Hep Stars was Sweden’s most successful band in the 60s. Benny Andersson (ABBA) was one of the members of the pop group back then. Actual members are: Svenne Hedlund, Bengan Arenblad, Totte Päivärinta, Todde Stoor and Joffe Enbom. One of their most popular song is ”Cadillac” (based on The Renegades’ ”Brand New Cadillac”). Cool song, isn’t it? Not sure if it’s the same baby and if the cadillac is big & black.
So, the guys are celebrating their 50th anniversary and for this reason, they are releasing an album in 2014 (4th week). Why am I writing about it? Because that album will contain a so far unpublished song written by Per Gessle. There will be 2 singles (”It´s Nice To Be Back”; ”I Wanna Be With You”), but I have no clue if any of these 2 songs is the one written by Mr G. Actually, there is a song with the title ”I Wanna Be With You” on The Lonely Boys album, but I guess it’s not the same, since they are talking about a so far unreleased song. UPDATE: As Per informs, it IS the song from The Lonely Boys… UPDATE (29th Jan 2014): here you can have a listen to it… Ehm… or maybe not if you don’t want to ruin what you have in your mind about this song.)
This is not the first time Per Gessle cooperated with Hep Stars. When EMI released their compilation album (Hep Stars: 1964-69!), it was Per who compiled those 30 songs the double LP contains. Not sure about the year, since some websites say it was in the early 80s, some others say it was in 1992. Would be cool to know the whole story behind it.
Google helped me to remember an old, fantastic SOAP interview (10/06/2006) with Per done by Jan Gradvall, where besides many many other interesting things he also mentioned that Hep Stars was his first favourite band.
Per said in that interview: “I liked them. I envied my parents that they could see Hep Stars on stage. I asked my mother about this just recently, but she couldn’t remember anything. She is 81.”
“I liked Hep Stars so much that I forced my friends to pretend that we were a band. We stood there with Carrom sticks as guitars and mimed to “Sunny Girl” from Hep Stars and “It’s My Life” from The Animals. But my friends were totally uninterested in music. They thought I was weird.”
Another interesting information is that the upcoming Hep Stars album was produced by Mats MP Persson.
MP played and worked together with Svenne several times in the past. You can find some pics of MP and his studio from the past HERE and some new ones HERE. Don’t forget to check the walls! 😉
BBC Four will broadcast a documentary with Svenne and MP in it on 27th Dec.
Pic of Per is from ”Gyllene Tider sommaren 2013” docu, pic of MP is from Hep Stars / Hep House Records FB site.