IN THE NEWS

About six years ago, Ola, Måns and Anders started to meet sporadically to play music together. Anders had learned to play guitar by playing Suede songs, so mostly we just did Suede-covers, even though we also tried to take on songs by Morrisey, Cure, REM among others. No one was singing at the time. We weren’t that good. After a while we came up with our first own song more or less by accident. Then Måns wrote the lyrics and someone had to sing so he grabbed the microphone. Luckily, that first song was pretty good so we decided to continue. As Christian joined in, and as we started writing more songs, we also started to call ourselves a band in the presence of others. After a while we started to practise on a more regular basis and we even agreed to play live, at Göteborgskalaset 2000. Not long after that, Kerstin also joined us and we became the band that we are today.

On a few different occasions we did some recordings. Usually we went out to a summerhouse somewhere over the weekend and recorded a bunch of songs live, directly on tape. These weekends resulted in records that we sold to friends. We then decided to sell our records at a store called Off the Record, where we to date have sold about 300 copies, which actually is more than any other artist in the store.

It’s always hard to mention any particular band that has influenced us, especially as we in the band have slightly different backgrounds. But, apart from those mentioned earlier, some of them are Mojave 3, Bear Quartet, Lloyd Cole, Will Oldham and Lemonheads.

The main focus has always been writing better and better songs. We try to be as open as we can when it comes to new ideas for songs, so that we never rule out anything because it doesn’t sound like a leopold-song or something like that. There is no such thing as a typical leopold sound or…maybe there is, but it isn’t premeditated, which makes a difference.

Maybe because of this focus on song writing we are not that good at organising concerts and things like that. Actually, almost every time we have performed live, we have been asked by someone to do it. In Göteborg, we have performed a couple of times each at Jord, Pustervik, Sticky Fingers and Göteborgskalaset. We have performed in Karlstad on three different occasions. In the summer of 2001, we also did a small, improvised tour in southern Sweden, a tour that actually is well documented on film.

Recently we recorded our first studio album, which we did at Peekaboo Studio in Göteborg. The record contains 10 songs that we are all very proud of. Some of them are a couple of years old while others are rather new. We were just about to release it ourselves when the opportunity to co-operate with Dead Frog Records came up, which we were happy to take. The album will be released in August and if everything goes well we will do some concerts around the country (or outside Göteborg at least…) after that. As always, we concentrate on writing songs and we already have a bunch of new ones ready. So hopefully people will enjoy our music and buy our album so that we can do another one next year.

Press release, 30 June 2003, PDF 130KB [SV]