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| Mattias Solo Gig (1998) |
December performance in K-Bar club
(by David Haglund) |
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July 3rdMattias Lindblom did a surprise solo gig in week 24 at the K Bar in Stockholm. He did live cover versions of some of his favorite tunes, Japan's "Night Porter", Dive's "Captain Nemo", Simply Red's 'For Your Babies', and other songs. (Japan featured Mattias favourite singer, David Sylvain. Dive was a Swedish synthpop duo that had a hit with the song later recorded by Sarah Brightman.) This gave fuel to speculations that Mattias was going solo and leaving Vacuum. Girls' magazine Vecko-Revyn even wrote that in an issue and was given a good telling-off by Mattias...
December 1st, which was the first Advent Sunday, Mattias Lindblom did another solo gig at the K bar in Stockholm. He was accompanied by Anders Wickstrom of Peace, Love & Pitbulls on electric guitar and backing vocals. Mattias was some sort of celebrity host, but seemed to know most of the people there, including former porn queen Ylva-Maria Thompson, personally. Me and my friends, Angelica, Stefan, Csaba and Fred, were among the few fans there, even though most of us had met Mattias a few times before. Apart from doing two sets of songs, Mattias sat in an armchair and read aloud from two Swedish children's books about Bert. More than once, Mattias got off track and started to laugh uncontrollably.
Set One:
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Glycerine (Bush)
- I Call Your Name (A-ha)
- Ship of Fools (Erasure)
- Prayer for the Dying (Seal)
- Damage (David Sylvain)
Set Two:
- Turn My Head (Live)
- I'm Ready (Bryan Adams)
- Karma Police (Radiohead)
- One Headlight (Wallflower)
- The Drugs Don't Work (The Verve)
Many of the songs were very well suited for the stuffy basement in which they were played. They felt very intimate, bordering on acoustic. It was great to hear so many good songs sung by such a good vocalist. Personally, I was especially thrilled by the A-ha song. Mattias got off trach two times here as well; in "Ship of Fools", he had trouble finding the key, and then in another song in the second set, he started over due to some noise in the speakers.
Afterwards, Mattias was very sociable and talked to us for quite some time. In fact, we were the only ones left in the bar after 22:00. A lot of pictures were taken (that will appear on this site at a later date). Mattias explained that that was what being an artist was all about for him: meeting people and performing to them. We learned several new things. For instance, VacuumNet may go through several changes next year. The final configuration of the new Vacuum album, Seance at the Chaebol, is far from finished. At the time of writing, Vacuum is still in the studio. "Icaros" is being remixed a second time, the first mix was too much "Backstreet Boys". This probably means another delay.
I also met and talked to the mysterious Anders Wollbeck for the first time! Yes, him, the fourth member of Vacuum, the songwriter and producer Wollbeck. He was very pleasant to talk to and looked remarkably young. For someone who has been working with Alexander for the last 9 years, I expected him to be older. We talked a bit about old and future projects and Anders told me how he and Alexander first met at SweMix's crawfish party. They hit it off right away and when they later met for coffee, they wrote "Ride the Bullet" in 5 minutes!
All in all, a fabulous evening, wouldn't you say?
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Written by David Haglund (VacuumNet)
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