In recent years, bands like Peter Bjorn & John and The Knife and independent labels like Labrador and Hybridism have made Sweden synonymous with a certain literate, open-minded, not-entirely-chart-unfriendly indie music. The kind of music, a recent article in the Guardian implied, that once made the British indie scene great.
Articles about Sweden’s recent surge of successful indie bands are tinged with a kind of English bewilderment: wasn’t that once us? Exporting fiercely independent, genre-bending music to a grateful and admiring world? Swedish pop star Robyn told an interviewer, “It seems to me like you have Westlife and guitar bands, and nothing in between.” It’s a pretty crushing analysis, and not entirely fair – staunchly “in between” British band Hot Chip get a lot of radio play in Sweden, for example – but perhaps it conveys something of the nature of the British music scene’s interest in Swedish music. There may be some kind of gap to be plugged, some kind of suspicion on the part of Brits that, between new rave and Oasis ‘best of’ albums, all is not as it should be.
Swedish bands have certainly been warmly received over here. All over the UK, club nights playing exclusively Swedish music have sprung up. Glasgow’s Sounds of Sweden night celebrates its first birthday next week, and London night Tack!Tack!Tack! is organising a gig at the ICA later in the month. As a plaintive comment by a UK band on Sounds of Sweden’s MySpace page puts it, “I wish we were Swedish.”
Ironically, the Swedishness of many Swedish bands goes unrecognised except by people who bother to read music magazines, or indeed attend Swedish club nights. Many have English names, sing in English, conduct interviews in English. I’m From Barcelona are Swedish. Love Is All are Swedish. The Sounds are Swedish. The Knife are Swedish. Jose Gonzalez is as Swedish as they come.
Sweden has long churned out a series of grinding heavy metal bands like Hammerfall, but the indie renaissance of recent years is something new, and appears to have taken even Swedes themselves by surprise.
With a population of just nine million and an unwritten national social code that forbids self-aggrandisement and favours conformity, Sweden never really looked like a pop breeding ground. Unlike in Britain, where we seem to admire a bit of arrogance and swagger in our rock stars, Swedish musicians generally come across as polite, down-to-earth and that most heinous of rock star sins, nice.
Musing on Swedish music for Canadian magazine Exclaim, the Knife’s Olof Dreijer said, “I think Swedish people are very good at copying. We also have a public music school that is quite good, and a fairly good social service system, where you can get money from the state to make music and not work. I think these three things are my political reasons for why good music is coming out of Sweden.” It’s a distinctly unstarry and self-effacing analysis of why Swedish music is doing well – you almost wish he’d taken the opportunity to brag, “Because we’re ace.” You can’t expect much in the way of anti-establishment fervour from Swedes either – Emil Svanangen of Loney, Dear first started making music on a computer donated by his local council.
This Swedish tendency towards “copying” has produced a culture that’s intensely trend-aware, in fashion, art and music – trends being the ultimate in copying, the ultimate conformism. It’s not a characteristic we normally associate with creativity, but the ability to adopt and adapt different cultural elements, to home in on what makes something cool or interesting or appealing, could only help a musician trying to straddle the divide between indie and pop – that “in between” that Robyn thinks Britain lacks.
While the British indie world has traditionally styled itself as non-conformist and anti-establishment, with bands often seeming downright paranoid about being too closely identified with a particular scene, many Swedish bands have been able to avoid that simply by coming from a smaller country with a more broad-minded attitude to genre. In Sweden, everyone seems to work with everyone: Jose Gonzalez famously covered Heartbeats by the Knife and made it famous in the process; Loney, Dear has collaborated with I’m From Barcelona on a song; Robyn has worked with both the Knife and Max Martin, the Stockholm-born songwriter and producer who gave the world Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time. And if that towering pop monument doesn’t fill you with gratitude for Swedish musicians everywhere, then nothing will.
