LITMIR.BIZ

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Lund is in the far south, just across the water from Copenhagen. I had been fortunate enough to get a room in a flat with a friend from my last trip there three years before. He had recently got married and they had acquired a flat in downtown Lund. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, to be living with a married couple, especially as my friend had sobered up somewhat since my last trip there. In my previous time with him in Sweden, I had got used to taking home bottles of 100% alcohol for free from the laboratory, which warmed up as you diluted it down. It is used all day long to clean the glassware in labs and costs nothing to manufacture. Everybody was taking the stuff home and making very strong vodka and orange cocktails with it. Someone was even brewing his own gin …

      Lund is an extremely ancient town with a cathedral dating back to 1100, and the beauty to match. Lots of little cobbled streets are jam-packed with buzzing student life. I was soon out and about finding friends. I remembered two brothers from my earlier trip – one was a musician and the other a playboy. The musician had recounted many stories of his living off of music and they had stayed with me. He told me once, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens at a gig as long as the beginning and the end are great. They’re the two parts that the audience remembers.’ This had saved him many times as he accepted gigs with bands that he had never played with before. Unfortunately, the brothers had moved on and I couldn’t find either of them.

      I started busking in Copenhagen. I would take a pretty nurse from the hospital with me, whose job was to go round with a hat whilst I was playing. The prettier the nurse the more money she would collect. We would split the money between us and it was always enough to pay for the hydrofoil across from Malmö plus some duty-frees. I would hit the bars close to the port in the small streets, and there were plenty of them. Each bar would offer a drink on the house, so it didn’t take long to get extremely drunk and, of course, lost. I could never find the same bar twice.

      On one such trip we were heading back to the hydrofoil and were walking down a street called Nyhamn, when the nurse I was with noticed a body on the ground. Being a nurse, she investigated and turned it over to expose a face covered in blood. Her professional instincts took over and she went into the nearest bar to call an ambulance. The bar owner knew the body was just a drunk Swede and refused to let her use the phone as Swedes are known to abuse the cheap liquor that is available in Denmark. To her credit, she persevered regardless and finally managed to summon an ambulance to help him. I wrote a terrible song after this night called, ‘Nyhamn Sandwich’.

      In the early Seventies in Sweden, there was a state-run liquor store chain called Systembolaget (it still exists today), and each Swede had a liquor allowance, which they could not exceed. Sounds like the government thought they had a problem with drink abuse to me. So at the end of each week there would be a queue in the liquor store, as everyone stocked up for a good weekend guzzle at home. There was only one of these stores in each town. No wonder they would jump on the boats at the first opportunity to get hammered in the bars of Copenhagen! And the prices were hugely inflated with tax too. Why do the Swedes have or think they have a liquor problem? It’s probably got something to do with their low self-esteem. Why do they have low self-esteem? Well, for starters they remained neutral and allowed the Nazis to trundle through on their way to Norway and Denmark in the Second World War. Doesn’t exactly endear you to your neighbours.

      Another interesting fact about Sweden. They decided to change over driving to the other side of the road and spent a year preparing for the changeover. On one particular night all the roads in the country were closed and all the signs were changed. Not one person (Persson?) broke the law and drove on that prohibited night. The whole procedure went without a hitch. Another interesting fact – when the weather is foggy everyone is warned over the radio to drive with their lights on. Sounds pretty obvious to me.

      The first time I met Kai Hansson I was sitting in the café of Lund University. I didn’t know at that first meeting what an impact this man would have on my time in Sweden. It was around midday and, as usual, I’d taken an early lunch from my research reading at the University library. This facility was in the centre of town, thankfully, and not on the newer, bleaker campus site of the University at which I was doing my degree in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong, my working environment in the laboratories was great. Dr Lindstrand was a fantastic mentor and he had made quite a name for himself in biochemistry as the discoverer of a new form of vitamin B12. The result of this was that he had a free rein to run his research team, which consisted of beautiful SKANDINAVIAN GIRLS!!!

      I didn’t get a chance to roll around in the snow or take saunas with any of them but they did love flirting with Dr Lindstrand and me, which sure brightened up the old laboratory. He would plan experiments and then the girls would set them up and run them whilst he supervised the results (when he wasn’t lecturing around the University). I had to do a lot of background reading before starting my PhD project, but I was getting distracted by the girls, who were indeed all gorgeous.

      Autumn had arrived in Lund and the many shades of the yellowing leaves mixed with the fattening sunshine had put me in a melancholic mood. The trouble was I was taking lunch earlier and earlier. The University café was an enormous place and my people-watching from a table by the entrance was becoming an enticing obsession. I had recently met another fellow called Hans Warmling there one lunchtime and had gone back to his small studio flat, a minute’s walk away in a quiet courtyard, to commence my tuition in composing and songwriting. Hans was working as a male nurse at the hospital and, judging by the dozens of open reel tapes he had of songs and song ideas, was spending all of his waking hours when not at work playing his electric guitar into his tape recorder, which sat in the centre of the room. He was bouncing guitar track after guitar track across onto each other to create immense orchestral tapestries, all without any voices. He’d been in the last line-up of the group the Spotniks, which impressed me. I remembered seeing footage of them years before stepping off planes in their spacesuits, playing guitars linked by radio to the venue where they were due to play that night.

      Hans had the idea that I could write and sing the words in English to all his five hundred unfinished songs. We would have a group together and become hugely successful. I liked Hans for his sincerity and enthusiasm and we very quickly became firm friends. But his confidence in my writing abilities had taken me a bit by surprise, as I’d never written a proper song before, and I was thinking along other lines …

      At this time, I also met two other characters who would prove central to my time in Sweden. Lund at the time had become a centre for US draft dodgers offered amnesty from prosecution, a veritable safe haven for those refusing to go to Vietnam. The Swedish government were not only providing them and their families with accommodation, but those without a trade were being supported on social security. I had met two of them called Gyrth Godwin and Chicago Mike at the University café on one of my ‘breaks’ from the library. Gyrth was from Washington State, above Oregon on the US west coast, and he and his wife Cindy plus child were making a life for themselves in Lund. Mike also had a wife and child with him. Gyrth was a playful, Tolkienesque character full of poetry and a terrific wanderlust. He’d travelled on freight trains all over the States and had reams of poetry that he’d compulsively written, and was still writing when we met. He’d also lost a couple of teeth along the way. He seemed to be much better suited than me to writing the lyrics that the ex-Spotnik Hans needed for his music, so I talked Hans into entertaining the idea.

      Initially, Gyrth’s and Hans’ personalities were completely opposed and their sharp corners jarred repeatedly. However, they slowly started to marry the music and lyrics together until the edges had been smoothed down. The trouble was that Gyrth was not much of a singer. His pitch was atrocious, his timing was almost as bad, but his enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll matched Hans’ and therefore I was happy to be playing second guitar behind Hans and to sing backing vocals. Chicago Mike, meanwhile, was a drummer of sorts: he had a drum kit and lots of experience playing ‘jazz’, which meant that he would occasionally drop a beat from a bar without telling anyone.

      Another friend of mine, Jan Knutsson, had volunteered to learn to play the bass and we had started jamming the Hans/Gyrth songs in the basement room of a small detached house that Jan and I rented outside Lund in Södra Sandby. The landlord was a university lecturer who lived in the house next door. Hans persuaded me to buy a Fender Telecaster on

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