Mando Diao

Mando Diao
May 2009

Vladimir ‘Dr. Steel Hammer’ Klitschko is a man's man. A whopping great chunk of sinister protein, steely sinew, and targeted aggression, even his name has a gristle-like quality to its phonics that makes you think of pulverisation, something that Klitschko regularly enjoys doing as part of his job as the WBO World Heavyweight Boxing Champion.

What sort of music would such a man want to lead him into the ring? What captures the spirit of Roman amphitheatre, of flying spit guards and glass jaws, the hype and hustle of a world title defence (given that 'Eye Of The Tiger' is probably out)? Well, Swedish garage rock, it transpires...

“He wants us to play before his next fight in Germany,” reveals Björn Dixgård, one of Mando Diao's two singer-guitarist-songwriter-frontmen. “Directly before he comes into the ring, it turns out he's a fan,” Gustaf Norén, Björn's other half, supplies.

The World Heavy Weight Boxing Champion is an apt ambassador for Mando Diao. Over the course of 5 albums, Mando Diao have punched their way from obscurity in the remote Swedish town of Borlänge (“two ugly factories and a load of empty space”) to world beaters. They’ve gone gold in Japan, Germany and Sweden; headlined Germany’s biggest rock festival Rock Am Ring to 100,000 people; played gigs everywhere from Beijing to the Late Night Show with Conan O’Brien in New York. All the energy and ecstasy firing out of a hard working class town in Southern Sweden, a place as obscure as Liverpool was to Beatles fans.

The song that Klitschko specifically asked for – 'Gloria' – is the spiritual pivot of Mando Diao's new record, Give Me Fire. It was the first track they recorded, and one that captures best the album's heroically cinematic feel with its big-throated, Stax-horny Jackie Brown seventies soul colourings – a song that's crossing 110th Street.

“We wanted to make it quite cinematic” Björn contends. “We always try and think of it as music for a film. I wouldn't say it's a concept album, but it has that feel about it.” Inspired by the cinemascapes of Tarantino, Moroder, and Morricone, they built a fantasy soundtrack to an unmade movie. (“There's a bit of death, a bit of sex, some daylife, some nightlife, a bit of everything really.”) As a film, it's a rip-roaring-rollercoaster-ride, veering wildly from the breakneck scuzz-fuzz garage of opener 'Blue Lining, White Trenchcoat', to the coquettish walkdown bassline of 'High Heels', to the string-drenched seraphic hymn 'Crystal'. At its core, their fifth release is an album about elevation; about peak experience – there's a strong vein of the narcotic here, whatever narcosis may mean to you...

Gustaf: “The title is a Swedish slang phrase. 'Eld' is 'fire', as in the kick you get out of drugs or alcohol – it translates as 'I want some spark in my life'. That track is about a friend of ours who was hooked on drugs. We decided to take his side of the argument on drugs – we looked at it from the perspective that this is an urge that everyone in the world has. Whether it's cigarettes or coffee or exercise or ecstasy, everyone in the world wants to get high off of something. That bled through into the whole album.”

Even at its lowest ebbs, it runs on a spirit of casual defiance, of living day-today, and the taking simple hedonisms where you find them. “For instance, 'Crystal' is a funeral song we wrote for a friend of ours who passed away,” Gustaf explains, “When we started out doing it, it was sad, like saying goodbye to life. But it turned out to be an inspiring song you can dance to. That feeling is all through the album. To me it's an uplifting album. 'Give Me Fire' isn't down on drug addiction. It's more like just to see the next day in. Leave your troubles behind.”

The apex of this fever comes with 'Dance With Somebody' – their rubberized disco-garage ode to that other great opiate of the masses: cutting a rug on a Saturday night, written for a friend who works nightshift at a factory in their home town.

Gustaf: “In Sweden in the seventies, there was a big political movement in music. It was very progressive, very socialist. Naturally, Abba were the most hated band of all. But obviously, the working classes weren't listening to all this political punk... They just wanted to dance to Abba. They didn't want to argue in the music. So it's not an intellectual song in that way. It doesn't talk to your brain, it talks to your guts. ”

But curiously, it was an attempt to unify both the refuseniks and the pure pop factions that inspired Give Me Fire's grungy melodicism. “I always liked the way the way that Oasis took a bit of the Beatles and a bit of The Sex Pistols,” Gustaf considers, “And fused them to make their own music – merging melody with chaos. We always wanted to do a Swedish version of that.” So, into their unlikely blender they threw equal inspiration from both Abba and Refused – the Swedish fathers of straight-edge hard