some other big names. Blom: “Me and Göran were standing at the bar of The Scotch Of St James when Roger Daltrey sidled up to us – ‘You must be The Tages. Why? Well, the beautiful clothes!’ He told us he had a Swedish car and promptly took us outside to show it [to us]. It was a Volvo P1800, just like the one Roger Moore used in The Saint. Then we got in the car for a trip around the city.” Lagerberg: “I also remember we played this Ballroom gig with Stevie Wonder. He took my arm and felt my linen jacket: ‘Oh, that’s a nice suit you got. What colour is it?’ I told him it was yellow. ‘Oh, that’s nice.’”


On the return to Sweden, more songs were quickly needed for a new album in time for Christmas. Lagerberg: “Me and Henkan took off to his parents’ cottage in Dalarna. We wrote a bunch of songs, got high and listened to lots of folk music.” Henriksson: “Both of us really dug the music of the local folk fiddlers and tried to incorporate some of their phrases into our songs. We even got the best two fiddlers in the country, Päkkos-Gustaf and Pål-Olle, to play on the album.”


This resulted in a uniquely Swedish slant on psychedelia – quite different from the eastern sounds employed by The Beatles and others. Svensson explains, “Original sounds and gimmicks were all the rage in those years. The Beatles had already used sitars, so we didn’t. Simple as that. We figured the Swedish folk tradition was just as interesting and used all kinds of strange folk instruments.” Blom: “Man, you should have been at the session for ‘Have You Seen Your Brother Lately’. These old men sitting there blowing into these pieces of wood that looked as if they’d been torn from a bush or something. What a sight!”


Clearly the most ambitious album ever made by a Swedish band thus far, Studio showed a remarkable growth from the band’s humble beginnings. But their audience – consisting mainly of girls in their early teens – hadn’t grown with them. As a consequence, Studio didn’t sell as well as their previous albums. The more complex arrangements also prevented most of the songs from being performed live. Lagerberg: “This didn’t matter too much for us, as we’d always much preferred to play songs by others anyway. At some gigs we didn’t even play our current single! Of course, we had to do one or two of our biggest hits – other than that, it was often all covers. Nowadays, it would be daft to do a thing like that but we just did what we liked and thought nothing of it.”


One advantage for a Swedish band of singing in a different tongue was that it was easy to get away with slightly risky subjects, since neither the fans nor the people in the music business paid much attention to the lyrics. On their third album, Extra Extra, Tommy Blom had sung about peeping through a hole in the wall to watch his parents having sex in ‘Secret Room’. On Studio there was ‘She’s Having a Baby Now’ as well as ‘She’s A Man’, not surprisingly the tale of a transvestite. The latter was a collaboration between Henriksson and up-and-coming producer Bengt Palmers, who was later responsible for


the first Swedish #1 hit in the US Hot 100 in ’74 when Blue Swede scored with ‘Hooked On A Feeling’.


“Palmers was often around at Henkan’s house in Tureberg outside Stockholm, trying to learn as much as he could”, says Lagerberg. Henriksson explains, “That house belonged to my grandfather. My parents couldn’t stand my practicing the piano all day, so I had to


“Hang on, I've got wood”. Tages circa ’67, L-R: Göran Lagerberg,Tommy Blom (standing), Anders Töpel, Danne Larsson, Lasse Svensson.


move to his house instead [laughs]. He didn’t mind. When he died I had the house to myself and all kinds of people came round.” Lagerberg continues, “Whenever we were in Stockholm, recording or whatever, I always stayed at Henkan’s house. He had this Godawful couch I used to crash on.”


In March ’68, their new single, ‘There’s A Blind Man Playing Fiddle In The Street’,


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