Biography

I’ve just finished reading ”Alla tiders Gyllene Tider”. The book is of very high quality, anyone can tell it already at the first glance. It’s unbelievable how fast Jan-Owe Wikström could put all the stories together to release this fab book appr. a half year after the thought of writing this gem was born.

I love this road movie style he chose and even if most of the information in the book we could read / hear in old and recent interviews, it’s great to have all these things together in one book and one can still find some new info. Many things I read made me smile or even laugh. One of these was when Lasse Lindbom said: ”There is hardly any pop star potential in these boys. And I’m a little hesitant about the singer.” 🙂 Or when MP forgot to bring his guitar for the Bio Reflex show in Getinge, 1978. Loved Göran’s quote from Leksand (audience: 7 661), thinking about his past and not being an active musician when there is no GT in sight: ”I never play for less than ten thousand people.” One of the funniest stories is still Micke Syd’s with the girls in Malmö. They couldn’t recognize him and even if Micke Syd told, the girls couldn’t believe him it was really him, the drummer from GT.

There were other things that made me ”ahaaa, so that’s why it was like that”. For example, regarding changing the setlist and putting ”Gå & fiska!” towards the end instead of keeping it as an opening song – to spare Per’s voice. ”Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sej” was anyway the best choice for being the opener. Another thing I’ve never been thinking about is where the name of DJ Fritzon’s magic instrument, Farfisa (Fabbriche Riunite di Fisarmoniche) is coming from. Nice to know now this, too.

It was sad reading about the 1981 Kristianopel tragedy again, but it also made me think how lucky we were with the numbering system during this tour. However, we are living in an another century now, when fights were tougher for the best picnic places this time.

I like it a lot that all the band members and some other important guys and girls from the tour got shorter or longer chapters in the book. The Gessleist in me, of course, likes chapters ”Per Gessle” and ”Låtskrivandet” the most. No matter how much I already heard and read about his songwriting or how much he was sharing about it so far, I never get tired of reading about this topic again and again. C’mon, this guy wrote ”(Dansar inte lika bra som) Sjömän” in only 8 minutes! Wow! Reading this chapter about songwriting and seeing a pic of Per’s ”Röstmemon” app made me think it would be nice to have some of those files as bonus on some future release. Wishful thinking. 🙂

Besides these chapters I really mean that the whole book is a very enjoyable reading. I didn’t know, for example that Anders and his wife, Jennie are that much into making music for movies and TV series.

It’s nice to see all the old pics, mainly because lots of them we could have never seen before. I can’t even count how many times I mentioned that the actual photos of the Golden Guys are fantastic, all 5 of them look extremely hot on all pics. Anders Roos, the photographer did a splendid job. Tons of shots are in the book from the tour, from backstage, of many details we can’t see from our crowd positions and we can see lots of familiar faces. I would love to see all the pics Anders took (20 000), but couldn’t make it into the book. Even a separate photo book would sound good. 😉

Well, there are some typos, but the high quality, the great stories and the awesome pics make you forget about them quite soon.

I love 2 of the last few sentences in the outro: ”It should not take nine years for the next comeback. Everyone agrees on it.” Indeed! And until then, can’t wait to see the upcoming GT DVD.

PS #1: If you haven’t bought the book yet, I can highly recommend you to obtain it. It is really worth it.

PS #2: Oh and when I’m back to Sweden, I definitely have to check the second-hand bookshops to get hold of Jan-Owe’s GT book from 1997.