Month: November 2009

Presidency of the Council of the European Union (commonly referred to as presidency of the European Union) is the responsibility for the functioning of the Council of the European Union which is rotated between European Union member states every six months. There is no single president but rather the task is undertaken by an entire national government, hence that state influences the direction of European Union policy during its term.

Source: Wikipedia

You might ask why I pasted this information from Wikipedia. As you are probably aware, on 1 July 2009, Sweden took over the Presidency of the EU and all the most important conferences/meetings with European politicians, scientifists and NGO workers are held in the Kingdom of Sweden at the moment. I had a chance to attend in one of these conferences. This wouldn’t be interesting to publish here at all as long as I wouldn’t have received an interesting CD album called “Swedish Pop Music” in the welcome-package. Afer all what’s the most popular thing that we associate with Sweden? Music, that’s for sure.

And guess who’s there? Per Gessle with “Silly really” among such stars of Sweden’s independent music stage as Lykke Li, Frida Hyvönen, Fever Ray, Kleerup, The Soundtrack of Our Lives or Benny Anderssons Orkester (yes, it’s Benny A. from ABBA). As for me, I wouldn’t expect Gessle’s song to appear on such compilation with these artist – don’t get me wrong, but Per was some kind of too commercial to be on this album. But it did happen! 🙂

There are (or better: were) 20,000 such albums and the production cost around 240,000 SEK. They were going to be distributed among all those people who attend UE conferences in Sweden this half of year. It’s an interesting way to promote Sweden and even better – interesting way to promote Per Gessle all over Europe – stright on the high level of diplomacy! 😉

More: SR.se, Swedish UE Presidency