P, C & C rockin' the plumber's crack (VIII): Happy Junk Year

It has been a busy year for Christoffer Lundquist and friends' recording company. In December, they released the first digital audio books in Sweden.

Another international artist was recording at AGM Studio this year: the Belgian Lio. She will publish her new album next week.

LJdM

Junk proudly presents: Junk Books! We released our first AUDIO BOOKS. We have recorded two of Sweden’s most talked-about authors, Linda Skugge & Per Hagman. Linda was recorded in her own living room, Per read his book at Hotel Savoy, Malmö. Magnus Börjeson from Metro Jets did the recording and editing. The books, “Saker under huden” (Linda Skugge) and “Att komma hem ska vara en schlager” (Per Hagman) are available both as ordinary downloads and as mobile/cell phone downloads.

There’s a huge interest in our Audio Books. Newspapers are calling. Television is calling. Metro-Magnus (Magnus Börjeson) is editing the last chapters of Per Hagman’s book. He sends them to Brainpool-David Birde, who checks for errors. The files/chapters are uploaded to the retailer’s servers the moment they are cleared. It’s an interesting process. It’s fast, fun & groundbreaking. These are the first Swedish novels that are published this way.

Junk Musik has released these albums in 2005

We finished our work on our audio books and sent the files to London, where the servers are. Our Linda Skugge & Per Hagman audio books had been released monday 19 December.

Anders Mildner

Junk Musik

It is snow everywhere today. I just got back from a meeting with a publisher. We discussed new audio books & new ways to sell them. It’s funny how easy it is to come up with new ideas for a business (books) that is so static. Anyway, tomorrow it is new year’s eve. We will try to sum up the highlights from our first year with Junk, and – hopefully – be able to release a new podcast with snippets of everything we have done so far. Thank you all for a great 2005! We could not dream of this much support when we started in april. In our new PODCAST you can listen to pieces from all our releases this year. We hope you will have a great new year’s eve – and we’ll see you in 2006. We can’t wait to get started!

JUNK STAFF:
Anders Mildner, Magnus Börjeson, David Birde,
Jens Jansson and Christoffer Lundquist
- Junk Musik

Lio is a Belgian singer and actress, born as Wanda Ribeiro de Vasconcelos in 1962 in Mangualde, Portugal. In 1968, she and her family moved to Belgium. She was an enormous pop icon in francophone Europe during the 1980s. In 1982 the American music duo Sparks worked with her on the album Suite Sixtine, on which some of her previous songs were translated into English.

She has an extensive discography and has collaborated with several important French music artists, including Etienne Daho and Jacno. Many of Lio's singles were successful, but her biggest hit was probably 1980s Banana Split. This track was redone on the Suite Sixtine album as Marie Antoinette. Now she lives in France and works in French television.

According to her own website:

"It took five years, encouragements from sister Helena, threats of kidnapping, a short disappearance and a small studio somewhere in a Swedish forest (Aerosol Grey Machine Studio, in Skane), but finally, it's here: Dites Au Prince Charmant, the marvellous comeback of Wanda Ribeiro de Vasconcelos, better known as Lio. 43 years old right now, but she still looks ravishing. No more electropop, but clever, beautifully arranged acoustic songs with lyrics about loneliness, disillusionment and dreams that did not came true."

The album, published today in France, was produced, and almost completely written by Doriand and Bertrand Burgalat-collaborator Peter von Poehl (friend of Florian Horwath and Christoffer Lundquist).

LJdM

Sandy Mouche's Junk singles (III): Spiderweb Suit

Sandy Mouche is member of Myspace since 25 November 2005. We can listen to some songs there.

Sandy Mouche at myspace.com

Here you can listen to our music and, just as in our guestbook, talk about it with other sandy-people and so on and so on...

Link | Martinique | 2006 · 01 · 18 20:42

Third new single for an upcoming album

“Our latest single available for download. Helena bursting out of her own shell. Moohhoohhoohhhahahhaha.....”

01. Spiderweb Suit (Helena)
02. Une Histoire (Martinique)

According to Anders, from Junk Musik: "

We are PROUD to be able to give you this christmas gift: a new, totally brilliant single from SANDY MOUCHE! It’s a great song, a great vocal performance – and a p-e-r-f-e-c-t single for christmas! It’s also the best way we here at Junk could ever say MERRY CHRISTMAS! Cheers to all of you, and big cheers to Sandy Mouche!

Singles sleeve-design for free in www.sandymouche.com

Merry Christmas to all of you out there! See you in 2006!

For all the hardcore fans out there our single sleeve-designs are available for download. Simply download the sleeve you want and but it in a plastic sleeve togheter with the matching single that you have downloaded and burnt on a cd. Now you have a single with a great sleeve-design that you actually can hold and look at. The sleeve-designs are made by Ola and are free of charge.
Download a sleeve-design:

Spiderweb Suit
In the sand
Une histoire

Martinique Josefsson - Sandy Mouche

P, C & C rockin' the plumber's crack (VII): children and iPods

In the same marvelous personal interview by Jan Gradvall translated by Thomas Evensson for TDR's readers, Per Gessle speaks about iPods and children. You have to read it.

By the way, the Son of a Plumber website reveals that the European release of the album is planned for March 6, 2006. Per writes on Son of a Plumber.com that the next Swedish single will be “Hey Mr DJ (Won’t You Play Another Love Song)” with an anticipated radio date of mid-January. The b-side is a “rehearsal medley” so to speak, called “Plumber in Progress #1.”

LJdM

My first iPod was the all-black U2 iPod, but I filled that in a minute. During 2004 I started uploading my entire CD collection onto iTunes. More often than not I was so absorbed in it that when I checked the time it was 5 a.m. I get to hear a lot that I’m so meticulous. That my albums are sorted alphabetically and things like that. Sure, they are. But in the middle of that I also have a totally different side to me. I can’t handle when my time is expected to be in order. The worst thing I know is schedules. I don’t like deadlines. I don’t like when I know in advance what will happen. I don’t understand people who write songs 9-5. To sit there for six hours, sometimes you write something, sometimes you don’t. I refuse to work like that. Instead I sit in front of the TV with my guitar in my lap. If it’s a semi-crap movie I turn down the volume and strum the guitar. I read the subtitles, don’t concentrate on what I do and then suddenly a melody can appear. Damn, what was that?

When I uploaded his record collection into iTunes I rediscovered a lot of old music. Things I had listened to on my headphones in my old bedroom. In the old days on the radio you could hear Chicory Tip followed by Harry Belafonte and then Deep Purple. It’s so damn boring with this format-thinking these days. Who likes just one thing? Who wants to eat the same thing the rest of his life? The old monopoly radio! At the same time I believe that the Internet and digital music can turn things around. On the web you can find, like radio in the olden days, random new songs and music. It’s too bad that iTunes Music Store still has so little older music. I don’t understand why companies like EMI or Warner don’t open their own versions of iTunes Music Store. They should upload exactly everything. Imagine if everyone got a possibility to click around there, go through the entire catalogue, discover all the music that’s hidden in the archives.

I have an eight-year-old son, Gabriel. It’s very fun to see what music he finds and why he likes it. On Cartoon Network they apparently have some music. He can come to me and ask about for instance The Rembrandts. A while ago I played “Smoke On the Water” for him. He had never heard it before. The live version from Japan. Duh-duh-duh… It was amazing to witness someone hearing that riff for the very first time in his life. I saw his eyes light up. Because what is it really that makes you stick to different songs? What was it I liked in different songs when I was eight. That feedback loop in “I Feel Fine.” What’s cool with that?

The b-side of next single, Hey Mr. DJ, is a “rehearsal medley” so to speak, called “Plumber in Progress #1.” This will feature Gabriel and me jamming on ’Substitute,’ lousy guide lyrics beyond belief to several songs, etc etc.

Per Gessle

P, C & C rockin' the plumber's crack (VI): Kurt, the fastest plumber

Per Gessle, the son of a plumber, remembers his father Kurt and his mother Elisabeth, his childhood and adolescence, in a personal interview by Jan Gradvall translated by Thomas Evensson for TDR's readers. Just read it. It is the most personal interview with Per we have ever read.

LJdM

I found the drawings made with watercolors and pencil at my mom’s house. I was looking in an old photo album and when I opened it a stack of old drawings fell out. I drew a lot when I was little. This, for instance, is a hockey game. Brynäs scoring against Teg. Kjell Rune Milton played with them. He went to MoDo later, but started in Teg. I was around 7 years. I collected hockey cards aswell. I made lists of everything. I even wrote down who scored in “TV-pucken”. Brynäs was my favorite team. I remember when they lost the Swedish Championship gold in a game against Leksand. I was devastated, I couldn’t go to school. I’ve always been a sore loser.

We were three siblings but we were seven years apart. When I was born my sister (Gunilla) was 14 years old. She disappeared from home rather early of course. It was mostly me and my brother (Bengt). But I remember that my sister had her room at the top of the stairs and that she always played “Lipstick On My Collar” by Connie Francis. A fantastic era. Many of those songs sound exactly the same, but you can’t help liking them. And Joe Mick, the guy who did “Telstar” with The Tornadoes. All his productions are amazing. Almost everything on this collection is great. Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages, “I Ain’t Mad At You.” Unparalleled. Damned great. My brother had this single. My brother is born 1951. I started out borrowing records from him before I built my own collection. My first favorites were the Hep Stars. My parents drove me to see the Hep Stars on stage. They said the exact same things between the songs as on the live album “On Stage.” I asked my mom about this recently, but she couldn’t remember anything about it. She’s 81. I liked the Hep Stars so much I forced my friends to pretend we were a band. We stood there with couronne cues as guitars and lip synced “Sunny Girl” and “It’s My Life” by The Animals. But my friends were totally uninterested in music. They thought I was weird.


We lived by the Folkpark in Halmstad, but moved 20 km up country. We lived there maybe five years, when I was about 9 to 13. Then we moved again, to Vilshärad, where we built a house. That was when my dad got sick. He got prostate cancer. He couldn’t work and laid at home for a year.

I played soccer too, but it wasn’t my thing. I was pretty technical, I could kick the ball in the air 100 times. But I was kind of fat back then and a bad runner. The thing that settled it was when I turned 15. I got to choose between a used moped and a used stereo. I picked the stereo. I’ve always been a loner and became even more so when I decided against the moped. Maybe it’s my personality, but it’s also due to us moving so frequently. You never rooted, didn’t get any close friends. I stayed at home instead, with my headphones. I listened to records, listened a lot to the radio and wrote down statistics.

At the same age, when I was 14-15, I started writing my own songs. We had a piano at home that I never used. I took a few lessons, but I could never connect the thing about musical notes. I never understood how the notes became music. So when I wrote songs it was just lyrics. I had the melodies in my head. I had hundreds of songs in my head. Not the way Mozart did (laughs), they weren’t symphonies where I could hear every single instrument. But I had pop songs all finished in my head; beat, verse, bridge and chorus. It was there, inside my head, where I lived my life. We moved and moved. Junior high school was a damned painful time for me. I felt totally out of place. I was kind of bullied and felt worthless. Plus I was rather fat. To get away from school I decided to take a sabbatical and start working at Bingo-Livs, an ICA [grocery] store. I’m born in January 1959. When I took the school maturity test at the age of six I got to choose if I wanted to start school a year early. We chose that alternative and I started school as early as six. I was therefore always the youngest in the class during my youth. Taking a sabbatical was a way to start over in a new class, with persons of my own age. Mom and all were unanimous that a sabbatical was a good idea. I worked at Bingo-Livs unpacking milk and things like that. I got to drive a moped after all, one with a platform even, picking up groceries. When I stood there packing milk one day one of my teachers at the disgusting school came by and said “Oh, so this is where you would end up after all.” Goddam what an ass. But to me it was a chance to start over. During the sabbatical I managed to lose some weight. I lived on chicken and crisp bread for a year. Everything was at the end of the line. I was determined to start over from scratch. New house, new school, new friends. I was looking for a year zero.

Parallel with this punk rock arrives. I bought Patti Smith’s “Horses” and the Ramomes first. I got a kind of abstract self confidence from this. Punk rock said it was OK to not be especially great. In the spirit of the times that had been before, marked by “Brain Salad Surgery” and “Dark Side of the Moon,” everybody were so damned good. When I came back to school, where I finally ended up in a new class, I found a friend. A great friend named Peter, Peter Nilsson. It was 1977 and he played the bass in a band called Audiovisuellt Angrepp. The band rehearsed in Harplinge, 15 km away. We went there as soon as we could and stayed all day long there. Among the other members of Audiovisuellt Angrepp were MP (Mats Persson, Gyllene Tider) who played the drums. That’s how I got to know him. In the band was also Martin Sternhufvud who later started MaMas Barn together with Marie (Fredriksson). After a while MP and I started a band on the side, but in the beginning I sat there, with my back to the wall, and listened to them play. The room they used to rehearse was small, a lot smaller than this room. And it was so damned loud. I sat there thinking, wow, this is exactly what I want to do with my life.

At the end of my father’s illness period we couldn’t afford keeping the house so we moved again. It was in that house I wrote “När alla vännerna gått hem”. It was at Hamilton’s Väg 1978. I remember it vividly. My dad died in 1978. He only heard us once. It was when Grape Rock was on the radio show “Bandet går” (“The Tape’s Running”). We were supposed to be a punk band, but the song, “En av dom där,” was over six minutes long. It was built on an eternal riff that probably had more in common with Led Zeppelin. But my dad didn’t like it at all. Above all he thought my singing was terrible.

Per Gessle

P, C & C rockin' the plumber's crack (V): SOAP success in Sweden and TV time

P, C & C go straight to #1 on the Swedish album chart with his Son of a Plumber project beating Madonna! The new album already sold platinum (60,000 copies) in Sweden the first day.

On November 27th, 2005, Per Gessle was interviewed at TV Huset. The band also play (not live) the song Jo-Anna says, with Clarence Öfwerman, Helena Josefsson, Jens Jansson and Magnus Börjeson. We missed Christoffer Lundquist, but he was working at AGM studio.

Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson (Roxette) were on a stage at the Dorchester Hotel in London last 29th November 2005 to receive two BMI awards for “Listen to Your Heart” which has been played 2 million times (and is also the “Dance Song of the Year”) and “It Must Have Been Love” which has been played over 4 million times on US radio.

Per Gessle and his Son of a Plumber project were guests at TV4’s Nyhetsmorgon this morning. Son of a Plumber performed “Hey Mr DJ” live in an acoustic version and “I Have a Party in My Head” lipsynced.

Son of a Plumber has been nominated for a Grammis - Best Male Pop Artist. The Grammis gala will be held February 7. In our opinion, the great work of all the band (C&C, Helena, Jens, Magnus) is worth more than a solo momination.

We have read many comments about Son of a Plumber. For those who think that "Son of a Plumber" is not just another sideproject to keep Per Gessle busy, there is a new forum nicely moderated by ""The nice Kai", from Berlin" and others. Please, visit the SOAP forum.

By the way, we have read many comments about the role of Helena Josefsson, a big role that some fans of Roxette do not like at all. Three German girls created some time ago a good web dedicated tot he singer, http://www.helena-josefsson.com (Updated 2008: This web is deleted).

LJdM

Yesterday, New David vistited Malmö and met up with Metro Jets/Brainpool David (David Birde), nowadays often referred to as “Old David”. The two of them went to the gay club Tomboy, where Jens played with Monkeystrikes. Some hours later, Brainpool-Christoffer, Metro-Magnus and Helena from Sandy Mouche flew to Stockholm to play with Son of a Plumber on morning tv. Old & New David probably slept at that time. I sure did & missed all of it. But you can watch it on the web. Go here to watch.

Anders Mildner - Junk Musik