ProgBlog goes to Sweden
- garethsprogblog
- 23 hours ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
By the mid-70s I had figured out that progressive rock could be found elsewhere in the world apart from the UK. I was very much into Focus and Trace (Netherlands) and PFM (Italy); I was aware of but a little unnerved by Magma (France); I knew people who liked Wigwam (Finland) and had listened to material by other groups like Anglo-Finnish Wigwam that were comprised of band members from different European countries (Continuum, an Anglo-Hungarian prog-jazz quartet.) I’d also come across the work of Swedish multi-instrumentalist Bo Hansson.
Hansson had a track on Charisma Keyboards, the Charisma sampler from 1974 that also included America by The Nice, The Fountain of Salmacis by Genesis and White Hammer by Van der Graaf Generator; Hansson’s Flight to the Ford was the shortest track on the album by some margin but the brevity of the piece didn’t deter a friend who lived across the street from me buying Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings, Hansson’s most successful assault on the UK album charts, from which the track was taken. The LP had been very successful in Sweden when it was originally released as Sagan On Ringen on Silence Records in 1970, partly because of the adoption of The Lord of the Rings by the counter-culture but equally because the music fitted the nascent progressive rock movement. The acquisition of Hansson by Charisma exposed Hansson to a far wider market and though his subsequent albums Magician’s Hat (Silence, 1972, Charisma 1973), Attic Thoughts (1975) and Music Inspired by Watership Down (1977) were not as successful it’s unlikely that many of us would have heard of him had it not been for Tony Stratton-Smith.
The music itself is pleasant and melodic but you could never call it over-adventurous; listening to it recently I found I liked it more than I remember doing so. There’s a space rock vibe pervading the compositions (the original Silence release cover art was quite psychedelic) and Hansson layers the instruments in a way that I think may have influenced Mike Oldfield’s modus operandi; he adds some nice distorted jazzy guitar that strays into Santana territory and, though he may have jammed with Jimi Hendrix, his playing is clearly more informed by jazz than the blues. Flight to the Ford is one of two up-tempo tracks (the other is The Horns of Rohan/The Battle of the Pelennor Fields where the cymbal work suggests clashing swords) but there’s only a relatively narrow dynamic range on the entire album; the swelling organ work conjures images of rolling countryside and though not truly pastoral, it certainly comes across as very reflective. Perhaps I was swayed more by the literary influences and references than the music itself, as Hansson employs titles from books I was reading as a teenager: The Lord of the Rings (obviously); Elidor by Alan Garner and Watership Down by Richard Adams. I suppose that it’s hardly surprising that the Swedes should have taken to modern myths from contemporary authors given their own story-telling legacy and Tolkien’s desire to create a myth to match the Norse sagas. My Bo Hansson collection has grown over time and I have all four of the classic 70s albums with their English titles, on vinyl, CD and, in the case of Music Inspired by Watership Down, a pre-recorded cassette which I've had to burn to mp3.
I travelled around Sweden with university friend Nick Hodgetts, now a renowned bryophytologist, as part of an InterRail adventure in 1983, making a brief stop in Gothenburg to wait for a train to Oslo, spent two hours in Boden before moving on to Finland, a seven hour train journey south, spent two full days in Stockholm, and finally waited for around half an hour for a hydrofoil in Malmo. The time spent on the Swedish rail network, much of which passed inside the arctic circle, revealed a stark landscape; the trees were denuded as though by acid rainfall which at the time was just hitting our collective environmental consciousness. Perhaps worse than all the rail travel was the ferry from Turku in Finland to Stockholm where, on an overnight sailing, it seemed that almost all the passengers and a good number of the crew had far too much to drink and bodies were lying anywhere and everywhere by the time we docked at 7am. This was the eve of the Finnkampen, an annual athletics competition held between the two countries (with each nation holding the event on alternate years, 1983 was Sweden’s turn) and provided an explanation why the ferry was so crowded; I was told that national identity was at stake!
I really enjoyed Stockholm and wished I could have spent more time there, staying overnight on a full-rigged three mast iron sailing ship built in 1888 just up the coast from my home town, in Whitehaven, Cumbria which had become permanently moored off Skeppsholmen and converted to a Youth Hostel along with a change of name from SS Dunboyne to the af Chapman. We island-hopped and explored some of the less popular areas of the city, delighting in the narrow streets behind the main thoroughfares. I don’t buy ‘tourist’ things but a chance visit to the Akademibokhandeln bookshop saw me buy a Franz Kafka T-shirt on Kafka’s centenary. The legend, in Swedish, read ‘Kafka hade inte heller så roligt' which translates to something along the lines of ‘Kafka didn't have much fun either’.
The third wave of progressive rock didn’t arise in the UK but in Sweden and the USA which was part of the reason I hadn’t noticed it coming. Another reason was that around the time King Crimson resurfaced with the double trio conformation in 1994, work and parental duties took up an average of 18 hours of my day and I was working a 1:3 on-call rota for much of the late 80s and early 90s, but on the plus side my department had strong academic connections which enabled me to get a university email address and access to the internet. I subscribed to Elephant Talk, the King Crimson internet resource run by Toby Howard and this is when I realised that there was some form of prog revival, frequently sounding like metal with some prog flourishes but also material that was reported to sound like Red-era Crimson; heavy prog but not prog metal.
It probably didn’t sink in that there was a strong Swedish connection to the prog revival until I bought my first Jerry Lucky book and with two highly regarded bands mentioned very early on in the listings, Anekdoten and Änglagård, I added Änglagård’s Hybris (1992) to my wish list (copies were selling for in excess of £50 when they were available, which was infrequent) and invested in my first ever download, Anekdoten’s Vemod (1993) because I’d read a description that suggested the music sounded like King Crimson would have done if they hadn’t disbanded in 1974, a remarkably accurate assessment. Vemod is heavy, Mellotron-drenched and although it’s predominantly instrumental, the lyrics are intelligent and call to mind Richard Palmer-James, rather than Peter Sinfield. The melancholy feel of the music is enhanced by the addition of cello; at times the guitar is like the angular playing of Steve Howe on Fragile and the bass style owes a heavy debt to John Wetton.
One name that links Anekdoten and Änglagård is Markus Resch who serviced and repaired their Mellotrons and who now owns the rights to the Mellotron name. I believe that I first came across his name at the Night Watch playback in 1997 where there were two Mellotrons on display.
Some time before I managed to acquire any of the 90s Swedish prog I’d been given Seven Days of Falling (2003) by the Esbjorn Svensson Trio (E.S.T.) as a present and because I liked what I’d heard, bought the posthumously released Leucocyte (2008); pianist Svensson having died in a scuba diving accident in June that year. This jazz trio deliberately blurred genres and I’d happily label them as prog-jazz, incorporating electronics and noise into their recordings and in 2005 I drove down to Brighton to take in one of their gigs at the Dome Concert Hall. A few years later I was given E.S.T. drummer Magnus Öström’s Searching For Jupiter as a present, which also fits the prog-jazz category and made my own Swedish prog-jazz discovery, Hooffoot, in 2017. A bit of serendipitous random Bandcamp browsing first led me to the band and I've now got all three albums on vinyl (Hooffoot, The Lights In The Aisle Will Guide You and Phantom Limb) but it was the self-titled debut with its great artwork by Bengt Böckman and promotional blurb on a sticker attached to the shrink wrap, accurately describing the prog/fusion they played that initially grabbed my attention.
In 2014 I finally got my hands on a copy of Hybris from a stall at the Prog Résiste festival in Soignes, Belgium. I’d describe it as a brilliant album, less heavy than Vemod or the Anekdoten follow-up Nucleus (1995), filled with darkness and melancholy but still deeply rooted in the 70s progressive rock sensibility. Later in 2014 I was fortunate to get to see Änglagård play their first UK gig at a weekend festival in Balham and despite a lengthy delay due to the obstinacy of a Mellotron it was a fantastic routine, then on the 30th anniversary of Hybris in 2023 I saw them again at the Porto Antico Prog Fest where irritatingly, despite the headline billing, the set was cut short because a couple of the preceding acts I wasn’t interested in had run over time.
All my Änglagård music is on CD. Epilog (1995) and Prog på Svenska - Live in Japan (2014) were added in the years after I’d first seen them, and I finally got hold of a copy of Viljans Oga (2012) at the gig in Genoa in 2023. Two other related albums, All Traps on Earth’s A Drop Of Light (2018) and Erik Hammarström’s Glödhet Rytmisk Svärta (2019) were both released on the Italian AMS label and I bought the LP of the former on a trip to Genoa and a CD of the latter via the BTF website. Any fan of Änglagård would love both recordings.
Another Swedish-Italian connection is the presence of former Änglagård drummer Mattias Olsson on Il-lûdĕre (2017) by Il Tempio delle Clessidre, the Genoa-based symphonic prog band signed to Black Widow Records, while Änglagård keyboard player Thomas Johnson has been a member of the UK’s Thieves’ Kitchen since The Water Road (2008) and a number of his erstwhile bandmates have helped out on subsequent Thieves’ Kitchen records.
My Anekdoten collection started with a download of Vemod, one of the first downloads I ever bought, and CDs of Nucleus and the compilation Chapters followed. My vinyl copy of Vemod was bought at the Black Widow Records stall at the 2018 FIM music fair in Milan where Anekdoten played at the Prog On festival, a performance I really enjoyed. 180g reissues of Nucleus, From Within (1999), Gravity (2003) and Until All The Ghosts Are Gone (2015) were sourced from Bandcamp, along with the instrumental keyboard Kosmogon (Nicklas Barker and Sophie Linder) LP Mässan (2021) and the Barker solo LP Epektasis (2022).
Another leading light of the third wave is Flower Kings, led by guitarist Roine Stolt who had joined Swedish symphonic prog band Kaipa aged 17 in the mid 70s. They were a headlining act at the 2014 Prog Résiste festival but I was a little disappointed because they didn’t match expectations. I subsequently read that their later material deliberately moved away from classic analogue keyboard sounds and this fits with my memory of their set, which didn’t come anywhere close to recreating 70s prog but sounded more mainstream as though influenced by US prog. I bought the Anderson-Stolt album Invention of Knowledge when it was released in 2016 because it sounded like a natural follow-up to Tales From Topographic Oceans and then ordered the first Kaipa album in 2017 when a limited–edition 2015 re-master became available on 180g blue vinyl which included a CD of the album with two bonus tracks. There’s a nice balance between keyboards and guitar and the result is first-class symphonic progressive rock and there are hints that passages featuring heavily reverbed organ and guitar may owe a debt to Hansson’s Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings. I love the Swedish vocals provided by keyboard player Hans Lundin which are confident and come across as poetic and naturally flowing. I managed to get to see The Flower Kings perform a second time, in London at the tail end of 2019, finding that I enjoyed the performance because my expectations had been lowered by my previous exposure.
I’ve got an odd few Swedish prog albums that don’t really fit anywhere. There’s obviously a connection with The Flower Kings and Manifesto of an Alchemist, an LP issued during a Flower Kings hiatus between Desolation Rose in 2013 and Waiting For Miracles in 2019 under the name of ‘Roine Stolt's The Flower King’ but it comes across as much more of a personal album, reflecting some of Stolt’s social and political opinions.
Nad Sylvan appeared as a guest vocalist on Manifesto of an Alchemist and his solo album Courting The Widow (2015) is another outlier in my collection. While Stolt’s 2018 solo effort includes both pop and blues, Sylvan sticks to well-crafted modern prog but the album’s sheer length (70 minutes), even with breaks to turn over the two LPs, makes it difficult to hold my attention. Sylvan features on a host of my Steve Hackett albums and I’ve seen him perform live with Hackett on numerous occasions.
On the other hand, the Sinkadus CD Aurum Nostrum (1997) is something like a cross between the music of Änglagård and Camel, and I’m grateful for the Reddit community for bringing it to my attention – I managed to find a second hand copy on the Music Magpie site.
Hackett has used a variety of bassists for his tours, the most recent being Jonas Reingold who is closely associated with The Flower Kings. Reingold appears on a couple of the albums I own, both of which are primarily vehicles for Andy Tillison, Proxy (2018) by The Tangent and Allium: Una storia (2021) by Tillison Reingold and Tiranti, an imaginary release by a band called ‘Allium’ that a very youthful Tillison actually jammed with while on holiday in Italy.
Despite my disdain for the death metal incarnation of Opeth, the reason I don’t own any of their albums apart from a free copy of the Live in Plovdiv that came with issue 81 of Prog magazine (October 2017), it would be remiss of me to write a blog without mentioning the band and I actually quite like Heritage (2011) which I’d buy on vinyl if the price was right. Part of what Steven Wilson, who mixed the album described as a trilogy (the other components being the collaboration with Mikael Åkerfeldt resulting in Storm Corrosion (2012) and Wilson’s second solo album from 2011 Grace for Drowning), Heritage was Opeth’s first full departure from the band’s roots and dispensed with Åkerfeldt’s trademark death metal growl. His singing voice isn’t a million miles away from Ian Anderson’s during the classic Jethro Tull period and the compositions are varied, steering clear of frantic, technical playing and heavy distortion.
I think need to revisit Sweden after an absence of 42 years.
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