Page 33 - Black Velvet Issue 101

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rock harder, but we shine brighter.’ And the band, we make the rules’. And I think
that kinda started some kind of motto that our followers and our fans have kind of
we don’t have guilty pleasures, we just learned, through following us over the
have pleasures. And this is the first time years, that we might just do anything.
we’ve really let go of every single block- We’ll do whatever we feel like. Whatever
ade in our way, sound-wise, and said, we think is cool at the moment. Looking
‘Let’s use the whole arsenal, no breaks, back, some of those ideas were more or
no shame, let’s just go all in’.” less cool, some of them might not have
All in they have definitely gone, in par- worked out, some of them worked way be-
ticular with ‘Anna-Leigh’, which some yond our expectations, but I think that’s
have noted could be misheard as being a the only way to go about it. I think also our
slightly rude-sounding word – where oth- label and our management have been with
ers may go ‘all in’! ‘Anna-Leigh’ was cho- us long enough to know they can’t tell us
sen as the second single from ‘Club what to do. I think they’ve given up. They
Majesty’, released prior to the album. tried for long enough. But somehow it al-
“We put out ‘Anna-Leigh’, that’s ways seems to work out. The band is still
fuckin’ bold!” laughs Adam when we ask growing so we must be doing something
what bold things they’ve done on this right.”
album. “I know a lot of bands that would The video for ‘Anna-Leigh’ carries an
have made a complete U-turn when they 80s vibe, which matches the sound of the
arrived at that chorus. In our case, there song, while other songs on the album also
was no question. We just wrote the cho- show influences of sounds from the 70s,
rus. For one split second, we went, ‘Can 80s and 90s.
we really do this?’ and then sanity kicked Adam says, “We were all born in the
in and we went ‘Of course we can; we’re 80s so we have some kind of weird nos-

talgic thing where, whenever something oyal Republic are a real feel-good rhymed reasonably and I just went to town
big, whenever there’s a big snare drum or Rpop/rock ‘n’ roll band. The four- with it, and that was a lot of fun. I think the
a big, fat synthesizer or a chorus or guitars, piece (Adam is joined by Hannes Irengård last verse was ‘Your love is like a fire…’ I
that sparks something in us, and we like on lead guitar and backing vocals, Jonas can’t remember now… ‘Take me to your
that feeling a lot. The people who worked in Almén on bass guitar and backing vocals, church, and I’ll make your choir sing it’…
music in the 80s, they hate that stuff, most and Per Andreasson on drums and backing ‘Spread it like you mean it, make half a man
of them… The producers, they’d go ‘No, vocals) don’t claim to write meaningful a whole’ is also funny. It was spread the fire,
you can’t do that. That’s so eighties,’ and lyrics and tell us not to read into them too the fire of love, not anything else. It’s full of
we’d go, ‘Yes, isn’t it? Isn’t it cool?’ We love much. If you do, you are likely to laugh out these things that can kind of be interpreted
it. So it just makes sense that we… and loud. But that’s not a bad thing though, in a different way depending on how nasty
when it came time to making the video, our right? you are. But I’m going to insist that it’s in-
director, our brilliant director I should say, Of all the songs, Adam says he had a nocent. It’s all very benign.
Leo Akesson, he did the last six videos for blast singing the song, ‘Flower Power Mad- “We never set out to be a band that
us now, he just told us, ‘Let’s do it like this,’ ness’. “Those verses are really rocking and touches people in any kind of way. We don’t
and we had no opinions on the matter, we it was very much a spur of the moment do soul-searching. We don’t deal with po-
just followed his lead.” thing,” he tells us. “We just wrote shit that litical issues. We don’t deal with social is-

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