“I immediately sent a demo to Music For Nations, and got a letter back in about a week. I didn’t even open it, and ran shouting ‘Mummy, mummy, it’s my record deal!’ I was so sure we’d get a contract instantly. But of course, it was just the first of many letters of rejection. Thank you for your demo. While it’s well executed, it’s not what we’re looking for at the moment and blah-di-blah.”
If the record companies were going to play hard to get, the band was determined to try another way. Many less serious labels over the years have tried a version of “pay to play”, where various young bands basically pay both for the recording and their share of the pressing costs. Frozen Eyes saw an opportunity in the compilation LP The Metal Collection III released by Ebony Records, and went all the way to Yorkshire in 1987 to record their contribution, a song called “Intruder (World of Madness)”. While IA was not happy with the track itself, it did get the attention of the Danish label Bums Records.
“After the costly experience with Ebony, our next studio visit was in Denmark, to record the Frozen Eyes debut LP and it was released in 1988. To us, Iron Maiden were gods with their harmonies. We were like some perverted version of Wilson Phillips, a girl trio who constantly sang every second of every song in three harmonies. Their songs used to drive me mad: I didn’t know what to focus on. But I think our guitar parts were a bit like that.”
Frozen Eyes may not have had the best of luck with record labels, but they had started to make a name for themselves – at least locally. Edward Janson, who then wrote for fanzines and magazines and who is present day Freak Kitchen’s booking agent, noticed the band very early on.
“There was this record shop called Dolores, which specialised in metal, where IA had put up huge, homemade posters advertising the new demo by Frozen Eyes. I had read in Metal Forces that stagediving was the new trend, and the first time I saw it was at an early Frozen Eyes gig at Kortedala youth club. A year or so later, it was very much the talk of the town that a local band had released an album.”
Other hard rock and metal journalists also noticed that IA seemed to be something out of the ordinary. The journalist who has perhaps followed IA the longest is Janne Stark. IA has since played on several of Stark’s own album releases (Locomotive Breath, Mountain of Power).
“I remember hearing Frozen Eyes, and IA really came across as something new, exciting and different. Later, when he had joined the Danish band Fate, I also heard an interview where he described very vividly how he played the guitar through an old Sharp transistor radio.”
Although Frozen Eyes started getting good reviews and a positive reputation, that didn’t stop Bums Records from ripping off the young lads. They were given no money for albums sold, and Bums even re-released the album on CD later. IA struggled for a long time before he got the rights to the music and saw any money for the album. However, he was not going to let a shady record company stop him.
“We had a friend in Denmark called Tina Sörensen who worked for a major booking agency. She had realised that perhaps this Mattias chap had some potential, so when someone from EMI phoned her, looking for a guitarist, she recommended me.”
The recruiting band was called Fate. Once a more light-hearted side project involving Mercyful Fate’s Hank Shermann, the band had now found its own place in the AOR world. They had released three full length albums and worked with renowned producers such as Simon Hanhart. But the more polished hard rock of the 1980’s was quickly getting old as the decade drew to a close, and Fate lost several members.
“Fate had tried 25 other guitarists before me, all of whom had brought amazingly over-produced demos. I didn’t feel I had any decent recording to send them, so I just brought my guitar and went to drummer Bjarne T. Holm’s place and played the songs from their most recent album Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’. I played it in my own style and they loved it.”
IA got the job, and it’s one of his favourite pieces of advice: if you want to audition for a band, don’t just rely on a demo – be there in person. Show what you can do face-to-face, and then you can see what they really think of you. However, IA soon discovered that joining Fate wasn’t an instant highway to stardom. Initially, gigs were few and far between and there were no opportunities to earn any money.
“The band was in a shambles: they had just returned from an appalling European tour and the singer Jeff ‘Lox’ Limbo had lost his voice. All that was left of the band at that stage was Bjarne and the bass player Peter Steincke. To this day, I cannot understand why EMI signed Fate for another couple of albums.”
Edward Janson remembers that when IA joined Fate, the small community of hardrockers in Gothenburg were very impressed that someone of their own age had joined an international band. But things weren’t quite as fancy as they seemed: IA didn’t have the money to move to Copenhagen to begin with, and his Gothenburg dwelling was close to inhabitable.
“I lived in the most dreadful rat hole imaginable in Gothenburg and I had to start by sandpapering the scabby floor by hand. The amount of dust I inhaled has probably shortened my life by a decade; the garlands of gook I blew out of my nose for weeks after were terrifying. When I moved to Copenhagen, I lived in Nørrebro, in a basement, half a floor down with a big window facing the street. The shower cubicle was placed in the middle of the bedroom and the drain was connected to the kitchen sink, so whenever I had a shower, spaghetti and meatballs – I wasn’t yet a vegetarian – would rise from the pipes and into the shower. The water would just slowly trickle down from the shower and it took hours to even get this dense shrubbery of a hair wet. One day when I came home, the whole place was flooded.”
IA would occasionally visit Gothenburg, mostly in order to receive kind donations from his supportive family and stock up on mega packs of tortellini, but also to hang at the local rock clubs with friends.
“They thought I was a big star and that EMI had probably given me a car along with all the money rock stars get. I’ve lived in rehearsal rooms, in communes where people died of AIDS, and with a single parent dad who had five kids and a dog called King and two rabbits. That was a rough awakening from living in idyllic Mölnlycke, I can tell you. In Gothenburg, people would talk to me in that strange tone that’s a mixture of awe and jealousy and tell me how I’d joined the major league. I’d think to myself, if only you knew that I live in a damn sewer and sleep on a stinking old mattress in a concrete basement. For a while I lived in a boiler room and the boiler kept leaking vapour, and I’d lie there in my bed thinking, yeah, I’ve come so far, haven’t I. But sometimes it’s good to have people thinking you’ve made it, the appearance of success leads to real success, in a way.”
But what made it all worth it for IA, was the fact that he was able to write music, knowing it would be released on an album. His ten year older bandmates in Fate saw the potential of the young guitar hero and gave him a lot of creative space.
“I wasn’t even twenty at the time, but I was allowed a lot of input. Plenty of tracks on Scratch n’ Sniff are purely my compositions. I wrote most of the lyrics, unfortunately, but I felt I couldn’t really write exactly what I wanted. The lyrics I wrote for ‘Larry’ was the reason Chrysalis didn’t release the record in the US, because of the lines ‘live my life under a microscope/my son is gay and my wife’s on dope’. This was the early 1990’s before Kurt Cobain & Co. turned everything upside-down, and Chrysalis would have none of those provocative lyrics. But the guys in Fate were great and let me do my thing; they even encouraged my little weirdo adventures. Sure, it’s a diplomatic album when you listen to it now, and you can tell that I was a person who had been isolated with my guitar for too long. I wanted to show off everything I could do all at once and while it’s not always super-tastefully done, I was very happy with it at the time and I had worked so hard to get there.”
Learning by doing is an expression which suits IA’s experiences in Denmark perfectly. By being thrown right into the midst of major record labels and the large-scale touring that eventu
ally followed, he quickly picked up on how the music business works.
“I also learned how A&R people work. I was so provoked by our guy that I threw both him and myself out of a taxi while it was rolling. I punched him black and blue and was dragged from the scene. It wasn’t the cleverest thing I’ve done, thrashing my fist two days before our first gig and having to get stitches. Well, I say stitches: the shafts of the bones were sticking out in between each knuckle, but they somehow patched me up. But what can I say, he had provoked me for hours on end, drunk as a skunk and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. As I was lying there on the ambulance stretcher with my broken fist, I was hit by the thought that I had been in Copenhagen for 18 months and worked my butt off; I had recorded an album on a major record label and it was finally time to reap the harvest…and what did I do? I threw it all away just like that. In no time at all. The day after, everybody called me and shouted at me. ‘What the hell did you do?! You can’t just grab someone by the coat sleeves and drag them out of a taxi at full speed in the middle of Copenhagen! We just had dinner with the record company for goodness’ sake! Phone him and apologize!’ So I did. I rang him up and with a trembling voice I said, ‘Hi Jan…’ and he replied ‘Hello there Mattias, thanks for a great evening yesterday!’ He didn’t remember anything after we left the party. So I asked him if he had seen my coat and he cheerily said he had it. Somehow he had collected my coat in all the hullabaloo. Amazing.”
Luckily for IA, he got out of the awkward situation, and the career with Fate took off. Although he has said that he never nurtured any yuppie-like dreams of success, he did dream of making it as a musician.
“I think I’ve always had the underdog’s twin-layered wish for both revenge and victory. One day they’ll realise what a genius I am! As a child I would dream: just you wait until I put on a big show with fire and blood and smoke here in Olofstorp’s football field and you’ll all be waiting in line to hear my music!”
Perhaps the taxi incident had deterred IA from any kind of voluntary contact with blood, but ahead of him was definitely a big show with smoke and a devoted audience. Fate played in front of 200,000 people in Tallinn, Estonia, and the gig was professionally filmed from helicopters and had all the ingredients you associate with the rock star lifestyle: limousines, champagne, guitar solos and roaring crowds. But it was all still surface polish; back in Copenhagen, IA had to make ends meet somehow.
“A guy called Benny played the keyboards in Fate for a short while and he introduced me to how to make a few extra bucks. Basically what happened was that I was given a porn film without sound, in order to create incidental music. It was locally produced, low quality porn and it was pretty embarrassing to watch. So I threw some material together on Benny’s equipment and cashed in from the film company. But worst of all was that I went to a club a while later and into the club came one of the girls from the film. At that moment I felt very much like the protected country boy that I was and barely dared to look up from my drink. I found it awkward and embarrassing.”
As with so many difficult, but ultimately manageable situations, IA’s dog years in Copenhagen strengthened his fighting spirit and taught him humility. He remembers those days with fondness – and simultaneously shudders to think about it.
“I think I learned a lot from it, but if I for one minute think about having to go back, I get terrible chest pains. Fate did a catastrophic reunion tour in Denmark in 1995 and I regret doing that. What’s dead should be allowed to rest in peace. I honestly think that here and now is the best. I’m so very thankful to be alive and well, and I want to meet all wrinkles and grey hairs with dignity. If I can’t keep up the pace, I’ll just have to become even more organised and focus on what’s truly important to me.”
When IA moved to Denmark, he had to make the decision to leave his bandmates in Frozen Eyes behind. While the other members of the band found new things to occupy themselves with, Joakim felt rootless and alone without IA. He decided to join IA in Copenhagen, because he needed his friend’s help and guidance. But IA was busy with Fate, and Joakim got the idea of applying for a programme at Musicians Institute in Los Angeles.
“When I got accepted at MI, I moved back to Gothenburg and worked for a while to get some money for my stay in the US. While IA was in Denmark and I in Sweden, I guess I just practiced drums on my own.”
Joakim studied music at MI for two years, but luckily, he also found another hero to work for. Mark Craney, who had played with Jethro Tull, Gino Vannelli and Eric Burdon, needed a drum roadie, and Joakim was over the moon.
“I worked as his drum roadie for two years, but I also studied under him. He taught me everything, and it was probably the best time of my life. My studies at MI meant that I was able to play a variety of styles in different situations, and I was so scared of playing the drums in front of an audience back then. I was terrified of playing with other critical drummers looking over my shoulder, so it was a huge challenge to me. But I learned even more from Mark Craney, and I could see him play every night, and that’s how I learn things, by observing. They also had ‘jam nights’ with two drum kits on stage, and I sometimes got to play with him, drum solos and all. I was tremendously excited and scared witless at the same time by the idea that I’d be duelling with Mark, live, in front of an audience. It was almost more than I could handle. But I grew so much as a drummer and as a person. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to bring all the insights and lessons I got there back home; I think I lost a lot of it. A horrendous thought, but that’s just the way it is. But what I learned regarding drumming technique, that’s obviously something I could make use of back home as well.”
Back in Copenhagen, IA was still getting to know the music industry, warts and all. It seems as if his so-called wild years refer more to silly, immature behaviour than to the usual rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle with drugs and groupies.
“I ran around naked in Munich, wrapped cars in toilet paper, then peed on it, and dragged people out of hotel rooms in the middle of the night. I got to ride a limousine and it took a long time before I could even watch the video footage from when we played in Tallinn, Estonia. It felt so awkward and unreal. When we recorded Scratch n’ Sniff in the tip-top studio Jailhouse in Denmark, Sisters of Mercy were recording in the room next to ours, and Andrew Eldridge used so much coke they had to come and get him by helicopter in the middle of breakfast. So for me, this was an incredible step up on the professional ladder. Yet somehow I felt that I wanted so much more. Perhaps not ‘rock star more’, but creatively. I wanted to grow my own moustache. So after two years and eight months, I quit, moved back to Gothenburg and formed Freak Kitchen.”
During Joakim’s years in Los Angeles, IA and he had corresponded through letters, as international phone calls were very expensive. IA had sent demos to Joakim, and Joakim had sent letters back which he signed with the now famous cow drawings. They ranged from simply freaky cows to cows dropping cowpats onto a caricature of IA’s face. He started to feel as if he was done with Los Angeles, and strangely enough this happened to coincide with IA moving back to Gothenburg. Joakim explains that he couldn’t learn anything else from Craney.
“I had learned all that I could learn and my head was full. It was time for me to utilize my new skills. I had given up on my short-lived idea of becoming a studio session drummer in the US; I just don’t have the talent it takes. So I returned to my idea of wanting to play in a band with guys I like, which meant returning to Sweden to play with IA and take that band to a new level. I had a work permit for the US, a car, friends, a place to live, so it was a bit of a risk I took, moving back home again. But I had heard the demos IA had made, so I knew we were onto something. So I moved back to Partille to my mother’s place, went looking for a day job, but I figured it was worth it, until we hit big. I was 23 years old then.”
Joakim never tried to hide the fact that he idolized his friend, but had matured and grown somewhat more independent during his years abroad.
“IA had something special. It wasn’t just an attitude; he could live up to it as well. I felt so inferior to him in so many ways back then. I don’t know whether or not he feels this too. I put him on a pedestal in a way, and I did the same with Mark Craney. I created such a distance between them and me, such an inequality. It wasn’t until after I came back from the States that I felt a bit more on the same page. IA was such a huge support for me, and I guess it was because I was so lost and broken inside. He was always there for me, listened to me when I needed to talk.”
IA admits to “loving the chap” and that they were best friends for a long time, but that their relationship wasn’t always straightforward. Joakim’s extreme personality made things complicated, and IA sometimes found it hard to keep up with Joakim’s ever-changing mood, behaviour and notions. His insecurities seemed easier for IA to handle.
“When he joined Frozen Eyes, he would ask me several times, ‘IA, am I a member of the band, for real?’, and I’d assure him that of course he was in the band! When he continued to ask me after having played in the band for a month, I just replied, ‘Yes, you’re in the band but if you ask me again, you’re out!’ We have very different personalities: I’m pretty much the same all the time, but he’s always searching. One day he’s only wearing hemp clothes, the next he’s a fruitarian, then smoking pot in order to find God and then going on a pilgrimage.”
From day one together, Joakim wanted – even expected – IA to make him famous. He longed for limousines and large-breasted women, and would regularly voice this when enviously reading about Bon Jovi and Van Halen in music magazines.
“Joakim didn’t have that truly genuine interest in music, and it’s a crying shame, because he is a much better song writer than you’d think. I have no idea where he is in life right now, but I sincerely hope that he’s not bitter or angry. He’s made me laugh like no one else and has done such insanely funny things you couldn’t make up if you tried. Once when I came home from school, he had hid in the chimney! I heard weird noises and couldn’t tell where they were coming from, and just when I was about to lose it completely, he poked his head out. He had biked all the way out from Gothenburg to Mölnlycke just to pull this prank on me. He was Jackass before it was a thing, but naturally so and not with the intention of filming it and showing it to people.”
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