Playing drums or just whacking objects in a semi random order.

The early years

I started playing drums when I was eight years old in school in Stockholm. I wasn’t very talented or good but I went every week and took my lessons and  mumbled around. In my group there were two other guys. Both of them were pretty good. Johan Persson was one of them, he had a very natural approach to rhythm and was way better than I was…But they were also pretty decent basket players so…after a couple of years both of them quit and all of a sudden I was the only one left in my drum group. My teacher was Freddie Pineda from Argentina and he spoke Swedish with a fairly heavy accent but spoke Latin-American rhythms fluently and tried to light some kind of fire in three überwhite middle class kids from Ekerö.

My first drum kit was a blue Maxwin by Pearl. I picked it up with my father and granddad a couple of weeks before Christmas and I was probably one of the happiest kids alive at the moment we put it in the trunk of the car. This kit caused me some problems over the years. I was very surprised when I played it that it didn’t sound anything like the drums I heard on albums. Drums on records sounded full, heavy and loud. My blue sparkly drum kit sounded like cardboard boxes and pieces of scrap metal hit in a semi-random fashion (as I write that I have this feeling that I would enjoy it immensely now…)
With this kit I started my first bands, did my first recordings and sounded like shit.

When I was around 12 my father realized that I had some tendencies leaning towards talent. So he found some info about music camps and he sent me off one week to Arvika to a camp for kids between 13 and 20. The had too few percussionists so I was aloud to go even though I was too young. And it was a rude awakening. I came from Ekerö and though that I was the bomb….came to Arvika and just simply bombed. It was terrible. There were tears. I thought I was great and I really really wasn’t (it has happened a couple of times since then, believe me…) Another thing was that I felt really sad and alone, and no one gave a shit. I was too young too hang with anyone. Oddly enough I got to hang out a bit with the cool kids who stayed up all night and did stupid things. I think I became somewhat of a mascot. It didn’t affect my playing, I played just as bad. After the final concert I sat in the backseat of my parents car and I decided that next year I’ll go back and show them all…and the strangest thing was that I did…
 
The orchestral years.

The camp in Arvika was a great eye-opener for classical music as well as the power of being 80-90 kids playing in a unison, symphonic fashion. When I got back home I found Nalle Holtsberg. A musical lighthouse in Stenhamra who ran several different orchestras and symphonic brass ensembles and he scooped me up and let me play. He was truly amazing in how he saw potential in kids and how they could develop and learn music. He put together ensembles in many different levels and I found myself playing in most of them after a while. I also became a lot more active in taking lessons and trying to learn stuff. Arvika had really fuelled my interest. Possibly for the wrong reasons initially ( I didn’t take my ass whopping too well) but the effect was the same. I became a lot better really fast. I had seen that there was a completely different and a lot bigger world of music outside of kommunala musikskolan in Ekerö. There were people in Ekerö that saw that I was ambitious and wanted to do something with my drumming and let me play. That was all I wanted to do, sit behind a band or an orchestra and just play. The following summer when I came back to Arvika I got my revenge. I wasn’t the best percussionist and I definitely wasn’t the worst which suited me just fine…also I think people were surprised to see me again after my first half assed attempt to music camp. This time it was really pleasurable and I was good enough to actually learn something instead of being chocked by all the impressions of being crap. The percussion section at Ingesunds music school was very well equipped and every possible piece of orchestral percussion was at your fingertips. This was of course extremely inspiring. Banging Tibetan gongs and then playing a drum kit a couple of seconds later…It made sense in some weird way…

I kept going back to the music camps for a couple of years and thoroughly enjoyed even though it became more and more a social awakening then a musical. Still very developing but in different ways. I realized that girls who play violas are very cute and very very distracting when you are 14-15.

The early bands

Parallel with my orchestral playing I kept on playing drums with my schoolmates Thomas Johnson and Peter Lithner. Our first band was formed in 4th grade and was called rundgång ( Swedish for feedback). In it’s first incarnation we had two guitarists. Peter played solo guitar and Max Lachmann played rhythm….(this isn’t exactly true neither of them actually played…they kind of strummed away as you do when you are ten). Peter Lithner was the cool one in the bunch. He was super cool and knew what to say to girls and all that. A really happening ten year old. But more importantly…He had a three year older brother who was really cool…He had posters of Dio and Led Zeppelin on his wall and we realized soon that rock music was something very exciting and slightly forbidden. Me, Peter and Thomas Johnson sat in the Lithners basement listening to Peters brothers albums. Yngwie Malmsteens first album (how can he play that fast ?), Thin Lizzys Black rose album, Kiss, Accept and Dio. We sat around trying to figure out what Balls to the wall meant…Peters brother explained it later on. We kept on playing together until the ninth grade. Peter Lithner moved to Gothenburg before the sixth grade but we still met one week at the end of summer and played and recorded songs. By now the band was called Minstrel and had developed into a pre symphonic band as we discovered Pink Floyd when we were 12-13. As usual Peter was the driving force and introduce to new things…such as Pink Floyd, Marillion, Coffee and later on Folk beer. By this time we had a fourth member in the band. Jonas Engdegård. Jonas could play both guitar and keyboards and was also great at understanding different types of music and how arrangements worked. His big brother was into Jean Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk so another influence started leakingh in as well.

The death of the orchestra

Minstrel kind of died after a couple of years and me, Thomas and Jonas kept on playing in school but nothing really serious came out of it. Our listening became more and more developed though. Thomas was always on the hunt for new and interesting music and found Genesis and Yes along the way…He also developed a taste for Classical and Swedish folk music. Me, Thomas, and Jonas had now shifted listening quarters to Jonas’s basement instead of Peters and listened to Yes, Pink Floyd and E.L.P and tried to figure out why no 15 year old girls liked us.

As the band stuff died out I focused even more on my orchestral playing and soon realized how everything became more and more serious. Other percussionists were constantly talking about different music schools, exercise books and teachers. I wanted to talk about music…and more importantly…girls. But in this quest I was pretty alone. I started to get paying gigs playing in churches and orchestras but it I knew I had to get into a real education if I wanted it to become a real thing. I did an audition for Södra Latins music school and didn’t get in…

The next couple of years were spent on doing more and more orchestral work but at the same time in the summer of1992 I was approached by Thomas Johnson. Apparently he and Jonas had hooked up with some guys to try to start a symphonic progressive rockband. I was not interested. Jonas and Thomas had played them some of the old Minstrel demos and had been trying out some drummers but it wasn’t really working out. I wasn’t too keen…I didn’t get the feeling that it was serious enough. In August he came back to me and urged me to atleast meet the guys. It was Tord Lindman and Johan Högberg. We met a couple of times and did some swift rehearsing mostly of old Minstrel stuff and then all ofd a sudden I had joined a progband. We called ourselves Änglagård but I didn’t really think that anything would come of it.