Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  While the financial side of things was pretty meagre, the attitude towards creativity was generous and the climate was big-hearted. Christian’s parents were both university educated and highly creative people.

  “We didn’t have a lot of money. My dad never had a particularly well paid job. Things weren’t dire, but my mother’s various jobs weren’t well-paid either, that’s for sure. She actually chose to work part-time in order to paint and to get an education in art. Later on, she made the brave decision to become a full-time artist, and we weren’t exactly well off back then. We had a lot of zucchini stew! But we had a decent place to live and I never went hungry, so she must have made sure to keep expenses low. My mother is my role model. She always went her own way, she always had complete faith in everything she did, and never doubted her art. I admire people who are focused and dedicated.”

  If you grew up in Majorna, chances are good that you’ve made it a part of your identity. But just like so many other previously working class areas of larger cities, Majorna has undergone a kind of gentrification. Right now, Majorna is one of the hippest and most happening parts of Gothenburg and even the tiniest one-room-flats sell for staggering amounts.

  “Our family never owned a house or a flat and our attitude was always very working class. We lived in a rough neighbourhood, and back then there were drug addicts on every corner. It never felt unsafe to me, but I can’t deny that there were people sniffing glue openly and so on. But thanks to my mum and dad, I had a very stable and safe upbringing. Oddly enough though, I ended up in a sort of gang, because in my early teens, I was already tired of school.”

  In another part of Gothenburg, IA was also getting bored by school and developing a strong commitment to music. Being a very active child with attentive parents, his energy was encouraged instead of scolded. Bernt and Inga noticed that their youngest liked to hit things rhythmically rather than just wreck things, and bought him a big military snare drum for his birthday.

  “They helped me build a kind of drum kit made out of old apple crates from Zackrisson’s grocery shop. I still remember just how lovely and cardboardy they resounded. I began making music with others just a few years later. Lars Crook, Jörgen Holmquist and I played in Bedrock, using gear sponsored by Jörgen’s dad Bo. We rehearsed at Jörgen’s parents’ house just down the hill from where I lived. We made a lot of noise for a trio of kids of seven or eight. My first songs were called ‘Go to Hell’ and ‘Homework Rots My Mind’. We had an old Maxwin by Pearl drum kit and I had a Hagström amp where the speaker had been so maltreated it fluttered like a garland in the wind if you cranked it loud enough. We built a drum podium from wood crates and plywood, used cheap Christmas tree illuminations for lights, which caught fire and nearly burned the school down once when we were allowed to play in class. We really did our best to put on a show: another time we tried to create smoke by lighting bunches of incense and had all the kids in coughing fits. So I’ve always had a band to put all my passion into.”

  There was no question: music was everything to IA. He simply devoured music and thanks to his being exposed to so many different styles, he wasn’t going to be restrained by boundaries or genres.

  “I discovered The Tubes thanks to their stage shows with chain saws, barbed wire, nudity, platform shoes and thrashing of Marshall rigs. Of course, I had only seen this in the gatefold pictures of their live album What Do You Want from Live? and not actually heard their music. I nicked some cash from my dad when I was around eight and bought one of their albums, came home and put the music on. They didn’t exactly play heavy metal, to put it mildly, but I still loved it, and from then on, I’ve never cared for genres.”

  Perhaps the young IA felt that homework would indeed “rot his mind”, but he was certainly no halfwit. When he was eleven, he only had to read something once to remember it and he excelled in maths. He even brought back extra books home and did maths just for the fun of it.

  “Hard to believe nowadays, when I can barely calculate the total amount of two litres of milk! When my parents realised that I had started to dislike school in my teens, I actually didn’t get into much trouble. They never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to when it comes to school or career choice; they used common sense, especially when I quit school at the age of 16. I failed several subjects even before upper secondary school, and I subsequently discovered that no one gave a damn if I attended school or sat at home playing music, so I simply and non-dramatically quit school. I think my parents saw that I could practice playing the drums and guitar for ten hours straight, and they probably realised that music wasn’t just some temporary pastime for me, but rather where my passion lay.”

  Joakim showed a similar lack of interest in school, and by the time he was 14, he already knew he was going to make it big; not among the workers on the shopfloor, but on the arena stages around the world. His parents, however, were a lot less understanding.

  “I didn’t like school. I think I’m a bit stupid. I can’t take in any kind of information if it doesn’t interest me, so my grades were atrocious. I had absolutely no interest in any of the subjects. I knew I was going to be a rock star, so I didn’t give a damn about anything else. My father used to call me a ‘one-trick-idiot’, and he said, ‘You don’t know anything about anything apart from drums. You can’t even engage in a normal, everyday conversation.’ My brother said the same thing, and for many years, he saw me as a bit slow. This has cast a shadow over my life to a great extent.”

  Joakim says that he’s become a bit better at general knowledge thanks to working with the elderly; they read newspapers and want to talk about the world. But school clearly wasn’t Joakim’s favourite place.

  “I never liked the teachers and I was always in trouble. But my appearance was deceiving. Sure, I wore a bandana and people thought I was on drugs, yet I was one of the very few who had never touched alcohol. I was the only one in my year who didn’t even apply for secondary education. I saw no point – I was going to be a rock star! I haven’t exactly had modest dreams. All or nothing. Like Kiss or Iron Maiden, that’s what I wanted. Millions of dollars and grand tours.”

  Slightly more of a loner than the rest of his future bandmates, Joakim practiced playing the drums to Kiss songs for over a year before finally joining something which resembled a band.

  “I don’t know if you can call it a band; we were a duo called Satanic. The guitarist only knew one chord, which I had showed him. But after a couple of years of that, I joined IA in Frozen Eyes, so it was rather a big step forward for me.”

  Just like IA and Joakim, Christian got hooked on music thanks to Kiss. He was only around six when a boy next door proudly played him this new and exciting band. Christian was completely captivated by the posters which covered the boy’s walls. Being the child of an artist, he remembers likening the posters to art – a kind he had never seen before.

  “My friend’s older brother helped me fill in some form in order to join the Kiss fanclub. About a month later, I was at home with a babysitter and a large, thick envelope was delivered. It had my name on it and I could see the Kiss Army logo printed on it, but my babysitter said I couldn’t open it until mum came home. I was so pissed off! I waited and waited for mum and when I finally got to open the letter, it was pure bliss. From then on, I started asking for Kiss albums for my birthdays and for Christmas.”

  Christian’s father Staffan didn’t play music professionally, but did own a piano and a double bass, and this introduced Christian to the notion that it was entirely possible to become a musician and do the things Kiss did on stage.

  “He put his foot through that double bass one night in the dark and managed to destroy it completely. This led to his buying an electric bass guitar, and perhaps this led to my taking up the bass guitar eventually. But I started with drums, and my parents rented a drum kit for me, which had a snare, a bass drum, one tom-tom and one cymbal. Slightly disappointing when you’d seen Peter Criss’ drum kit!”

>   Thanks to Sweden’s long tradition of municipal music schools, it was possible for children to take courses in music, dance or theatre for a modest fee during afternoons and evenings. In the 1970’s and 80’s, it was very common for children to learn to play an instrument through the many associations which provided courses for those who couldn’t afford private tutors. This is often stated as a reason why Sweden has become the third largest country in the world in music exports. If your parents couldn’t afford to buy your instrument for you, there was always the possibility to borrow or rent one.

  One way of handling the sometimes large groups of children who wanted to learn to play a particular instrument was to begin with group lessons, but it didn’t take long for Christian to put together a band of his own. The Kiss worship united the young boys and inspired them to play. They named the band Corkhead and rehearsed in Christian’s mother’s living room.

  “Me, a guy called Johan Wallin and Roger Teilmann, who is still a musician, started playing together when we were around ten. I had got my first drums, Roger had his first electric guitar, but no amplifier and I think Johan had to sing or something. We added the audience noise from Kiss’ Alive! and Alive II. I can’t imagine we sounded that good.”

  All three members from the first Freak Kitchen line-up started their musical careers playing the drums. Unlike Joakim who gladly kept banging away at the drums, Christian had something else in mind – he wanted to play the guitar!

  “My parents changed the leasing deal to a guitar and an amplifier. But I had no idea at the time how to distort the guitar; I thought all you had to do was play loud. Eventually I came across a distortion pedal, and that’s when I discovered how to make it sound metal. This was in the beginning of the 1980’s. The slightly grittier sleaze and glam scene had just started happening, and I got completely into that for quite a few years: the L.A. scene. It was around this time I started playing more seriously in various bands and we got our first proper gigs, at Majorna’s youth club. It was me and Mattias Starander, who now plays the drums in my current band Gods Favorite. We also had a guy called Martin Eriksson who was the local guitar shredder number one. I don’t think we had a name at the time, but eventually singer Daniel Magnusson joined, and he is also around today in one of my constellations. I only remember one song we wrote: ‘I Wanna Be Free from School’. So the foundation for the gang I do music with today was laid there, all those years ago.”

  Whereas Christian had a small family, IA’s family kept growing. In the late 1970’s his parents split up and lots of new people came into the equation. They proved to be just as keen on music as the rest of the Eklundh clan.

  “My mum’s new husband Janne had a friend who dragged me along to a Nina Hagen gig, and everybody there smoked pot, which I was completely oblivious to, and suddenly I was totally fascinated by Hagen’s African reggae and cool image. In 1982, Metallica and Motörhead were obvious influences, but even before that, what really caught me was Frank Zappa. I saw him live in 1981, and that changed everything for me. My musical upbringing has been mixed, to say the least. Plenty of volume and distortion, but preferably with weird scales and odd time signatures blended in. But I never had any problems with admitting that I like both Slayer and Lionel Ritchie, and I try to listen to new music without any preconceptions or prejudices.”

  When IA was about twelve, his family moved to Mölnlycke, another nice and quiet suburb in Gothenburg, and IA formed what would become Frozen Eyes – the precursor to Freak Kitchen.

  “We had a few different names to begin with – Lizzard, Avenger – but I’ve not played in very many bands: Bedrock, Frozen Eyes, Fate and then Freak Kitchen. I changed my main instrument from drums to guitar around this time because I wanted to be seen. No matter how ferociously I played the drums, nobody would recognize me.”

  Although IA’s parents had now divorced and several of his sisters left home, he was still surrounded by people who loved and encouraged him.

  “I guess my parents always felt guilty for the divorce. Sure, it was probably tough to start with, but after a while I was cool with it. I don’t think it had any negative effect on my ability to maintain relationships, because I’m an extremely monogamous person. I’ve been with my wife Camilla for 21 years now and before that, I was in another relationship for eight years. When I was around 19-20, I had my wild years, but it never really appealed to me. It was more wailing and gnashing of teeth than it was worth. I don’t need that kind of frustration in my life. So I guess I haven’t been traumatised by anything at all in my childhood. I think what really made an impression on me was probably something more like being taken to the Lerum record shop on my birthday. My sister’s old boyfriend had an account there because he worked at a youth club, and he just told me to pick a few albums I wanted. So I grabbed If You Want Blood, You Got It and Highway to Hell by AC/DC and then he said I could have another one as well. And I was like, another one?!”

  It’s safe to say that IA wasn’t affected by traumatic incidents, but by acts of love and kindness. The only incident that comes close to a crisis happened when he lost a bit of his finger. He cut it wide open on broken glass, and the fingertip nearly came off.

  “A piece of glass is still in there. I’ve got all sorts of stuff in my body, lead from a pencil and I don’t know what. I’m a bit contrary, normally your body tries to get rid of stuff that doesn’t belong there, but I seem to integrate it. I’ve always done things the wrong way around. I ran before I could walk, I made my bed instead of painting graffiti, I practised the guitar instead of doing sports. Well, I did ride a skateboard for a while and loved it, but these days I can barely walk in the forest without falling over and hurting myself badly. But I don’t mind that, I even cherish that kind of pain.”

  IA stayed true to playing hard rock despite his varying influences, but Christian had found a new passion. He was captivated by the New York scene of the early 1980’s, and got into hip hop, graffiti and break-dancing around the time he was twelve.

  “I was totally into Grand Master Flash and Rock Steady Crew. In a way it was kind of like the glam scene, with leather and studded belts. So for a few years, basically all I listened to was hip hop. But when I was around 14, I started listening to W.A.S.P. as well. I wasn’t the only one who liked music from very different genres, but at that time the music scene was very segregated: you either liked synth music or heavy metal and so on.”

  And so it happened that another shocking and image-oriented hard rock band got Christian into playing again. He picked up the bass and during his mid-teens, he played in a handful of bands simultaneously. As with so many local bands, they mutated and transformed, and Christian found himself playing in a band called Major N.A. The strange band name is a word play on Majorna, the area in Gothenburg where Christian grew up; Gothenburg is seen as the “pun capital” of Sweden. The quite silly, but sometimes sharp and witty kind of pun-based sense of humour is characteristic of this area, and you can in fact see it in plenty of Freak Kitchen lyrics and titles. Major N.A. enjoyed a brief moment in the Swedish spotlight with their self-titled album on MNW Records (1993), but by then, Christian had long since left the band.

  “The reason I started playing the bass full time was that this guy called Rasmus played the bass in a local band from Landvetter called Speed, and he hated it – he wanted to play the guitar. So they asked me to take over and I left Major N.A. to join Speed. Major N.A. had formed around the time Guns N’ Roses happened and they got a record deal soon after my departure. My songs are on the album and the actual music was brilliant, but the album turned out to be a complete disappointment.”

  Despite the fact that Christian already played in several serious bands, he still couldn’t afford to buy proper gear. He borrowed basses where he could, but there was one problem: he is left handed.

  “I quickly learned how to play ‘up-side-down’. I played like that for many years, and when I finally got my own bass in my late teens, it was pretty tricky to lear
n how to play the right way around. I got that bass from Joel Starander, a great bassist from Gothenburg, and also the older brother of Mattias. It was a black Ibanez, with a tremolo bar, a real shredder bass! I played that bass all the way until perhaps 1997 or so, it sounds mad, but it’s true. I was simply happy with it. It’s been a constant companion: I don’t care about brands. If the sound is good, I’m happy. I did get some sort of sponsor deal with Yamaha, but to be honest, I didn’t think it sounded that different.”

  Fierce Looks and Fist Fights

  THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS what would become Freak Kitchen happened when IA recruited Joakim to Frozen Eyes in 1986. As so many others, Joakim had seen IA in town, thoroughly impressed with his charisma and attitude. Joakim knew right away that this was the guy he wanted to play in a band with.

  “The first time I saw IA, I thought he looked totally fierce and I remember thinking that I ought to ask him if he was looking for a drummer. I was looking for a band and I posted a huge note at the local music shop MUG, and it basically covered the whole noticeboard. I wanted to make sure I was seen. That day, he happened to be there, and the staff told me to go talk to him, because his band was indeed looking for a drummer. I didn’t dare, but fortunately, he got my number from the noticeboard. But before that I had met an old school pal of his on the local tram, and he acted as a sort of messenger between us for a while, and finally he told me that IA would be phoning me that very evening. So I sat by the phone, waiting, and then he rang me.”

  The Frozen Eyes line-up was completed by Leif Larsson (bass) and Aulis Hultin (vocals), and the quartet soon started recording demos. IA and Joakim were only around 15-16 years old when they recorded their first songs properly, in Memory Studio in Gamlestaden, Gothenburg. The studio was usually frequented by traditional dance bands, but now the four heavy metal musicians tried their luck with the reel-to-reel recorder. Because the boys were so young and inexperienced, the sound did not come out quite the way they expected. IA was frustrated by that fact, but proud of the performance.