Street in London and suddenly all these boutique owners came running out of their shops going ‘What’s this? Who made these? Where can we get them?’ [laughs].” Svensson adds: “Only problem was they were so damn warm. I lost several pounds each gig from all the sweating.”


The recording sessions continued and their fourth album, Contrast, appeared in April ’67 in a suitably colourful sleeve. Svensson: “It was made by this guy named Banana. I remember we all went to his pad near the legendary concert venue Nalen.” Blom continues: “These days he’s a renowned artist. The back cover is pretty cool too. He illustrated every track with a small drawing.” Despite their manager’s dislike of the style, Contrast included two soul tracks, ‘House On Soul Hill’ and a cover of Rufus Thomas’ ‘Sister’s Got A Boyfriend’. The latter with a very gritty vocal performance from Lagerberg. “I actually tried the old trick of eating chalk for that one,” chuckles Lagerberg. “I don’t know whether it really affected my voice or not and, as I had expected, the chalk had no taste at all.”


Taking a cue from Revolver and Pet Sounds, the new album contained some adventurous band originals, none more spaced out than ‘You’re Too Incomprehensible’. This track was the result of an unlikely collaboration between Henriksson and troubadour Thorstein Bergman. Bergman recalls, “I was not associated with the pop scene at all, so we used pseudonyms. He was Akon and I was Thokon – A for Anders and Tho for Thorstein. I always wrote the words first then Henkan put music to my lyrics, kinda like Elton John and Bernie Taupin did later.”


Henriksson: “In the studio there were usually seven of us: me, the five Tages lads and our trusty engineer, Björn Almstedt. We were often working around the clock and poor Björn didn’t have time to see his children. They were sent to my mum and dad, who babysat them [laughs]. At the time, we had only three – and later, four – tracks to work with, so there was lots of tape splicing going on. On ‘Treat Her Like A Lady’, Björn dropped a tape snippet on the floor and accidentally put it back together backwards.” Svensson: “When he played it back there was this sudden slurping sound. ‘What the hell was that?’ It sounded really cool. Perfect.”


‘Treat Her Like A Lady’ was a big hit in the late summer of ’67. Before that, they had also scored with ‘I’m Going Out’. Both singles were originally recorded by American girl singer Leslie Gore. Henriksson explains. “EMI had limited office space, so I had my desk in the house of their publishing division instead. The boss there was an accordion freak and didn’t care much for pop music. In a cupboard I found box upon box of foreign singles he’d passed on. I managed to find several hits for my acts among these neglected songs, including those two for Tages.”


Breaking in England was always high on 32


Tages’ agenda. A year earlier, in March ’66, they had boarded the ferry from Gothenburg in high spirits for a British tour, confident they would take the Brits by storm. Then things went horribly wrong as Lagerberg explains. “The British authorities wouldn’t even let us into the country [laughs]. The tour was organised by the son of our Swedish booking agent trying to prove himself in daddy’s firm and he’d forgotten to fix our work permits.


“It took several days before we were let in but we had to leave all our gear on the boat and


minors, you see. So, we definitively had to be more careful. In the end, all that happened to Tommy was that he lost the starring role in a movie”. That film was to have been directed by Bo Widerberg, who’d just enjoyed an international smash with Elvira Madigan. Ironically, in his new film, Pistol, Blom was meant to portray a notorious criminal. The whole project was abandoned after just a week of filming.


The long-awaited British tour finally kicked off in October but was not entirely without setbacks, though. Top Of The Pops declined to show the six-minute film clip for ‘Treat Her Like A Lady’ made by Peter Goldmann, famous for making the ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ clips for The Beatles. Also, the single ‘She’s Having A Baby Now’ had been banned by the BBC due its to lyrics about teenage childbirth out of wedlock.


Svensson: “Talk about dubious morals. Hell, there was nothing dirty about that one! Anyway, the tour was a wonderful experience. Loads of fun. Sometimes there was even teen hysteria thanks to big build- ups in some of the local papers. We played everywhere. Tiny places and bigger halls. In the countryside as well as London clubs. You name it.” Lagerberg: “We did a very good show at The Marquee, where the place was packed. The tour also took us to Ireland and Wales.”


“The British authorities wouldn’t even let us into the country [laughs]. The tour was organised by the son of our Swedish booking agent trying to prove himself in daddy’s firm and he’d forgotten to fix our work permits.”


all gigs were cancelled. In those days, British tours were very difficult for Swedish bands. There had to be a British band touring in Sweden in exchange for every Swedish band working in Britain. This, the young man had also forgotten to arrange.” The British debacle was headline news at home and Swedish Cabinet Minister Olof Palme even tried to intervene, to no avail.


More headlines followed in the summer of ’67. In the wake of Paul McCartney’s admittance to having taken LSD, the Swedish press, naturally, looked for a similar story. Perhaps a bit naively, Tommy Blom admitted to smoking pot, adding he didn’t care for it much. It was enough to create public outrage and even a prosecution against Blom. Lagerberg explains, “It was still a fairly innocent time. There were not many drugs on the Swedish pop scene yet. Still, incidents like this made our parents very angry. They were adamant that we shouldn’t use drugs, or they would break the band up. They owned shares in our management company – we were still


A highlight of the tour was a recording session at Abbey Road with Henriksson flown in from Stockholm to produce. Lagerberg remembers, “Abbey Road was fantastic. As often was the case, we had no songs ready, so Henkan and I made up ‘Like A Woman’ in the hotel room the night before the session. I finished the lyric after the basic track was done.”


Svensson: “I used the studio’s drum kit, whoever owned that. It sounded like crap but the guys told me to come and listen in the control room. When I heard the playback my jaw dropped. Amazing power! Those engineers definitely knew what they were doing.” Henriksson agrees, “Instant Sgt Pepper, you know. They’d obviously gained an enormous amount of experience from all the bands recording there and had experimented a lot with mic settings and so on.”


Svensson: “Later, we had the opportunity to record at Olympic Studios as well. That was the first time we used an eight-track. We were there during office hours and The Rolling Stones came in at night.” Henriksson: “Yeah, one could be standing outside on Castle North and get as high as a kite just from breathing the air coming from the ventilation duct [laughs].” Svensson adds, “One night they even managed to set the studio on fire and we couldn’t use it, so we quickly went to Abbey Road. They let us in on the condition that if ‘the boys’ showed up we would be thrown out. Sure enough ‘the boys’ came. Who were they? The Beatles, of course!”


The band also found time to socialise with


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