(from Melody Maker - December 2, 1995 - page 35 - written by Simon Price)


If you like St. Etienne, Stereolab and Dubstar, you'll love The Cardigans, Sweden's leading sugar-pop weirdos. Simon Price hails their happy sad music. Knit-wit: Jamie Reid.

Ah, The Cardigans. Aren't you the happiest band on earth? "I don't think that we're any happier than any other band."

This is Nina Persson. Nina has been compared to : Honor Blackman, Astrud Gilberto, Nancy Sinatra, Jane Birkin, Doris Day, Mary Quant, Sandie Shaw, and Lady Penelope off "Thunderbirds."

"Every song has some sort of a melancholic feeling." This is Magnus. He supports Tottenham Hotspur.

Nina: "Even the songs which are naive and really happy are exaggerated. Because nobody's that happy". And she sighs.

The Cardigans are: fur collars pulled tight against the snow, a wistful glance over the shoulder, Super 8 film faded from Technicolor to watercolour, the only car on the road as the sun rises over the Cote D'Azur, photographs torn petulantly into quarters and left in the ashtray. The adjective being happysad.

I'm sitting in a darkened tour bus, on the Rue De Voltaire in Paris' troisieme. (It's the exact same spot where, one year ago, I interviewed Richey Edwards. Which is freaking me out to no small degree.)

"Sweden are quite melancholic compared to Italian people," says Peter, who writes the songs. "Maybe because the sun is dark. And there are so few people that sometimes you're on your own a lot."

Maybe it's the Cardigans' isolation from the swing of things which has helped them sound so attractively alien.

Nina: "Actually, there's always been a splendid music scene in Sweden."

"But we're quite amazed that Melody Maker are interested in us. Even two years ago, if a Swedish band got a review at all, it'd be..."

Magnus: "Polar bears, saunas, suicide..."

Nina: "...Abba, Ace of Base and free sex."

The Cardigans' music makes me think of many things, but Sweden is never one of them.

"Actually, you're wrong. In the Sixties inn Sweden, there were many serious jazz musicians who turned away from arty jazz and made music for children's TV programmes. We're influenced by that and, when Swedish people hear 'Sick And Tired', they get it."

Peter: "We grew up with those programmes. My girlfriend and I talk about nothing else."

Magnus: "I think you have quite a weird relationship."

Nina: "Sixties children's TV and Death Folk! That's The Cardigans."

"From Luxembourg to Rome, from Berlin to the moon/From Paris to Lucerne, from Athens to the sun/Our car became a spacecraft, flashing through the world..." - Daddy's Car"

Incidental thought: if we are to value anything in our pop groups as we enter the second half of the decade, it must not be the bankrupt currency of "soul" or "honest", but a certain imagination. A certain life of the mind. You know what I'm saying.

"I HATE that song!" Nina hisses. "It sounds like...a mushroom! I'm glad you like it, though." It's the line about the car becoming a spacecraft that really gets me.

Peter: "..and do we use drugs?"

Nina: "Yes, we do. Ha, ha, ha. No, we don't."

That honestly never occurred to me. It's the romance of travel that I hear.

Peter: "I've been Interrailing a lot, and I tried to find cities that rhymed. It wasn't easy. Lucerne with Moon was a bit forced." (Their favourite exotic place names are: San Marino, Monaco, Marrakesh, Caracas and London).

Nina: "Actually, being on tour is like being in a spacecraft. Because every morning you wake up in a different city. It doesn't feel like traveling. We didn't know that when we wrote that song, though..."

Magnus: "But we found the truth inside."

As children, we slide into fantasy worlds where every man with a briefcase is a spy and every flash in the sky is a spaceship. As adults, this skill is lost. To some.

Nina: "Fantasy? Any sort of art needs that."

Magnus: "Lying is cool. I lie to my girlfriend sometimes. That's a sign of a good imagination. Among other things."

Nina: "I used to lie a lot when I was younger. I'd tell stories to people about my dog, and I didn't have one." Really? I did exactly the same thing myself. "Nina is always talking about her dreams," Magnus complains. "They're...wicked."

"I am obsessed," she admits. "I tell everybody. I am convinced they are important in some way."

Magnus: "They're always about your boyfriend."

Nina: "NO! They're no!"

Nina describes a recurring nightmare involving a concrete room and a basket full of eels. Magnus insists her last dream had her "running naked with 50 black guys through Nigeria."

"Sometimes it's, 'Nina, don't take those drugs before you go to bed.'"

Nina: "My life is only interesting when I go to sleep."

Magnus: "I think you need professional help."

The instruments used on The Cardigans' marvelous longplayer, "Life" - which they think is "very emotional" and "appeals to sensitive hearts" -: glockenspiel, fingers, melodica, hands, viola, feet, triangle, pernod bottles and something called an angelpiano.

As I said once before, while most bands in these pages merely rock, The Cardigans swing. In this respect, their peers are Pizzicato Five, My Life Story, the Stereolab of "Ping Pong", and Saint Etienne (Magnus, who owns all Saint Etienne's records, is mightily impressed to be sitting next to the composer of "Memo To Pricey"). The sound, it must be said, is unmistakably SIXTIES.

But where most of today's slowcoaches are busy mining the sterile earth of Sixties ROCK - the stuff that has never had the decency to leave us alone - what make The Cardigans so oddly contemporary is their fascination with half-forgotten Sixties POP.

Magnus: "I think that trend should have been killed two years ago: Primal Scream trying to sound like The Rolling Stones. I hat rock'n'roll. I can't play rock'n'roll, and Nina can't sing it - her voice is too.."

Nina: "Beautiful. Classic."

Magnus: "We aren't an Academy Of The Sixties. I'm the oldest guy in the band and I was born in 1972, so..."

Nina: "We pick out the romantic stuff. The glamorous images. We're building our distorted fantasy version of what the Sixties were about from what we've seen on film and TV. Our own...soap opera."

To describe music as "cinematic" is Cliche #5 in the Journalist's Big Book Of Cliches. But The Cardigans (favourite films: "Return Of The Pink Panther", "Switchblade Sisters", the works of Luis Bunuel) actually set out with this effect in mind.

Peter: "The songs on 'Life' are supposed to be like abstract Sixties short cuts. When I start writing, I have the whole picture already made in my head before I've even found a chord."

At this point, somebody says the satanic word "kitsch".

Nina: "It bothers me. I think kitsch is a rude thing to say. We aren't doing this for a joke."

Magnus: "Jarvis thinks we are. He said so in a Swedish paper. It's a shame. We like Pulp. I think Jarvis should meet us, and find that we're really beautiful people."

Peter: "We're kitsch, but we're not super-kitsch. The first album we made, 'Emmerdale', was like yogurt: healthy, natural, but maybe boring. So we decided everything on 'Life' had to be over the top."

The conversation takes a few detours. First right for The Cardigans' celebrated Heavy Metal cover versions.

Nina: "We talked about doing a Lovin' Spoonful song or 'The Girl From Ipanema', but it was simply too obvious to do them."

So they did "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", "Mr. Crowley" and "The Boys Are Back In Town".

Peter: "People think we're making fun. Actually, we're saying 'Open your mind and...'"

Nina: "Free your ass! It's a... tribute."

Magnus: "Nina knows a lot of difficult English words, you know."

Nina: "'Difficult' is a good one, too."

Peter: "Your really can't argue with that. 'Difficult' is a difficult word."

Second left for being Big In Japan (alright... tonight...)

Magnus: "We've sold half a million in Japan, you know. Actually, that's an 'interesting lie'."

Nina: "I think the reason we're ultra-fashionable in Japan isn't the songs, but the picture of me on the cover. Japanese kids understand style. They appreciate things which look... perfect." (She is dressed as an ice skater. The others: a spy, a gymnast, a boxer, a U-boat captain).

Handbrake U-turn for Supporting Blur On Tour. "I think Blur think we are antisocial. They think we don't like them. Maybe they ere expecting us to be in their dressing room, hanging on their trousers: "OH, DAMON, DAMON!'".. (In the alley, a hundred Parisiennes in Chelsea shirts are chanting exactly that).

"If you see them, tell them we're really nice. We're just shy. The only time I've seen them relaxed was walking down the Reperbahn (Hamburg's world-famous sex precinct). I think it's quite difficult for them, with all these young girls screaming."

Nina: "Oh it muse be terrible."

Still no closer to pinpointing the mild but pervading weirdness at the heart of this group. Then Nina says... "Our town is the religious centre of Sweden. There are 52 different churches, factions and sects, from orthodox religions to Jehovah's Witnesses. It's called Sweden's Jerusalem. Growing up there is strange. I feel the strangeness all the time."

Malmo. Famous for losing the European Cup to Nottingham Forest in 1980, and having a funny name. "Among young religious people, our town is really hip. Nobody listens to The Smiths or The Stone Roses. It's all Christian rock. Toto. There is no scene. You have a choice: play sport, or go to church."

"The leader of the biggest church - the Pindskierke - said he wanted the whole town to be religious. How? Make the atheists leave."

She goes all misty for a moment.

"The Cardigans is my salvation."

Death Folk, Sixties kids' TV, national melancholia, satanic metal covers and Christian fundamentalism. Suddenly, it all makes sense.