The May episode of Nordic Rox on Sirius XM was broadcast last night.
Per thinks you can’t go wrong with the Teddybears, so the show starts with one of their songs, Different Sound.
The second track on the program is Song Three Blues by Alberta Cross. Great Anglo-Swedish band with a great singer, Petter Ericson Stakee.
The next song is Titiyo’s Come Along. Still a great song, according to Per.
From Venus to Everyday, the closing track from Atomic Swing’s debut album is next. Per thinks they are a great band. Sven always liked them, they have a sort of different twist to the rock sound. Sven thinks this song is not a hit single at all, but it’s fun sometimes to go into the albums and check out all the tracks. Per’s reaction to this is that Sven is so old. Sven laughs.
Mando Diao starts the next block with Down In The Past from their Hurricane Bar album.
You Can’t Hurry Love by The Concretes is next. Per thinks they are were good.
Then comes I Like It Like That from a strange guy calling himself Son of a Plumber, as Sven says. He adds, ”I happen to sit next to him”. Per laughs. Sven tells it’s one of Per’s many disguises. Mr. G tells this Son of a Plumber project was made in 2005. This track is a little bit more contemporary than most of the other songs on that album. He wrote I Like It Like That for Roxette, but they never recorded it, because it was just written before or at the same time when Marie got ill. So he recorded it for SOAP. He put the drums on one side of the speaker. Sven tells it’s The Beatles way, or Nick Lowe style, Per adds. Cracking Up has got the drums to the left, which is really cool, Mr. G thinks. Sven tells SOAP became a highly eclectic double vinyl album. The whole idea with this project was to pay homage to the music from the early 70’s which Per was raised on. Mr. G really loves that sound and that style. It was the time when he put all his music collection into the iPod, so he just realized there were so many songs he forgot about. He was just getting into that 70’s mood and he wanted to make an album that sounded like that. He spent a month in the studio in the south of Sweden together with two other silly people, very good friends of him, Clarence Öfwerman and Christoffer Lundquist. Sven says it’s amazing that the creative concept came from an exercise of transferring a lot of digital tracks to an iPod. Per says it just became an inspiration. Everyone who’s been raised on music of the 60’s and 70’s knows there are so many songs that you forget about. Songs you loved when you were a kid, when you were in your teens, suddenly they just pop up and you just remember those days. For him, transferring appr. ten thousand tracks into an iPod, there were so many songs he forgot about and suddenly they just came to life again.
Sven asks which are the 3 most fab songs from the 70’s that Per can think of. The 70’s is a very complex decade according to Mr. G, but from the early 70’s he thinks about Metal Guru by T. Rex, Moonshadow by Cat Stevens and Aqualung by Jethro Tull. Sven says Per’s last choice is funny, because it came out in 1971 and earlier they had a discussion about a British journalist, David Hepworth who is writing a lot of books and one of his books was about 1971. He claims 1971 is THE year in rock music. Sven asks Per if he agrees with David. Mr. G says 1971 was an amazing year in pop music: the Blue album by Joni Mitchell, some great Rod Stewart albums, Led Zeppelin IV came out, the solo albums from The Beatles, the list goes on and on. Per says: ”Hey, we’re getting old, man!” Sven reacts: ”And we’re also drifting away from the subject, which is Scandinavian music!” The guys are laughing.
So they get back to more good-looking music and Popsicle is next with Not Forever. Per thinks the band is magnificent. They were founded in the 90’s and Sven asks Per what he thinks about the 90’s in general. Mr. G says it was a hectic decade for him. They had the Roxette circus going on for many years, then he did some reunion stuff with his Swedish band in 1996 and he did some solo stuff and then back to Roxette, so it was a very busy decade. His son was born in 1997 and that changed his life… for a week, Per jokes. Haha. Sven says the 90’s brought some slight change in music, a bit of a harder edge in Britpop wave, which effected Per as well. Mr. G tells they were very much part of the 80’s and when the Nirvana and grunge scene happened in the 90’s it changed contemporary music a bit. In England you had e.g. Oasis and Blur. Per liked that too.
Sindy is also on the show with First Cut from his debut LP, Hits for Kids. The guys say Sindy is one of their favourites. He sounds like he is sitting somewhere in Sweden with his songs, recording them in his own closet or bedroom. He sounds like he is a bit cut off from the current trend of Scandinavian music, creating his own little universe.
Fanny de Aguiar’s Map comes next. Per thinks it’s also a great one.
All Over My Head by Imperial State Electric (feat. Nicke Andersson from The Hellacopters) is next. Per thinks the band is amazing and The Hellacopters is also a great band. Sven says you can hear they are related.
Sven thinks in the 90’s there was a Swedish creation boom and that leads them to Johannes Runemark, an interesting artist. Per tells Johannes is a songwriter and guitar player and wrote lots of stuff for big Swedish names, e.g. Veronica Maggio. He started a solo career under the name Kasino. Per thinks his song, Skriva om dig is really cool, he loves this vibe, this loop just goes on and on. It has a beautiful lyric too, so the listeners have to practice their Swedish. It’s the next song on Nordic Rox.
Per thanks everyone for listening and at the end of the show, before Anita Lindblom’s Cigarettes is played, the guys translate the title of Kasino’s song, „to write about you”, giving a little Swedish lesson, which Sven says is one of the many benefits of Nordic Rox. Mr. Lindström says they will be back with more good-looking music and that can be taken as a promise or a threat. The guys are laughing.
Still is from the Bag of Trix comment videos recorded by Anders Roos.
Thanks for the technical support to János Tóth!
