early ’00s?
BM: I think there is, musically, an unbroken line there, our influences, and the sort of thing that formed the band, we had a love of a lot of classic rock bands. Some garage rock, but based around blues patterns, rock n’ roll patterns, like a lot of bands like AC/DC, Motörhead, Led Zeppelin. It comes back from rock n’ roll. We also grew up with a lot of fast, energetic, and crazy punk rock on top of that. We mixed that together. You take classic rock at a violent speed with a lot of energy and craziness on top of it. That’s Scandinavian rock, in a way. I think that’s still there, but we’re 25 years older than we were, so we have to play it like we should play it today, don’t try to pretend that we’re twenty-somethings jumping around onstage. We have to do it our way.
Maybe the band I think is a little more heavy, or authoritarian *laughs*. We should play this with a lot of authority. We can do that because we know how to do it. I think also, on this record, we tried to go a bit more into songwriting and tried to crack a few codes there to maybe write the songs a little better, or maybe simpler. It’s just something to do with how you pace it and how you put things together. There’s a little more going on there, so that’s a little more mature in a way. Sometimes, in the old days, you would just have guitars playing a lot of riffs all the time. Then, I would yell my lungs off on top of that. This time, we said, “Maybe we should make something I sing and say, “OK, how much guitar do we really need on this to fit the song cool?”” It’s a little more crafted, but in a weird way, it sounds maybe less crafted. It sounds a bit more that we just play on the go. Someone said, “It makes a lot of work to make something sound easy.” *laughs*
For you, does Same Drug New High feel like a reunion album, a natural follow up to 2004’s Automatic Thrill, or somewhere in between?
BM: We’ve all been so into making this album that we haven’t thought that much about it from the outside. It’s fun to hear what people think about it, because it’s like, “We just made a record, man.” We try to make a good record sounding like music we like. That fits the band. We like a lot of music and it’s not like, “We can’t play with this band.”, or it doesn’t suit the band because we have some qualities. We try to write music that sounds good for Gluecifer. Some of it, I think, are songs we could’ve written 25 years ago. Some of it feels quite new. It feels like, not that we’re writing…instead of saying, “We have to make a record. Let’s write some songs and force the band into play this stuff and see what happens.” It’s more like, “We have this great band. We have a good time. How can we make something that would fit this and make everybody go, “Yeah, this feels great. This is good. There’s no stress.””, and it can show off some of the stuff that we think sounds pretty cool.”
We have a new bass player who’s really good, so you can hear a bit more things that are happening in the bass department. We still have a great drummer, of course, so we want to build a bit around him always. Guitar players, but this time I think it’s maybe a little less a wall of guitars than it used to be. I think the guitar playing comes out a little more too. I think one thing that we’ve gotten much better at since the old days is we sing a bit better. We know a little bit more about register. Our backing vocals are better. Also, we try to do stuff with that which feels fresh, but come on. It’s a rock n’ roll album! It’s not science. It’s not a symphony. It’s not an opus. It’s not something new. It’s not like bands are making a concept or a completely different album. It’s still a rock album.
For every high-speed punky rocker on this album, there’s no shortage of melodically inclined power pop tunes to counter, like “Pharmacity” and “Another Night, Another City”. Who’s responsible for this direction in the band’s sound?
BM: Arne has a soft spot for melodic stuff like that, so he’s into that. I’m a fan of Cheap Trick, bands like that, and I like The Cult. “Pharmacity”, you can hear some of The Cult in there. “Another Night, Another City” was a song where were like, “Is this too melodic for us? Can we really pull this off, or is it the outlier on the album? What the hell are we doing?” For a while, it was a bit like, “Are we leaving it in or taking it out?”, but we never got tired of the chorus. It sticks with you in a way. We like songs like that, so we put it in there. A lot of people are saying that they really like that tune, so that’s fun.
“Pharmacity”, that is big sounding and it’s sort of a riff, but it’s not like a classic, rock n’ roll guitar riff. It’s more like The Who, The Cult, of course, a bit ’60s, a bit of jangling guitars, and stuff like that. That was one of the first songs we wrote. I like it. With the lyrics, I thought, “This is cinematic. You paint a scene. The scene’s kind of grim, but the chords are upbeat.” They’re beautiful, in a way. There is absolutely some of that too. It’s always been on Gluecifer records. Some of it we can play really good. Some of it *laughs*, we try, but maybe we’re not the band to pull it off in a really good way. I think on this one, we nailed some of it, but Cheap Trick would be a key band.
Cheap Trick from my home state of Illinois! I love those guys.
BM: Great state!
It’s funny when you think back to those early Cheap Trick albums, especially the debut. You’ve got these really nasty, riff-driven songs, and then these sugary sweet forays. It’s like, “Is this the same band?”
BM: Right! “I Want You to Want Me” *laughs*, “California Man”, I love all that stuff.
At the same time Gluecifer formed in the early ’90s, your homeland of Oslo was synonymous with black metal. Did you ever cross paths with any of these acts back then? What were your thoughts on that scene and the sensationalism that surrounded it?
BM: We did not go that much to the same bars as those guys. One of the guys from Darkthrone, he was the sort of guy who hung around a lot of different places, but they were a bit secluded, and a lot of them were spread a bit around Norway. We thought the band Mayhem, that’s something I heard about from my teenage days. You always heard about Mayhem. That was the baddest band, the most rad stuff. It was like, “These guys, they are really fucking grim.” I like Mayhem. I think they’re cool. Some of the black metal stuff is a little too advanced for me.
When Burzum and those things came, and they were trying to sound really shitty, even though that was a part of the thing, we thought it was a bit funny *laughs*. All these guys were like hobbits. Suddenly, they started killing each other and it was like, “Woah, OK, wait a second. This is really…” I think we looked at it like a lot of Norwegians did. They were these weird people. With the killing of Euronymous, it was like, some of these guys are really fucking weird.
I don’t think we had that much in touch with them. We came more from a punk rock, rock n’ roll place. The black metal and the metal scene was a different place. They did different tours, played different venues, so we didn’t cross paths that often, but we met them sometimes at festivals. The guys from Gorgoroth, we hung out with them and we had a great time *laughs*. You can still talk about Marshall amps, drink beer, and have a great time.
One band who influenced both the black metallers and your band is Motörhead: A band whom you toured with here in the States back in 1999. What was that experience like and what are your favorite memories of Lemmy?
BM: Oh my God! We were invited to do that tour by Nashville Pussy. They were opening the tour and they could invite an opening band, so they invited us. It was like, “OK, this is happening. This is really cool.” Our first show was in Chicago. We showed up and we were like, “We’re the new guys here. We’ll just try to stay out and do our shit. Don’t bother anyone.” We were told, “Don’t bother Lemmy. He wants to chill out.” We were like, “That’s cool. We won’t bother him.” Then, we hung out with Nashville Pussy’s people and they were really nice.
You’re at the club and you wait all day for soundcheck and shit like that. You’d be in the hallway and you’d hear this sound like, “Clack, clack, clack.” There was this big guy in white cowboy boots with his shirt opened up, his belly button showing. He’s got a big hat, a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand, a bottle of coke in the other, and he would just walk down there. It was Lemmy *laughs*! He went up to the wall and we were like, “Hello, sir.” Then, after a while, he saw some of our shows. The drummer in Motörhead, Mikkey Dee, was Swedish, so we got a long with him. He liked talking Swedish. We didn’t understand Swedish. We’re Norwegians, but we hung out.
Lemmy was friendly and cool. The cool thing is he was just like you would think. He was a rock n’ roll legend, the same on and offstage. He drank a bottle of booze a day and walked it like he talked it. He was a no frills guy. He was not like a diva or anything. He was just cool. We had some really funny stories together.
What was the band’s initial takeaway of America upon first touring here?
BM: We loved it! I’ve spent a lot of time there, both privately and with work, so I love America. I’ve been to lots of parts of it. I love Chicago. I think it’s a great city. I’ve been around the Midwest and I’ve been to D.C. quite a lot for work with my newspaper. I’ve been to New York, of course, east coast, west coast, everything. I think the country is really great. I love being there. There’s a lot of cool people. The nature is spectacular. The cities are great. We used to call it “the world’s best country”, me and my friends *laughs*. “Oh, you’re going to the world’s best country this summer!”
Sometimes, I tell myself, there’s a lot of shit going on with politics. We might disagree, but it’s still America. There’s a lot of great people. It’s a great country, and a great way of life for a lot of people. OK, sometimes it’s difficult and hard. Of course, the music scene, bands, everything that’s been going on and has always been going on has been so important, for us and a lot of bands. A lot of the stuff that we do, it came from America. Without America, there wouldn’t be any rock. There was Britain in the ’60s and stuff like that, but a lot of the bands that we loved and liked like Ramones, thy were very American. I like it!
Every few years, we’ll hear the likes of Gene Simmons or some other talking head proclaim that “Rock is dead”: A phrase that has been uttered since the genre’s inception. What is your take on the current state of rock as it stands in 2026, and what do you have to say, if anything to the genre’s naysayers?
BM: I think Rick Sims from the Didjits, another great Illinois band, once said, “Rock ain’t dead. It’s just passed out in the corner.” *laughs* When music was more about records and stuff, you would have all these different hypes. It was like, “No, it’s not more rock. It’s more electronica or more hip hop.”, stuff like that, because then, the record business would be like that. You needed new stuff to happen all the time. Of course, rock had been around since the ’50s, with a revival in the ’60s, stadium stuff in the ’70s. Then came punk rock, and it was like, “Old rock is dead. New rock is here.” I understand that one.
Right now, everything that’s happening is like live shows. That’s the core of it now. When we play and go do shows, it seems very vital. There’s new bands coming up that sound great, put on great shows, and they sometimes make new stuff. A band like the Viagra Boys, for instance, are so exciting and cool. They’re fantastic. People go to a show and a rock show is an easy thing to go to. Just lower your shoulders a bit, get into it, and it’s a great experience. It’s kind of the same experience that people had in the ’60s or ’70s. Nowadays, you see people at shows from 70 years to 20 years, so I think it’s not dead. It might not be the cutting edge, hippest thing around anymore like it was in the ’60s or early ’70s, but it’s very much alive.
I see people come out for shows. There’s a big rock festival here in Oslo and 50,000 people come out. For a city of half a million people, that’s pretty cool. I think it’s very healthy, and I like it as a live thing because I think rock n’ roll is live music. It should be. That’s a very special experience you can have. To see a good rock show, that’s something everyone should do a couple times a year. It makes your mind healthy *laughs* and it’s fun!
Amen! In closing, Biff, what does the rest of 2026 have in store for Gluecifer?
BM: We’re gonna play some shows, and then hopefully some more shows *laughs*. We’ll just see what happens. We’re just saying, “We’re here!” Now that we’ve done the record, we’ve got some great new songs we can play. If you want us to come and play a show, and you think it’s gonna be a cool show, let’s talk! Let’s see if we can make it happen. We’re doing it in proper fashion, but it’s not like the old days where we had to play 100 shows to stay alive. We can maybe cherry pick a bit more, so now we try to say, “Let’s try to find those really cool nights where we can make something really cool happen.” Whether it’s a couple hundred people or a couple thousand people, it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s gonna be a cool night. We hope we can do a lot of that this year and we’ll see what happens.
The new Gluecifer album, Same Drug New High, is out now on Steamhammer. For more information on Gluecifer, click here.