Some photos from Stockholm. In chronological order.
My plane got into Arlanda (the Stockholm Heathrow) at about noon on the Friday. I was met at the airport by Niklas and Matt from But Is It Art? Records. It’s so nice to be met at an airport. Though I’ve never had that business where people hold out my name on a piece of card. My appearance is green-friendly – it saves valuable card and ink.
Niklas and Matt drove me into the city, where we had a lovely vegetarian lunch at a Japanese restaurant and discussed the artwork for the Fosca live album. Then it was off to the Stockholm Hilton’s cafe area, ‘Eken / The Oak’, for the first interview. This was recorded for the radio station P3 Pop, by the perfectly lovely Sara Martinsson. I talked about what ‘cult musician’ means, the strange history of Sarah Records, being played on John Peel and what he meant to people, and my obsession with different types of notability. So many small ponds to be a big fish in, that kind of thing. And I made sure I plugged the gig.
After that, I was whisked off to yet another restaurant for the second interview. This was in ‘Gondolen’, towering high up above the city in a long, crane-like structure. Very plush inside, so I guess it’s the equivalent of the Tate Modern restaurant. This is what it looks like from street level:
Here’s myself and Niklas in front of it:
And here’s what it looks like from the inside:
On the left is Katja Ekman, who did the second interview. On the right is the other Niklas from the record label, who took photos of me throughout the day. His photo of Fosca onstage appears on the live album.
Photo Niklas told me he spent some of his teen years on a cultural exchange in England, living in a seaside town on the south coast. Bournemouth, I think. It was one of those seaside places dominated in the 1980s by two curiously polarised species: cream tea-loving pensioners in retirement, and young right-wing skinheads looking for a fight. Foreign students being fairly high up on the list of targets.
Niklas also told me he had a Phil Oakey haircut at the time. Mr Oakey was the singer with The Human League, and indeed still is. In the group’s 80s zenith, he had a curtain of black hair down one side of his face. ‘Can’t attempt that haircut these days’ joked Niklas. ‘Neither can Phil Oakey,’ I replied.
Digression time… I was going to say that the days when pop stars and the teenage boys who bought their records had outrageously effeminate hairdos are long gone. But of course, that’s not true in the slightest. These things go in cycles.
Jumping ahead in my story, on the tube home from the wedding party the next evening, there was a skinny teenage boy sporting the nearest 2007 equivalent to an ‘Oakey’ hairdo. An asymmetrical, angular explosion of dark hair, cut into a jagged yet overgrown style, so it resembled a splatter of paint. I think this look must be partly influenced by Japanese Manga cartoons, and partly by time-honoured angsty, Gothic leanings, which I think is now called ’emo’. There’s a band called The Horrors who are a good exponent of this New New New New Romantic style:
[picture by Chiara Gulin, Italy]
Hair like this is famously handy to hide acne, shyness and general lack of physical perfection behind. But sometimes you get young men who remain beautiful however outrageous their hair, like Ryan Ross from the group Panic! At The Disco:
To be continued.
