Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  Joakim even made the national headlines, when he interrupted the Swedish entertainment programme Bell & Bom in 1985. He gate-crashed a scene where a diving challenge was being filmed, and had to be dragged out of the swimming pool before the broadcast could continue. What the famous TV-show host Ingvar Oldsberg didn’t know was that Joakim had phoned the TV-station and threatened to “bomb” the place. There were no policemen or security, and most likely Joakim had only meant that he would make an uninvited interruption of the show. It is perhaps difficult to explain that this was met with nothing but a good-humoured attitude back in the 1980’s, when bomb threats nowadays are most definitely a real worry. IA was amused by Joakim’s antics, but they had a more disturbing side as well.

  “Joakim didn’t drink alcohol, but was naturally uninhibited. One midsummer, he bought an entire box of yoghurt cartons, poured it over himself and pretended to be a ghost. I thought that was amazingly funny. Something less funny happened when I was talking to someone, and suddenly I felt this weird warm sensation on my jeans – it’s Joakim pissing on me. Not to mention one other time when he took a dump right into his own hand and started throwing faeces around. I laughed about it at the time, but these kinds of things kept happening.”

  While IA lived in Denmark and Joakim in Los Angeles, Christian was playing sleaze and glam rock back home in Gothenburg. However, he was slowly growing tired of the extreme shallowness that was typical for the scene.

  “My band Speed had changed name to Lazy Bones. We used to rehearse in an old barn in Härryda, and wore pink spandex and had tousled hair. Thomas Silver and Jocke Berg, who went on to form Hardcore Superstar, were also in that band. We played tons of gigs and although we weren’t musically brilliant, we had lots of attitude and a good stage presence. I played with them when I was around 17-18 years old. By the end, I was so damn fed up with the shallow image, which apparently mattered a lot more than the music, so I quit the band and vowed never to play in a band again. So for a year or so, I studied marketing and I painted a lot, both traditional art and graffiti.”

  Christian tried a more sophisticated attitude, travelled to Copenhagen to visit art galleries, and played Backgammon with his friends. He had been in a gang a year or so earlier, where not all kids made it out alive because of drugs and crime, so it’s easy to understand his parents’ relief. Then, out of the blue, someone told him that IA was starting a new band, and apparently he had tried to get hold of Christian for several weeks.

  “Frozen Eyes had been kind of household gods to Lazy Bones, so I was very aware of who IA and Joakim were. The prospect of being in a band with them got me all jittery and excited, and I instantly re-evaluated my decision to abandon music. We had all heard these crazy rumours of how IA had learned how to play the guitar in just a week’s time, how he had used all sorts of weird stuff to play with despite his young age, and so on.”

  IA had been made up to be some sort of semi-mythical persona in Gothenburg during the late 1980’s and early 90’s, and the word was that all he had done, was to grab a guitar and he could play it like a professional from day one.

  “That was not the case, I discovered recently and painfully, when I listened to my old cassettes from the mid-80’s! Anyway, I had tried to get hold of Christian for two weeks, but when somebody finally picked up the phone, it turned out that I had been ringing the Finnish Association in Gothenburg, because that bloody Thomas Silver had given me the wrong number. I had been to a Lazy Bones gig, and Christian looked so cool with his cut-off jeans jacket on top of a leather jacket. He was constantly smoking and had such a badass, confident attitude. I struck me afterwards that I didn’t really know if he was a good bass player, but I knew I wanted him in my band.”

  The two young musicians – IA 22 years and Christian 19 – met up at Epok, a café in central Gothenburg where the hardrockers and metalheads used to hang and savour a cup of coffee for hours on end. It didn’t take the boys long to realise that they were indeed going to form a band.

  “We started making some broad outlines…or rather, IA made some broad outlines and strategic plans. He had decided that we were going to form a band where we took turns singing. I thought that sounded awesome, because I enjoyed singing backing vocals and could very well imagine doing more lead. But that’s not exactly what happened in the end. IA also told me that he had already decided that Joakim would be our drummer. Joakim went to MI in Los Angeles, and back in those days, that really meant something and increased your credibility in the scene.”

  Joakim was on his way home from Los Angeles, and when IA picked him up from Landvetter Airport, he simply told Joakim that Christian would be the bassist and that the band would be called Freak Kitchen. Joakim was not impressed.

  “I demanded that Leif Larsson from Frozen Eyes should be our bass player. I had a very negative attitude towards the whole thing. I wasn’t at all keen on getting to know a new person and his style of playing. In the end, Christian and I turned out great pals, but I don’t even remember the first time we met. Perhaps he didn’t make the same impression as IA did.”

  IA had already recorded demos for “One Last Dance”, “Heal Me” and “Part Time Rebel”. He also did a demo of “See You in Pittsburgh” with the help of Leif Larsson. The songs had a distinct touch of glam rock, and had partly been written with Fate in mind. Leif Larsson’s style of playing was a lot more technical, and Christian had to strain every nerve to keep up: he had the groove and the beat, but he had not yet mastered the more dexterous elements that IA felt Freak Kitchen needed.

  “Christian could always play, no question about that, and he soon got the hang of how I wanted Freak Kitchen to sound. We found a rehearsal room which had a toilet with the worst possible stench, but we could play as loudly as we wanted. And boy did we want to play loud. ‘Appetizer’ was the first song we ever rehearsed, but I remember that when we played ‘Raw’ for the first time, I thought that no other band could ever have sounded as hard as we did.”

  Around the time when Freak Kitchen first started making music, grunge bands such as Nirvana and Alice in Chains and hard rock and heavy metal bands such as Metallica and Mötley Crüe were pulverising the late 1980’s polished music scene. Perhaps it was just convenient to compare Freak Kitchen with Metallica, which many of the first reviewers did, but the fact of the matter is that IA himself has said that Freak Kitchen would never have sounded the way they did without Metallica. In fact, as a short-lived hobby, IA and Joakim had a Metallica cover band: Järnia. You would have to be a truly devoted music fan to have witnessed this quartet, and Edward Janson remembers seeing them play at a shabby, temporary underground club in Gothenburg, around 1992. The Gothenburg humour comes across in the band name, and IA explains:

  “Järnia is a chain of hardware shops in Sweden and loosely translates to ‘Metal-ia’. I played the drums, Joakim sang, Leif Larsson, the bassist in Frozen Eyes, played the guitar and a guitarist called Stefan played the bass. You get the picture: everybody traded instruments. It was just something we briefly did for fun before Freak Kitchen took off, but it sounded very good and there are bootlegs of our shows out there.”

  Around the time Freak Kitchen formed, the trendier side of the Swedish hard rock scene was greatly influenced by funk and rap. Big names were Mental Hippie Blood, Skintrade and Clawfinger, who all faded pretty quickly into varying degrees of obscurity. According to IA, it’s been a conscious decision to avoid the exposure trap, but instead to work towards gaining a steady fan base. But initially, the road was rocky.

  “We played some godawful gigs in the beginning. For instance, we drove to Finland in my old Mazda, packed it so full it was probably not even legal, and took the ferry. I don’t even know what we were doing there; nobody knew who we were. My singing was dreadful throughout the entire gig.”

  A member from the Finnish rockabilly band Hurriganes had invited the boys to play a rather flashy venue, and Freak Kitchen could probably have won a few new fans over, thanks to Christian�
��s willingness to give it his all, and IA’s ability to talk to the audience. There was just one problem – all the people left. Christian remembers the gig with a certain dread.

  “To begin with, our sleeping quarters were a disgusting old office with a couple of mattresses on the floor. Not that it’s the last time we’ve slept on the floor, but anyway, when we arrived at the fancy venue, things looked brighter. We did a soundcheck which sounded pretty decent, and then we hung backstage until it was time to get on stage. When we entered the stage, the audience consisted of a small group of people who had no idea who we were. When we started playing, they all left.”

  IA talks of the Finnish gig as a crossroads. The experience was so disheartening; it made him decide that if the next gig was going to be as dreadful, he would quit singing.

  “I had a few months to think it over, and that was really excruciating. Our next gig was in Kolding, Denmark, at Knud’s Garage. Luckily, that gig was totally kickass, and the pieces sort of fell into place. That’s also when we met Torben Schmidt as a band for the first time.”

  Torben Schmidt of Thunderstruck Productions, Freak Kitchen’s record label, has seen the band evolve like nobody else apart from close family. He rose to fame in the 1980’s with his AOR band Skagarack, where he was the singer and songwriter. He had first met IA in Copenhagen in 1991, where he had tried to get IA to play on his solo album A Bit on the Side. IA tells the story of how his contempt for major record companies was first sparked.

  “I was asked to record a guitar solo duel with Kee Marcello, who was really happening with Europe at the time, and it was something I was dying to do. But EMI rather churlishly said, ‘We would rather you didn’t’, and that was that. All because Torben’s album was going to be released on Epic. Bloody hell, I thought, I really want to do this! Surely I should be able to decide for myself? Torben is such a cool guy, and what harm would one guitar solo do?”

  The next time IA and Torben met was when they were both nominated for the Danish Grammy Award for hard rock, which Torben won. IA subsequently quit Fate, and Torben asked him to join Skagarack, but IA I wasn’t keen on joining someone else’s band again. What he was looking for now, was for someone to coach him in legal matters, and as it happened, Torben was turning his publishing company into a proper record company.

  “IA and I stayed in touch when he moved back to Gothenburg, and he sent me a demo with three songs on a cassette tape. I still vividly remember playing the cassette in my car, and the first song was ‘Appetizer’. I couldn’t quite figure out how the hell he was playing what he was playing, but it was so good and I just thought to myself: I have to work with this guy!”

  This meant that Freak Kitchen now had a record label, and that they were going to record their debut album. It was finally happening.

  Next Stop: Stardom

  SPIRITS WERE HIGH, and despite the fact that Freak Kitchen still had to endure some rather foul sleeping arrangements, they felt that they were really going places. To Joakim it meant a lot knowing that they had an album recording – at someone else’s expense! – ahead of them, and Christian recalls that not even a tremendously shabby place in Århus could bring them down.

  “We played Lucy’s Rock Joint, and the actual gig was fantastic. When we got there, it turned out that they hadn’t finished building the place yet; there wasn’t even lighting! The entire light source was a candelabrum and a fluorescent tube light. When it was time to go to bed, naturally we assumed we’d get at least some sort of hotel room, but they had arranged for us to sleep in what looked like a dope den. It actually reminded me of a really gross institutional kitchen, and we were told that the premises had been closed for over a year, due to a girl having been murdered there.”

  Initially, IA had recorded a number of songs on his own where he played the drums. A few other songs, “Raw”, “Dig Me Out” and “Now You Know”, had been recorded by the band as a whole in a Gothenburg studio. “The New Part” was written before Freak Kitchen formed, and originated from a demo IA had recorded in Spökstudion. “The Healthy Man” was the last song to complete the track list. Christian thinks back on how they met up at Jensen’s Bøfhus to discuss the matter.

  “At first we thought that we were recording another demo, but when we found out that Torben wanted us to record an entire album eventually, we had to exclude a couple of songs, for instance ‘Rubber Love’, that we knew wouldn’t suit the album.”

  After IA had watched the Harrison Ford film Frantic, he wrote “Hollow” in just ten minutes, and the song was also heavily influenced by the old disco tune “I’ve Seen this Face Before” by Grace Jones.

  “I felt we needed a song like that, but naturally I had to write it in 7/4, so that plan failed completely. ‘See You in Pittsburgh’ is based on a film too, Cronenberg’s Videodrome, but that track took me about a hundred years to finish. I wrote ‘Paperdance’ just to please the Japanese, in major pentatonic scale so it would sound Asian. Joakim really liked ‘Are You for Real?’, but I think it’s a bit cliché now. And my sleazy scream in the intro, it’s simply not me, although I’m sure I thought so at the time. The sneeze in ‘The Healthy Man’ was unintentional, but we kept it because of the perfect timing with the lyrics.”

  Although both IA and Joakim had recorded albums before, the trio felt slightly out of their depth. This was also the first time IA recorded vocals in a proper studio, Cello studios in Aalborg, Denmark, run by Torben’s old band mate from Skagarack. It was a nice studio, but neither the band nor the record company had any money, which meant that they had to stay at a very basic bed and breakfast. IA had to share a bed with Torben, head to tail, and the recordings weren’t going smoothly either.

  “We had some real trouble when we first tried to record vocals. The sound engineer told me to try the mic out and just improvise some singing so he could adjust the levels. I pretty much screamed my head off and when it was time to press record, I had lost any kind of confidence I might have had. We didn’t keep one single note from that recording. It was such a bloody mess, because we were so inexperienced. I felt so uptight.”

  However, IA wasn’t the only one who was feeling frustrated. Joakim was meant to go back to Gothenburg to work when IA and Christian did vocals, but his girlfriend broke up with him, which upset him to the point where he couldn’t stand being alone: he joined his friends in Aalborg again. IA explains that Joakim was soon back to his old self.

  “He found and ate a three-day-old hamburger Torben had thrown in the trash. Anyway, Torben was shopping for a licensing deal in Japan using these three songs, and JVC were interested, so we recorded some more material.”

  After that, things happened quickly and Torben booked studio time in one of Scandinavia’s most prestigious studios: Puk Studios in Denmark. Christian had recorded a demo with his old band Speed, but had no experience in recording an entire full length album. He was impressed with the luxurious surroundings.

  “It was this huge complex with fancy apartments and free beer everywhere and they had people who served you food. You really felt like a rock star. But I also remember that this was the first time Joakim and I felt like we were being treated differently from IA. Torben had hired Michael Ilbert who was a well-known producer, and IA got to stay at Puk for two weeks whereas Joakim and I only got to stay for one week. There wasn’t enough money for the whole band to stay, so therefore we had to leave early.”

  Torben explains that it was a request from the mix engineer not to have the whole band present during the mix session, and that this is quite common. Joakim and Christian simply had to trust IA to make the right decisions musically. Christian says that they didn’t really have much of a choice.

  “I think we trusted him at the time. We hadn’t had the opportunity to think about it because we were given no time to. This kind of situation was repeated many times over the coming years. In the beginning, none of us had ever thought of Freak Kitchen as IA’s project; sure IA was a great guitarist, but the band was
something we had started together. So this was a pretty significant situation – and it happened as early as during our first year together. Looking back, it’s not difficult to understand that things like this were eating away at us sub-consciously throughout the rest of our time in the band. Joakim and I have talked about this many times afterwards, how we were forced to go back home, kind of dismissed.”

  But they soon laughed it off, and concentrated on the fact that they were now going to make an album cover and a video. The cover illustration is actually a close-up of an old jacket IA had, and Christian and Joakim were responsible for the video for “Raw”.

  “Joakim and I had already practised video production by shooting a video clip for the demo version of ‘See You in Pittsburgh’, but this time we took a crash course in media production and had access to a 16-millimeter camera. The video was shot in a military barracks at the LV6 Air Defence Regiment. We also shot a video for ‘Hollow’, but I don’t think anyone outside the band has seen it. It’s such a dreadful video. It was supposed to come across as ‘rough’, but it gives you a worse sense of nausea than Blair Witch Project. It pictures IA lying in a bed of flowers, on a windy beach and in some bloody train depot.”

  When it came to promotional pictures, the trio were sprawling in all sorts of directions. No sense of fashion, no sense of image, no sense of what hard rock bands were supposed to look like. IA thought it would be funny to make the “kitchen” connection.