Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  “I had found an old apron that I spattered some red paint on, but we still look like three cheerful chaps. Joakim had borrowed my fetching Indian waistcoat and I wore cycling shorts. Christian wore a really smart waistcoat too. And a leather jacket. I had a smart jacket as well. We switched around a bit. I don’t think we had found our style yet.”

  But if the band came across as light-hearted and with a sense of humour, their lyrics weren’t quite as silly. In fact, in the very first song on the debut album, “Blind”, IA puts his foot down regarding narrow-mindedness and racism.

  “I’ve always been strongly opposed to racism. My family was pretty liberal and people from all corners of the world came to stay, sometimes for longer periods of time, in our big house in Olofstorp. We were very much a part of the anti-nuclear power movement and my parents would take me along to endless demonstrations outside nuclear power stations. Obviously I wasn’t that amused as a wee lad, but I think the attitude stayed with me: look after our fellow human beings and our environment.”

  During the years, some reviewers and listeners have voiced the opinion that Freak Kitchen is a bit on the comical side and that this silly streak isn’t quite suitable in hard rock. Christian was in two minds about it.

  “Freak Kitchen has had some very serious lyrics indeed, and if you’re as earnest as that, perhaps you must lighten up a little in order not to seem pretentious. I feel that we were being nudged in the silly direction to avoid being seen as serious and deep. But I wouldn’t have had a problem with that.”

  While the band awaited the album release, they were rehearsing and gigging. They had a rehearsal room in Partille, a municipality in the Gothenburg urban area, and spent most of their time there. IA was the one least keen on rehearsing, and Joakim couldn’t get enough of it.

  “I loved just hanging with IA and Christian. People were jealous of our chemistry. It always felt like a punch in the stomach when we were done rehearsing and I had to go home. I don’t even know what I did at home, it was so boring. Going home to that old flat. My place was so depressing, it even brought IA and Christian down when they visited me.”

  IA confesses that he preferred to go home and play with his portable studio, but did sometimes play pinball games with Joakim after rehearsals. Hanging out was never his favourite pastime. Joakim also gave musical development as a reason why he wanted to spend time with the boys.

  “I truly felt as if it was us against the world, and we were fighting for something which kept growing. We had such great band vibes. And I totally sucked at playing the drums and I couldn’t develop on my own. If I practised on my own, all that happened was that I became better at practising. I could never transfer those skills to a real band situation.”

  It was getting close to the release of Appetizer, but the night before the release party in October 1994, something happened which would turn IA’s life around forever. IA had done a guest solo on the Gothenburg band Road Ratt’s 1992 album, and that particular band would develop close connections with Freak Kitchen. The charismatic singer was called Christer Örtefors, but it would take another eight years before he replaced Christian as bass player in Freak Kitchen. The guitar player Fredrik Stenberg had an old girlfriend called Camilla Ahlqvist, who had stayed in touch with the band, and before one of their gigs, drummer Patrik Herrström introduced Camilla to a certain Mattias IA Eklundh. Patrik was interested in Camilla, but had to get on stage, and left her with IA.

  “Patrik jokingly asked Mattias to look after me while he was on stage. Mattias offered to buy me a drink and I asked for a Coke. He went to the bar, only to discover that they didn’t sell anything nonalcoholic. But instead of, you know, ‘sorry babe, here’s a beer’, he left the club, went out to find a Coke in the middle of the night and came back half an hour later with a Coke for me. He is such a gentleman. But Mattias and I had a stormy first year, because he and his longtime girlfriend Ulrika had trouble letting go of their relationship, so ‘we’ nearly didn’t happen.”

  Something else that attracted Camilla to IA, was his ambition. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to stay at the level where he’d play to a handful of people in a local club.

  “We socialised in circles where everyone played in a band, and the general talk about Mattias was that he was going places. He was better, different, at what he did, he had high ambitions and everybody knew it. By the time he was 19, he had already played in a well-known band, and then he came back to Gothenburg, where people were still struggling for recognition at the youth clubs and the crappy old bars. But he wasn’t going to be held back. You might think that this made people dislike him, but they never did, because he was kind and not at all self-centred. I think to this day, that’s why he’s so much in demand as a musician and consultant. He’s reliable, always gives you that little bit extra and he’s never got an attitude that gets on your nerves.”

  There is no doubt: IA was born to be a musician, and he made sure Camilla understood it right from the beginning of their relationship. He told her that he would be travelling a lot, playing live a lot and that she had to understand that she’d have to cope on her own for long periods of time.

  “He said that if he couldn’t do music full time, he’d rather jump off a bridge. He says that our son Gabriel and I make it worthwhile, he loves us more than anything else, but I’m also aware that there is absolutely no alternative to what he does. I could never during our time together have given him any kind of ultimatum if I found myself unable to cope. He needs to travel and play music; he can’t live any other way. He would go mad if he couldn’t channel his creativity, and then it wouldn’t matter who was close to him. The thought of asking him to make any kind of compromise has never even crossed my mind.”

  Looking at pictures of the young couple, it’s easy to understand why IA fell for the beautiful Camilla, but looks alone weren’t going to keep IA’s interest alive.

  “He comes from a family of strong women. His sisters are strong-willed and so is his mother. He sometimes says that I’m so much like his mother and he has tremendous respect for her. On the other hand, I’m quite different from them when it comes to honesty and straightforwardness. I can be awkward and difficult, because I speak my mind. His family never does. They’re always bright and cheerful, even though you know they’re not happy all the time. He’s got two sisters who are not on speaking terms anymore. They might be in the same room for family gatherings, but they’re not friends. But an outsider would never be able to tell; they would come across as the best of friends. And I’m not that kind of person.”

  It was also Camilla who introduced IA to vegetarianism. This was frowned upon by IA’s mother, who would always “forget” Camilla’s ethical stance at family dinners.

  “It took ten years for that information to sink in, but I always stood up for my beliefs and explained why: animals in the meat industry live short and painful lives, which end in terror by all sorts of awful slaughtering methods. Mattias was baffled by my directness to begin with. In his family, you were pleasant and agreeable no matter what. He calls me his heroine because I say the things he will only think. He finds certain confrontational situations bothersome. He wants everyone to agree and be happy, but that’s not the way life works all the time.”

  The release party in Gothenburg was a success, and Thunderstruck Productions had done their job in Copenhagen too: the record store HMV had Freak Kitchen posters in all the windows facing the town’s most popular street, Strøget. Although Freak Kitchen was clearly not going to be “the next big thing” in Sweden, the album received good reviews. The specialized press such as Backstage and Metal Zone were impressed. Writer and guitarist Janne Stark was the first to interview Freak Kitchen. He says that he was “astounded by IA’s guitar oddities, mildly put” and that he loved the band. In his review, he names Appetizer the best debut album by a Swedish band in the past 15 years. He calls the music powerful and humorous, and writes that IA’s adventurous style of playing reminded hi
m of Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme.

  Other reviewers used words such as heavy and playful, bubbly, sensational playing, varied, sparkling performance, anti-trendy and original. The album received few top marks, but plenty of 4/5, and most of the reviewers had positive things to say about the band’s fresh approach to hard rock. They were compared to everything from King’s X and Mr. Big to Frank Zappa and Megadeth. The opinions about IA’s vocals ranged from “a weakness” and “one of the band’s strengths”. One of the most enthusiastic writers was Mik Gaffney, who at the time wrote for UK based Frontiers Magazine. However, he soon started booking Freak Kitchen’s British tours, and has since been the band’s right-hand man in Britain.

  “The editor and I were immediately blown away by the band’s ability to blend melody and power alongside some of the most insane guitar playing we’d heard at that point. We were, I believe, the first publication to review the band and a short while later to interview them too. When we finally got hold of IA that is. He was rather elusive in those days.”

  Every little review or interview counted. Joakim talks about the excitement he felt, and says that he really savoured everything that was written. He refers to that period of time as fun and thrilling. He had a daytime job at a café, and played the album all the time. Christian remembers an almost glamorous feeling in the beginning, when they lived with the idea that they were on the brink of stardom. And when they won the Swedish Zeppelin Award for Best Hard Rock album of the year 1994, ahead of a number of hot and trendy bands, you could excuse them for thinking that the years of drudgery were over. IA can’t help but laugh when he talks about the award ceremony.

  “We were real underdogs. We came from Gothenburg, not fashionable Stockholm. We pretty much shat our pants when we heard our name called out. All the other bands walked the stairs onto the stage in a very dignified way, but we tumbled all over the place, jumped over the riot barriers separating the audience from the stage. Christian grabbed award host Vanessa Warwick’s drink and poured it over his head. We were surrounded by the hip media, famous bands and I was totally overjoyed.”

  Until then, Freak Kitchen had had a slow but steady trickle of press coverage, but Christian feels that it died down somewhat after the award.

  “I actually felt as if the Stockholm based media were making a silent statement, brushing us off as nothing but a quirky bunch of musical funnymen. It was frowned upon that we weren’t easy to pinpoint, we had unfashionable influences and we weren’t hard enough.”

  IA explains that Freak Kitchen has chosen an alternative path and that to him it was never important what people would categorise them as. The reviews were full of newly invented genres to describe Freak Kitchen. But if the reviewers had trouble getting to grips with Freak Kitchen, it’s easy to understand the confusion if they had known what was in the making in various bathrooms, kitchens, outhouses, attics – anywhere IA could get a moment alone. But this time, he didn’t mainly use his guitar, but rather a keyboard and a typewriter. Say hello to Mr. Libido.

  “In the summer of 1995, I had borrowed a tape recorder and a sequencer. If you listen to the songs on Sensually Primitive, you’ll notice that they all fade out with fewer and fewer instruments, and the reason was that the equipment didn’t have enough memory. The whole album is one big send-up of techno and Euro disco, but I couldn’t do it the straight and normal way, of course. I wanted to create a kind of fake techno persona to go with the music: Mr. Libido. I was really skinny at the time, so I figured that if I started working out like a madman, I could probably imitate the male super models that had just started happening. I only went to the gym once, with a friend, but I was thrown out, because I couldn’t stop mocking the other people at the gym. Oooh, would you look at those biceps! Wow, look at my fancy muscles in the mirror, aren’t I delicious! The people at the gym just told my friend in quite a stern voice: Could you be so kind as to escort your annoying little pal from the premises. So I just used a heavy old Facit typewriter as a weight and did press-ups all summer. When it was time to shoot the cover for Sensually Primitive, I found this old rubber skull mask my mum had bought for me when I was little, rubbed myself with cooking oil and posed naked with just a bouquet of flowers to hide my bits. Perhaps a slightly odd thing to do, I realise that.”

  Things were moving slowly forward, and the same summer Freak Kitchen got to open the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. In Sweden at the time, playing Roskilde was seen as something prestigious, and it was where young Scandinavian music lovers returned to, year after year.

  In the autumn, a tour of Germany followed as support act to Pink Cream 69. This tour is perhaps one of the most talked about episodes in the years of Freak Kitchen’s existence, much thanks to the song “Jerk” from Spanking Hour. In 1996, in Frontiers Magazine, IA candidly and in eye-watering detail told the readers that the lyrics deal with the crass and revolting behaviour of their prostitute-shagging, drugsnorting, tour manager. Twenty years later, IA still remembers the utter misery of the tour.

  “Anyone who harbours any kind of contempt for that tour manager will be pleased that he was the victim of Joakim’s strange tradition of wiping his arse with his hands and then shaking hands with someone. And that bastard wasn’t the only low-point of the tour. Christian’s dad had been very kind and found us a caravan we could use, but the first thing that happened was that both electricity and heat broke down. It was freezing cold and we slept in double sleeping bags; Christian was crying because he was so cold. To make matters even worse, it was such a ramshackle caravan, you really had to keep a ridiculously low speed. It was fun, we laughed a lot, but it was a bloody pain too. The first thing Christian did when we got there was to get plastered and pick a quarrel with some badass Hells Angels. He had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. The bikers told us to piss off, or they would kill him. As we dragged him away, what did he do? He threw beer cans at them! But then he managed to stay mostly out of trouble until the end of the tour, where he got beaten up. I can’t imagine why.”

  The caravan and the ability of some to hold their liquor weren’t the only things in need of maintenance. Christian sounds both proud and slightly embarrassed.

  “My gear sounded like shit, to be honest. I’ve played crap gear for most of my life and for a very long time with Freak Kitchen as well. Everybody was sponsored on Spanking Hour but me: Christian uses CRAP. When we went on tour, I didn’t even have a case for my bass guitar. My bass sound on the first two Freak Kitchen albums is just the Ibanez bass plugged into some sort of pre-amp. I don’t think we even used a proper microphone. My bandmates have always been annoyed by my lack of interest in gear. Because I played the cheap stuff, it tended to be a bit unreliable. I never used any pedals or even a tuner which frustrated them no end. Perhaps my choice of gear shows that I’m not the most orderly of people, I don’t know. But I am very careful at work, for instance. I take care of my children the best I can. But I’m hardly the master of details. I try to keep my home fairly tidy, but when it comes to cars and things, I’m not that bothered. It works when it works and when it doesn’t, well, then you’ll just have to fix it, haven’t you? I don’t like to show off. I’m not materialistic like that. I’m quite content with the simple stuff. I don’t understand people who buy a custom bass for insane amounts of money.”

  The Fortune-Failure Paradox

  WHEN FREAK KITCHEN RETURNED to Gothenburg from the tour in the autumn of 1995, they started recording Spanking Hour right away. Everybody was excited about the coming recording and the future looked bright. IA had written plenty of material on the road.

  “A lot of the lyrics, not just ‘Jerk’, on Spanking Hour deal with stuff I thought about during that tour. I wrote ‘Burning Bridges’ in Wurzburg while my bandmates were out with some chick. It was October, but it was so bloody hot, like summer, and turned into a freezing cold storm in a matter of hours. Perhaps that’s when my interest in the environment began. ‘Cos I refuse to sit here on my ass and drown/When we burn
our bridges down.’ When we eventually recorded the album, Joakim and Christian had alternative versions of the songs with lyrics about diarrhoea.”

  One of the most talked about tracks is “Lisa”, which was inspired by the Canadian singer Lisa Dalbello. Luckily the key word here is “inspired” – the menacing lyrics deal with an imaginary Lisa.

  “I wrote ‘Lisa’ in my dad’s basement because I was wondering why Lisa Dalbello hadn’t recorded an album for a while. She has since discovered our song when she was googling herself, and we’ve had quite a long conversation over e-mail. Most of this track, except for the bass, I did on my own, but I remember that Joakim wasn’t at all pleased that I used a drum machine.”

  IA always had a knack for writing music wherever he happened to be at the time. His creativity isn’t dependent upon geographical circumstances, and the strangest places have seen him sweating away, making music.

  “I did a demo of ‘Taste My Fist’ in a sauna in Rättvik. I was staying in a small cottage for a week and had brought a drum machine, and had to try to calculate how many percent faster I needed to program it in order for it to play the beat I wanted. I listened a lot to Soundgarden when I wrote that song.”

  The period of writing, rehearsing and recording almost intertwined, and this was the first time IA used the digital audio workstation Session 8. Initially, he was unsure of the reliability of it, as he was used to reel-to-reel recordings, but he had eight channels at his disposal. One of IA’s main reasons for using the Session 8 was that he didn’t want to be in the hands of a bored sound engineer. Torben was nominally the producer, but in reality he was rather just overseeing the production. The drum tracks were recorded in the foyer of the National Danish Radio building and all those involved were very satisfied with the drum sound. After that, in early 1996, a period followed where IA and Christian recorded the rest in Torben’s basement, and IA acknowledges that he has learned a great deal from him. Joakim, however, didn’t stick around for all of the recording.