Ingen är nog gladare än jag över att kunna berätta att vi kommer få se Lina Hedlund, Andreas Lundstedt och Tess Merkel tillsammans på melodifestivalscenen på lördag. Tillsammans med Danny står de för mellanakten i Malmö.
Det har hunnit gå ett och ett halvt år sedan den tårfyllda kvällen i Kungsträdgården när Alcazar sa farväl till sina fans under Prides partykväll. Jag var nog en av dem som grät mest den kvällen efter att han följt alcazar nära i några år. Men nu ska vi äntligen få se dem på en scen tillsammans igen! På lördag står dem för ett ”sprakande shownummer” och jag ser verkligen fram emot det!
För jag menar, hur mycket har vi inte saknat det här i festivalen:
Apologies for the lack of updates, Gothenburg did me in. Efterfested until 6am on Saturday night/Sunday morning and had a thoroughly good time.
I’m getting too old for this.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the show. And yes, I’ve been crowing about the fact that I was one of the few people backing David Lindgren from the moment I heard his song(click to hear the interview). I don’t crow about much, so let me have this one.
Much has been made of David and the reasons why he was so popular – so here’s my contribution. First of all, far from being some ‘random’ act brought in to make up the numbers at the last minute, he’s an accomplished stage performer who has appeared in musicals like Hairspray, High School Musical, and Mamma Mia! – and is currently appearing in the successful Tomas Ledin show. So he was one of the most experienced on that stage.
Then there was the song – upbeat, involving, and contained the breakdancing surprise. So he challenged himself with a performance that could have easily gone wrong, just like Loreen did last week. And he clearly enjoyed every second of the experience.
What about that supposedly wrong image? Well, at least he was being honest. He’s clearly not the sort of person who wears Saade and Danny-’street gear’ (for want of much better phrasing) – he’s a 29-year-old dad, for goodness sake! And let’s face it, we’d never have had all those trouser-splitting moments otherwise.
Is he a popstar? Who knows. But he’s being the wise one. He’s not walking away from the stage, and plans to continue in his current show, working on new material if it becomes a possibility. And after all the carping about him, I really hope that is possible.
So he’s through, along with Ulrik Munther, a hugely confident (but not arrogant) teenager who toasted his victory with Pommac sparkling apple juice. Although he’ll be able to drink once he’s at the Stockholm efterfest, so let’s see how many pictures will be taken of the poor lad taking a sip of his champagne there.
Gothenburg will be remembered for the exits of two established names – Sonja Aldén and Andreas Lundstedt. Sonja stuck to her usual formula of schlager-ballad, with the totally expected strong performance. It’s big shame that it didn’t even get a second chance, and there was lots of muttering about the ‘death’ of the ballad at Melodifestivalen. Well, as David Lindgren demonstrated, anything can happen in the contest, so I’m not going to agree.
Andreas was a different matter. With Alcazar on indefinite hiatus (”that’s a posh word meaning ‘break’,” I declared to him during our interview. I’m such a loser.), we’re not going to get anything new from them soon. Aldrig aldrig was Andreas showing off a more mature sound, and with a performance that was just as gay, if slightly more, well, posh, then he would have put in with Tess and Lina. If some were disappointed that his song didn’t sound more like Alcazar, then I think they’ll have to get used to it. It’s hopefully going to produce a great album that marks a new era in Andreas’ career. Plus, Andreas is turning 40 this year, and has perhaps decided that cavorting around in neon pink really isn’t the way forward.
We did, however, get plenty of neon from Mimi Oh. It’s a shame that she was compared to Veronica Maggio all the way through her time in Gothenburg. I’ve never heard a Maggio song that sounds like Det går för långsamt, so I can only assume it’s because they’ve both got blonde hair – which, as we all know, is very rare in Sweden.
Written by Anton-formerly-of-Le Kid and Niclas Lundin, Det går för långsamt is fresh pop, and always faced an uphill battle to get a top-five placing. The opportunity for Mimi Oh to get a huge audience was great, though, and I hope she’s producing more of this soon. I’m really enjoying her progress from the 1986 EP to Säkerhetsnål, and now this. I’m going to keep on saying it: more, please.
Top Cats isn’t really my thing, and sounded a bit too much like last year’s The King for my ears. But the boys were all very lovely at the party. But I never saw Thomas Di Leva smile once at any point.
Timoteij came back! Sticking with the if-it-ain’t-broke formula, it was folk-pop all the way. It’s clear that the girls have definitely got a lot more confidence this time round, and they’ll be determined to get their way through Andra chansen. As I’ve said before, I’m not actually that much of a believer in the need to do well at Eurovision (more of that down the line), but Timoteij has the potential to be an outstanding act there, and could actually do really well from it afterwards. Good luck to them.
The circus moves on from Sweden’s second city to the small town of Leksand today. So here we go again…
Gothenburg has been celebrating all things gay and trans this weekend at the annual HBTQ Festival. And by all accounts, they’ve been doing it with copious amounts of alcohol and food. Schlagerfiasko approves. Fortsätt läsa →
It feels like the first day of spring. Well, it’s the first time this year that no one seems to be wearing coats on the streets of London, at least. And inside a Soho bar, four members of Le Kid are about to have lunch with their manager.
Until Schlagerfiasko arrives.
In what has become a seasoned pastime, I’ve been stalking the band for this interview for some time, so after a bit of badgering, I’ve been given permission to stop them from eating.
Le Kid (all except Anton, who has stayed at home for family reasons) is in London on various missions. In no order of importance, these are: to eat sushi; to see Sophie Ellis-Bextor at G.A.Y.; to meet record companies; to visit the British Museum; to get rid of Schlagerfiasko quickly so they can have lunch in peace. I empathise with all these goals.
The five-piece group is made up of Felix Persson, Märta Grauers and Anton Malmberg Hård af Segersted – all songwriters and musicians, who are joined by lead singers Helena Lillberg and Johanna Berglund. Between them, they’ve worked with the likes of Agnes, BWO, Alcazar, Velvet, Eric Saade and Malena Ernman, among many others. So it’s fair to say that they know what they’re doing when it comes to pop.
Debut single Mercy Mercy was released to acclaim throughout Europe in 2009, and after plenty of time in the studio, the debut album, Oh Alright!, is in the can, and waiting to be released at the start of June.
Before then, of course, there’s the aftermath of Melodifestivalen to pick over. At least, that’s what I’m making them do…
You entered the Melodifestivalen bubble for the first time this year with Oh My God, and came fifth in your heat. How do you feel about that in retrospect?
Felix: Well, I think the Melodifestivalen voting public isn’t necessarily the same as the general music-buying public – in fact, the voters are probably a small segment of that. I think it’s hard to compare the popularity of someone like Sanna Nielsen with Love Generation based on Melodifestivalen results. I’m not criticising Sanna in any way, but with Love Generation there was the whole RedOne thing, and even that didn’t succeed in the competition. You know, Le Kid is like really spicy food – the first time you have a taste, you don’t like us – but give it a year, and you want ever be able to eat that bland old thing again. We’re whisky and modern art! So the result doesn’t matter.
Johanna: We’re sushi!
And how was the experience of the actual competition itself?
Helena: Luleå was cold.
Johanna: As soon as we went into the schlagerbubble, people were asking us who our biggest competitors were. But we just wanted to make it the best Le Kid gig ever – we wanted to have fun. That sounds like a cliché, but for us, we were performing to show everyone what we’re about.
Märta: It was hard to see the other competitors as our ‘enemies’, because everyone was doing something different.
Johanna: Yes, everyone was friendly. There was no rivalry at all.
Felix: Look, you have a choice. You can buy into all that perceived rivalry and enter into the competition like you’re a football player, and do everything you can to make it as likely as possible that you’ll go through to the final. That isn’t always the best thing to do, of course. But we sat down and decided we wouldn’t do anything like that. We could either make it popular or good. And we wanted to do a fantastic performance. When you decide that, you have to leave the competition thing alone, because you can’t do both.
Despite that, did you have any hopes of winning?
Märta: Of course. But we didn’t want to win the whole thing. We certainly didn’t want to go to the Eurovision Song Contest.
Helena: No, that wasn’t the goal at all.
Johanna: We wanted to reach the biggest audience possible. If we’d gone through to the final, perhaps more people would have seen us, and we could have gained more fans. But the contest part of it wasn’t important in itself.
Helena: The final would have been great, though…
Felix: Going to Eurovision would have been too much, even just thinking about all the preparation to perform there. It’s not that beneficial for our careers to represent Sweden at Eurovision – it would have been a bad move, in fact. If we had gone to the Melodifestivalen final, we would have wanted to win that, of course.
That’s interesting, because Loreen said the opposite – she was all set to do a full show in Düsseldorf if she’d won…
Helena: Loreen is amazing, I have her song on all the time!
Felix: Sure, we’d have done the same. But with all due respect, there are artists that live in the schlagerbubble all year round – singers like Sanna Nielsen and Nanne Grönvall. They’re great, but we’re not them. For Melodifestivalen, we just wanted to pop in, say “Hi!”, and get out again. And that’s not being rude, it’s just the way that Le Kid is.
Johanna: Yes, it wasn’t about Eurovision. We wanted to meet Sweden, and Melodifestivalen is the only real way to do that. It wasn’t a hard decision to enter.
Felix: And it was amazing fun.
Johanna: It was also a shock. We went in there thinking that we could make it all as ‘Le Kiddish’ as possible. But we quickly realised that we could also be killed by the media. That actually didn’t happen. We realised afterwards that we’d got so much positive press. We weren’t reading it at the time, though.
Helena: No, our PR made a deal with us that we wouldn’t read anything while it was all going on. It was such a great surprise afterwards that people who love pop music loved us! That gave us some real credibility.
Felix: There were a couple of mean stories, but in general everyone was really nice. We could have got so much more press if we wanted, though. That’s the weird deal about it all. We did some really good interviews, saying some fun things, but they didn’t make it into the papers – the reason being that we didn’t diss anyone, we didn’t complain about our hotel, or cause any scandals.
Märta: And we weren’t obsessed with the competition, we just talked about everyone else and what we’ve been doing ourselves.
Felix: Yes, that was the deal. We refused to be negative. But if you’re not negative, then you don’t make the papers.
Johanna: But that’s just us – we’re not like that. We have to be ourselves, so we got on the carousel, said hello, and got off. We did that and it went well.
Felix: It was weird doing interviews knowing that they were really good, but would never be published just because we weren’t being scandalous – just interesting. That wasn’t enough. Weird.
Johanna: We did have some fun, tough. We did an interview and just mentioned that Felix had lost something. Then they asked us about what was the worst thing that has ever happened to us, so I said that it was when Felix has lost a prosthetic! And later on, Felix said the same to someone else. So this rumour started, and everyone was asking us if it was true!
Felix: We’d pretend to be really uncomfortable if they asked us about it.
Helena: So they’d be thinking they’d offended us, and apologise for asking the question!
Felix: We heard rumours in the production team that people thought we’d lost my arm.
Helena: So Felix walked around with a stiff arm!
You’re very naughty. And hilarious. (I can confirm there was nothing stiff about Felix because I was sitting next to him.) Would you go through this experience again?
Märta: No way! Or if we did, I’d want to do it in a different country…
Helena: Azerbaijan!
Märta: Or Liechtenstein!
Felix: If we were to do it again, I think it’s likely that we wouldn’t do it in Sweden, just for the fun of it. It’d be fun to represent the Netherlands and beat Sweden in some place like Helsingborg…
I’m sorry for the lack of schlager. Unfortunately, I’ve been ill and had to take time out. But I’m recovering slowly.
While I’ve been ill, however, I’ve discovered an amazing service from Sweden called Digster. And you need to know about it.
Essentially, it’s a site dealing in playlists, linking them through Spotify. A simple idea, of course, but a good one, too. And the Digster crowd seem to be big schlagerfans…
Melodifestivalen playlist? No problem. Love Generation’s picks? Varsågod. Alcazar’s? Darin’s? Linda Pritchard’s? Ja, ja och ja.
Basically, Digster is a really handy tool for finding the music you want without spending ages trawling through lists. And it works.
Here at Schlagerfiasko, we love to get a few stats in. Mainly because it reveals the truth behind the rumours and speculation. So we were very interested to see that the Swedish Performing Rights Society (Stim) has published the top ten most-played songs from the Andra chansen round of Melodifestivalen. The full list is below, and here are a few observations to go with it…
Alcazar – perhaps the queens of Andra chansen, appear twice in the top ten, at 1 and 6. Although you’d expect the positions to be reversed for those songs, wouldn’t you?
Nordman’s 2008 song, I lågornas sken, is at number eight. So anyone who assumed people voted for the group just to stop Carola and Andreas Johnson from getting to the final is, in all probability, wrong
Velvet’s Mi amore is at number ten. That’s a real shocker!
Schlagerfiasko knows for a fact that you can’t hum the Jan Johansen song at number nine without looking it up on YouTube first
Patrik Isaksson and Velvet are the only two acts who didn’t go through to the final
1. Not A Sinner Nor A Saint – Alcazar (2003)
Lotta Ahlin, Bobby Ljunggren, Tommy Lydell
2. För att du finns – Sonja Aldén (2007)
Bobby Ljunggren, Sonja Aldén
3. Moving On – Sarah Dawn Finer (2009)
Sarah Dawn Finer, Fredrik Kempe
4. Min kärlek – Shirley Clamp (2004)
Bobby Ljunggren, Henrik Wikström, Ingela ‘Pling’ Forsman
5. Faller du så faller jag – Patrik Isaksson (2006)
Patrik Isaksson
6. Alcastar – Alcazar (2005)
Niklas Edberger, Johan Fransson, Anders Hansson, Tim Larsson, Tobias Lundgren
7. Alla flickor – Linda Bengtzing (2005)
Niklas Edberger, Johan Fransson, Tim Larsson, Tobias Lundgren
