MAGIC ROCKING NORSE I


t’s January 1967. Gothenburg beat sensation Tages [pronounced ‘tah-guess’] are riding high in the Swedish charts with ‘Miss MacBaren’, their eighth Top 10 hit. It’s


their last release for the small indie label Platina as they’ve just signed with the mighty EMI and its legendary Parlophone imprint. Everything seems to be going their way. Then, all of a sudden, drummer Tommy Tausis decides to leave.


“It came right out of the blue,” says singer and bass player Göran Lagerberg. “We had no idea.” Singer Tommy Blom agrees: “He got a very good offer from The Spotnicks replacing Jimmy Nicol – you know, the guy who toured with The Beatles in ’64 when Ringo was in hospital.” The Swedish instrumental legends – also from Gothenburg – were very much old hat at home but were still big in places like Japan and Mexico and spent most of their time there. Blom: “Tausis got more money with The Spotnicks. He had a wife and kid, you know. Our manager, Hedda, didn’t like him too much either. He thought Tausis was too quiet a fellow and that he led us down the wrong musical path – soul music. So, I guess Hedda didn’t put up too much of a fight to keep him on board.”


Besides Blom and Lagerberg, the band also consisted of guitarists Anders Töpel and Danne Larsson. Tages was formed in ’63 with original drummer Freddie Skantze and won a high-profile battle of the bands contest the following year. This was held in conjunction with the


premiere of The Beatles’ filmA Hard Day’s Night and Tages earned the title “The Beatles Of The West Coast”. The first prize was


the release of a single. Amazingly, the crudely recorded ‘Sleep Little Girl’ made #1 in Sweden in November ’64 and Tages became instant teen idols.


Never heard of TAGES? Too bad – they were one of the best European bands of the ’60s. Tages – and Blond, as they were later known – released a string of superb albums and singles that matches those of their British and American contemporaries hit for hit.


ULF HENNINGSSON talks to the band about their near-misses overseas, involvement in an ABBA-related porno film and a cameo appearance from Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was murdered in 1986.


Now – three years into their hit-making career and with their second skinsman gone – the band needed a new drummer... fast. “Hedda checked with people in the business and Lasse Svensson’s name came up,” says Lagerberg. Svensson was the drummer for The Hi-Balls, a Stockholm band that had released three singles on the Karusell label. Lasse’s face had already graced the teen magazines, mostly due to the fact that he was the younger brother of Swedish megastar Lill-Babs.


Blom: “Lasse was recommended to us. We knew who The Hi-Balls were but we had never seen them play.” Lagerberg continues, “He came straight in. No audition. No nothing. Of course, if he had been a lousy drummer, or if we hadn’t liked him as a person, he wouldn’t have lasted.” Blom adds, “Fortunately, he fit like a glove. Bloody good drummer.”


Lasse Svensson takes up the story. “My old band was going nowhere fast. Sometimes we even had to resort to playing weekend dances in the countryside for four or five hours a night. I think Karusell head Simon Brehm pushed for me. It was probably somewhere along the lines of ‘Give that sonofabitch the job. He needs work. He just stays at home draggin’ his feet behind’ [laughs]. Well, I got one day to pack my bags and then it was off to Gothenburg.”


Just one week later, Svensson was back in Stockholm at the Europafilm studio recording ‘Every Raindrop Means A Lot’, the first Tages single for Parlophone. Producer Anders “Henkan” Henriksson remembers, “Lasse came early to put new calf skins on his drums. Those beasts took a long time to get in tune. It’s so much easier nowadays.” Svensson: “Things were very different from what I was used to. They only had song fragments coming there. I remember the lyric for ‘Every Raindrop’ was written out in the corridor, while some of us were inside working on the basic track. We were just rhyming and the words mean absolutely nothing. You know, ‘One brain less for every drop’ [laughs].” Henriksson adds, “It’s just like ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’. Ask Keith Reid and


he’ll tell you he ain’t got a clue what that one means either.”


Svensson: “I wonder if bands are allowed to do that today, booking lots of studio time and then start writing the songs only once they’ve arrived there?” Lagerberg muses on how much Henriksson’s role had changed. “The funny thing was that, originally – when we recorded our first album – Platina wanted to keep the recording costs down. So, they called the distributor, EMI, to send someone down to keep an eye on things and make it more efficient. They sent Henkan and it was an instant love story. We were 18 at the time and he was just two years older – the perfect producer for us. Henkan was a classically trained musician and we learned so much from him, me especially. Things like you didn’t have to play the root note on the bass and so on. Without Henkan, Tages would have been a very different group.”


In March, the band presented a new light show as Blom explains. “I suppose Jefferson Airplane and their coloured oils were the inspiration but we took a slightly different approach. We went out and bought cartoon films and cut them up and put the frames into slides. We also used pictures of naked breasts and circles and stuff.” Svensson: “We had four projectors going on these foldable screens as well as sound effects. A hell of an effort.” Lagerberg: “The show began with the stage all blacked out. Suddenly we just stood there in our white suits – coming from out of nowhere – bathed in ultra violet light from two posts hidden behind the PA speakers on either side of the stage.” Henriksson: “It was bloody impressive to watch”.


“Clothes were always very important for us. In the early days we went to London several times to get the latest fashions ahead of the other Swedish bands but later we had our own designs made by local seamstresses”, says Lagerberg. Blom has a similar view. “I remember this lady who made these low-cut trousers. Oh, my God, how low the cut was [laughs]. We also had suede suits made for our summer tour, all in different colours. We wore them for a photo session in Carnaby


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