Easybeat

Public gigs 2008:
26 jan, Charles Dickens, Helsingborg,
08 feb, Scandlines ferry, Helsingborg-Helsingor
09 feb, Scandlines ferry, Helsingborg-Helsingor
19 jul, Prästasvängen, on the island Hven
06 sep, Dagstorp
Hi!
Hope to make some interesting contacts here, both new ones and persons or bands we have come in contact with during the years since the late 70's. Easybeat was (still exists as a popular party/coverband today!) a well known pop/powerpop band in the south of Sweden in the 80’s, with much of the motto “1-2-3-4.... don’t bore us, get to the chorus”. Influences were for example The Beatles, Dwight Twilley & Phil Seymour, Paul Collin’s The Beat, Romantics, Blondie, The Knack and many others in the pop/powerpop category. Color-striped T-shirts, sun-glasses, lots of energy, clear vocal harmonies and melodies, driving/riffing guitars, a steady beat, and nearly always a dancing audience on our gigs characterized the band.
As you can hear on the example tracks uploaded here, nearly all the early tracks had the same theme, summer, beaches and.... girls :) And it’s not strange, the band started as teenagers and we all grew up in a little town by the sea, and some of the members lived frequently on an island as children/ teenagers during the summers. The reason for the MySpace name “Easybeat_sweden” is of course to avoid confusion with the Australian well-known 60's band “The Easybeats”. Easybeat is a swedish band which formed in the late 70’s, and we didn’t know about the australian”The Easybeats” until a few years later. The name Easybeat came from a german guy, who after a gig in the late 70’s said “ach so, en bischen easy beat!“. We thought, well, that’s a good name for the band....
The band had its first early success with a single called “Christmas Rock” which became the single-of-the-week in the well known Swedish magazine “Veckorevyn”. After an article and a picture in the leading evening newspaper in south of Sweden (Kvällsposten), the single sold quite well without a recording company backing it up (it was released on our own label). And the band started to get gigs frequently. Highlights a little later in this early period (1981-1982) were for example playing support act to the most famous pop band in Sweden, Gyllene Tider (with Per Gessle who later formed Roxette), and support act to Elvis Costello in Malmoe Folk Park.
1987 Easybeat won the regional Rock Championship (Rock SM) in the south of Sweden, and our faces then covered nearly the whole front page in the morning paper “Arbetet”, which made some of our friends and working mates believe that we really were pop stars now.... but we were always quite cool about it. We then finished as number 2 in the Rock-SM final in Stockholm, in front of a big audience who had come to see Joe Cocker play after the final. The jury included people like Anders Glenmark and Mats Claesson (guitarist in Ultravox at the time). We were happy to get a special price for good song-writing, each of us got a combined portable CD-player/tape recorder, which was quite new and unusual in the music tech-market at that time. We were then very near to join the “Rock around the country”-tour (Rock runt riket) as a support act, with artists like Roxette, Eva Dahlgren and Ratata (Mauro Scocco’s group), but finally another new swedish artist (Orup) got this job... he released his first hit single just before the tour started. After the Rock-SM final (and a lot of articles in the press) we played in Swedish folk-parks and of course a lot of smaller club gigs and some live radio gigs.
A single reached the position 7 in a top list in south of Sweden and was “single of the week” on some radio stations, but we never managed to get a real major record deal (although very near). In the mid/late 80’s the record market had changed, mostly to more keyboard-based songs and hard rock. We tried a more keyboard based sound and songs, but later went back to the original “2 guitars,bass,drums” set-up which clearly is the natural set-up for this band. Other working careers then became more important, so we transformed the band (1989) into a party/coverband to be able to play music with a little less input of time. It was an immidiate success on that “level” so to speak. We were immidiately engaged in the Carneval in Lund, and played in the big dancing hall there, and we played on many many student parties and other clubs in the south of Sweden during the early 90’s. Easybeat has made about 400 live gigs in total, and nowadays we play mostly at private bigger parties and company parties as a cover-/partyband. Sometimes you can see/hear us in clubs though.
A couple of years ago a very strange and funny thing happened, we got an email from a japanese boy who wanted to buy one of the early single records, and wanted to pay about 300 swedish crownes for it. We then found out that this record was listed on the net, on a “rare poprecord”-site in Japan, and was valued to about 300 crownes. We clearly know that none of our records has been released in Japan (!), so the only way it can have found its way over there is through local record markets where people buy and sell secondhand records. We now call ourselves popstars in Japan, with a glint in the eye and tongue in cheek of course. 25 years later the record paid off a little bit more :)
Some info and funny things about the band members:
- Anders has a clear pop tenor voice, he still easily hits the high C, for example in the refrain of the cover song “Hot Love” (Marc Bolan/T.Rex) which we have covered for a long time. Anders is also like a computer when it comes to remembering lyrics, very seldom forgets a lyric line at live gigs. And we all know, if the vocals together don’t sound right, someone else is singing out of tune.... He was in his late teens a “girl magnet”, so he bought a second hand old Vauxhall car and had two things in it while driving around, vodka and condoms.
- Jonas has a great bass voice, so the vocal range within the band is quite good. For nearly every bass player the singing and playing at the same time is a challenge, Jonas has a very good "split mind" capability, with sometimes rolling bass-lines and singing at the same time. Jonas has written many of the Easybeat songs (often arranged together), and is often the ”motor" of the band concerning get-togethers, rehearsals etc. He uses a melodic kind of bass playing, and misses his old brown Rickenbacker from the early 80's. Probably the only one (?) in Sweden who plays the ”Surfcaster"-bass. In the early days when everybody usually was short of money, Jonas used to cook his bass strings in hot water to make them last longer. He has also once managed to eat a couple of yellow ear-plugs by mistake, thinking they were peanuts....
- Dan started as bass guitarist (before Easybeat) and for example played a gig as a teenager with the rock singer ”Kal P Dal” (1978). Kalle Pedal (his nickname) was at that time a famous rock singer in Sweden, especially with the song “Blåa skor” (a cover of Blue suede shoes). Dan was in his mid-teens influenced by the rock artists Ted Nugent and Rick Derringer, and used this kind of guitar-playing in some of the Easybeat pop songs as well. These influences can clearly be heard in the songs “California sunbeach” and "I dina ögon" (In your eyes) for example.The vocals in some of the early songs has been recorded on Dans TEAC144 cassette multi-tracker (the very first portastudio 1981), and the final mix was then made from the 144. Dan was given the task to sing most of the “girl” harmonies in the songs, he had the softest falsetto voice in the band. When he was short of money he sometimes used to order childrens portions of food in restaurants, with sun-glasses on of course and speaking with a little higher voice than normal.
- Benni had the same short trousers on every gig with Easybeat for 15 years (!), 1980-1995 (shorts with strawberries painted on them). We have seldom heard a better drummer when it comes to hitting the bass-drum and the snare-drum at exactly the same millisecond. He could easily have made a living as a disco drummer in the 70’s (before the drum machine was invented!). Benni has once been so drunk, in a car driving at high speed on the highway, that he tried to step out of it from the passenger seat. We managed to stop him, obviously. Benni is the technical guy in the band, and repairs the equipment when needed . He has also an extreme talent for "one-liner"-jokes, and we all get our share of that now and then.
In the year 2000, the band decided to make a collection-CD with seventeen of the original Easybeat songs, and a booklet with the story of the band. We mostly sell this CD on our live gigs, but if interested you can get it from our website. If you like classic melody-based pop music (like the swedish band “Melody Club” today for example), well, you will probably like it. Most of the lyrics are in swedish. Visit our website http://easybeat.just.nu for more info (in swedish). We plan to digitalize some live tape-recordings from radio- and club gigs in the 80’s, and a live video recording from a gig 1987 in Helsingborgs Folk Park, and put out links to them here.
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What is (classic) powerpop ? A common definition is a mix of The Beatles up-tempo songs and the "wild" sound of The Who, with a more modern and "tight" production than the 60's sound (but not overproduced). It could also be softer guitar-based tunes with ringing guitars and sweet melodies / harmony vocals, with a steady beat/bass.
Keywords: energy and fun, clear melodies and vocals in tune, clean ringing or half distorted guitars, "interesting" guitars and vocals (not strictly following the traditional blues, rock'n'roll, soul or any other "root music" standards and patterns), driving drums/bass with energy (often a straight or a riffing bass-line instead of a slow-rolling bass on the chord notes), often romantic lyrics with a youthful touch, often a playful and humorous attitude overall (concerning chord sequences, key changes, sounds, "interesting" breaks/bridges/riffs etc).
If interested, read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_pop
Some powerpop favourites (70's -->)
- Walking out of love, Paul Collins & The Beat (could maybe be called a "definition" of pp... this is real pp-energy at its best)
- Working too hard, Paul Collins & The Beat
- Work-a-day-world, Paul Collins & The Beat
- I'm on fire, Dwight Twilley Band
- Twilley don't mind, Dwight Twilley Band
- Found a love, Phil Seymour
- That's what I like about you, The Romantics
- Accidents never happen (in a perfect world), Blondie
- Hangin' on the telephone, Blondie
- All over my head, Matthew Sweet
- Tough love, Patty Smyth
- I want you to want me, Cheap Trick
- Do you want crying, Katrina & Waves
- What I say and what I mean, The Like
- These days, Tia (swe)
- Adorable you, Stars on Mars (swe)
- Love turns into boredom, Sugarplum Fairy (swe)
- All I need, The Headlines (swe)
- Reporter, Per Gessle (swe)
- Days of summer, Ana Johnsson (swe)
- We've got the beat, The Models (swe)
- Out of patience, Lina Hansson (swe)
Some soft favourites:
- You were so warm, Dwight Twilley Band
- That I remember, Dwight Twilley Band
- If she knew what she wants, The Bangles
- Winter, Teenage fanclub
- Cynical girl, Marshall Crenshaw
- Yes or no, The Gogo's
- Weather with you, Crowded House
- Sunshine, Juliana Hatfield
- December snow, This Perfect Day (swe)
- You are mine, Calaisa (swe)
- Clouds dreams, Stars on Mars (swe)
FAVOURITE BAND OF THE MOMENT, Dwight Twilley Band.
"I'm on fire" was a hit in USA 1975. His partner on harmony vocals and drums, Phil Seymour, had one of the best powerpop-voices of all time. Phil sadly passed away (cancer) 1993. The band split up 1978, and both of them started solo-careers. Dwight later had hits with "Why you wanna break my heart" and "Girls" in the mid 80's, Phil had a hit with "Precious to me" -81.

I'm on fire (live)
Note, the bass player is not joking, he plays upside down with the left hand
Looking for the magic
The bass player here is... Tom Petty, before his own music career started.
Twilley don't mind (Phil Seymour singing lead)
Phil Seymour solo, Found a love
Phil Seymour solo, Precious to me
All the best, and rock on!
Written by
Son of a beach