You can't stop the music

I found out the other day that I was once in my youth, around the late Paleolithic era, at the same concert as David Bowie.

In October 1991, Bowie and his then-band Tin Machine were touring their second album, imaginatively called Tin Machine II. On October 20, they had a night off between the Copenhagen and Stockholm shows, and went out to first see Bowie's old friends Kraftwerk at Solnahallen on the The Mix tour, and later Graham Parker and Mick Ronson at Berns. As it happened, I also saw Kraftwerk that night. I was 17, and it was only my second major concert (after Roxette at the local arena in my old home town a month earlier), and the also first time I visited Stockholm on my own.

The story doesn't tell if he got to hang out with Ralf and Florian, or if anyone in the crowd recognised him: "Fuck me, you look just like David Bowie!" "Yeah, I hear that a lot..."

Source: Timo Kangas' review of Tin Machine's Stockholm show, Göteborgs-Posten, 23 October 1991, p. 30. I only found the review three days ago, a third of a century after the fact; not that it would have mattered, of course, as I'd hardly heard Bowie at the time and was just starting my musical self education.

Today, ten years ago, I saw I Satellite, Sista Mannen På Jorden, Marlow, Psyche, and Rational Youth at Nalen in Stockholm.

That is also where I got the "Saturdays in Silesia" 12" at the top left and the Cold War Night Life CD (third row, first from left) autographed. (In fact I already had Tracy Howe's autograph on the CWNL CD from when I bought it, at the 1999 Stockholm concert, but this time I got Kevin Komoda's as well.)

Rational Youth, if you haven't noticed, is one of my favourite bands, and I've seen them five times and interviewed them once.

For anyone who is interested, this is what I looked like 50 years ago today. I was my mum's first baby, and we had to stay for a week in hospital (not sure why, and I can't ask my parents: Mum died in 2017, and Dad doesn't remember the details half a century later). On this picture I had been home for just over an hour. Photo by my father, who still lives in the same house where I and my younger siblings grew up (and Mum died there).

In other news, I spent last weekend in Visby with my wife to celebrate my 50th birthday and our fourth wedding anniversary as a belated honeymoon. (For obvious reasons we never got to take any honeymoon in 2020.) Feels a bit strange to know that I'm older now than any of my grandparents were when I was born, but I can't say I feel old; on the contrary, I'm still wondering when the hell I will start feeling grown up...

And here are my ABBA LPs. All except Arrival (an Italian release on Dig-It Records) are original Swedish pressings on Polar. (I got Voulez-Vous for my fifth birthday in 1979.)

And I never gave a fuck about how hideously uncool ABBA were in the 80s. Always loved them, always will. So there.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary with the original Swedish pressing.

I don't remember the Eurovision victory myself, because I wouldn't be born for another three weeks (and yes, I'm an old fart), but my late mother once told me that "Waterloo" was probably the first song I heard on the radio, because it was played a lot at the time. I didn't become a fan,though, until I was about four years old and "Take A Chance On Me" was a hit.

Hanging around at Münchenbryggeriet, waiting for Walt Disco and then OMD to take the stage.

Today I'm in Gothenburg, for the first time since 2011, to see Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb supported by Rein.

Feels strange to see a bunch of aging EBM fans that I haven't known for 25-30 years. But then I'm hardly a spring chicken myself: I'll be 50 in six months...

For the past nine months I've been indexing and scanning a couple of hundred music magazines, Swedish and English (and a few Norwegian and German), with the goal of finally getting rid of the bloody things. For years they've taken a lot of space in our storage unit, space that both my wife and I are strongly starting to feel could be put to better use, and so I have talked to a record shop owner who is willing to take them for me when I'm ready.

So since last spring I have been spending a lot of time in the back office at my job with our A3 scanner/printer, scanning interesting features (interviews, reviews etc) to a USB stick and post-editing them on my laptop. (Melody Maker from the mid-80s was the worst — it was larger than A3, so I had to scan every page in two halves and stitch them together in Photoshop later.)

I have 24 issues of New Musical Express left to do now, and then I'm done.

Above: Interviews with Kowalski and SPK from New Musical Express, 22nd October, 1983, p. 44-45.

Laibach @ Lilla Cirkus, Stockholm.

In a few hours I'm off to see Laibach for the 13th time. Since 1994, I've seen them here:

1994-11-23, Gino, Stockholm (Occupied Europe NATO Tour)

1996-11-18, Gino, Stockholm (Jesus Christ Superstars)

2000-07-14, Arvikafestivalen, Arvika (Festival program)

2003-08-30, Electric Gathering, Fryshuset, Stockholm (Festival program based on WAT)

2005-08-24, Mondo, Stockholm (WAT)

2006-11-29, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (Volk)

2009-02-13, Uppsala Konsert & Kongress, Stockholm (Laibachkunstderfuge): Played as an instrumental quintet. Ivan Novak on stage for a change, rather than behind the mixing desk.

2011-03-05, Tyrol, Stockholm (Laibach Revisited)

2015-03-14, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (Spectre): Opening with a 20-minute rendition of Grieg's opera Olav Trygvason in Norwegian.

2016-01-17, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (The Sound of Music)

2017-11-11, Kraken, Stockholm (Also sprach Zarathustra): Here I got my NSK passport autographed by Ivan Novak, signing as Ivo Saliger.

2019-03-10, Kägelbanan, Stockholm (The Sound of Music)

The new Laibach album arrived today from their webshop. An industrial album with Slovene lyrics and very, very different from their other new release this January. (Well, you can't accuse them of not being varied.)

2022-09-10: Robert Görl as DAF live at Slaktkyrkan, Stockholm.

Mindphaser!

Ten days ago I was at my first concert in two and a half years. (Koenix, a Swiss folk metal band, live at Medeltidsveckan in Visby. But that's another story that I may tell when I'm not writing on my phone.)

Tonight I am out to see Die Krupps and Front Line Assembly with support bands Tension Control and Priest. I'll probably write a little report later.