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e.p.
Gå & fiska!
Juni, juli, augusti
Harplinge
Faller ner på knä

Per's liner notes:

  It all started with my family moving from Simlångsdalen to Vilshärad in the mid-70s. I transferred schools and friends and got in touch with a guy with a moustache, who went to the technical branch of this school. He called himself M.P. and played drums in my school mate Pedda's band "Svenssons AB". [Svensson Inc.] However M.P. had decided to exchange his drums for a guitar (he wanted to play "Caroline" by Status Quo), but there wasn't room for a second guitar-player in this band. So M.P. and I (who could passably play the riffs of "God Save The Queen") founded a duo, which we named "Grape Rock". Decisive for this wave of self-confidence was our idea, to write songs and do our own recording and this way approach Our Big Dream: A record-deal!

  Tough Shit!

  Soon we realized that we needed more members in the "club". M.P.'s 16-year-old drummer-pal from Harplinge, Micke Andersson, joined us and from Steninge came a left-handed bass-player named Janne Carlsson. The four of us changed our name to "Gyllene Tider". Oh, my God, it just came to my mind, that the first song, that we rehearsed, was "Helen Of Troy" by John Cale...

  Time went by, we skipped school and learning (I got an F in Maths), we terrorized the music-business and Swedish Radio, without result. Yes, we even got our own radio-show: "Bandet går vidare [The tape/band moves on]".

  In the summer of 1978 we all worked persistently (potatoes-stock, picking mushrooms, construction sites) to earn enough money for an own, simple EP-recording, which was supposed to be taking place in a 4-track-recording-studio in Kärleken outside of Halmstad. The record was finished and released the same winter and Kjell Andersson from EMI was one of the many, who got this work sent by mail. He woke me up on a very cold morning in January '79 and told me he liked "Billy"...

  Things started happening...

  Janne dropped out and Anders Herrlin's fretless bass and Göran Fritzson's Farfisa organ became steady influences at our rehearsals. These took place nearly everyday, after all we had a wonderful, bewitching, sparkling record-deal! We were the best in the world!

  So in August '79 we started the recordings for our first LP up in Stockholm with a new recording of "Billy" and a dozen of other songs, which M.P. and I had written. The first single was "Himmel no. 7" and on the B-side was just a small trifle... Well, M.P. and I had written a reggae, sort of "Watching The Detectives" by Elvis Costello and in this connection I "borrowed" a line from Hasse Alfredson: "det enda jag får sätta på TV-apparaten... [the only thing that I get to turn on is the TV]". The song was called "Flickorna på TV2". What happend next was that, consequently, all radio stations started to play the B-side of our first single, the discos joined in and in February '80 Gyllene Tider and "Flickorna på TV2" were at No. 1!

  Awright!

  (Pause for effect...)

  What followed was a fantastic 80s! For us with hundreds of concerts (we'd done 6 before "Flickorna" hit No.1), thousands of miles on the road, tens of thousands of fan-letters, hundreds of thousands of happy faces and more than 1,000,000 sold records, before Anders said stop a few years later, at the Restaurant Svea by the summer shy Nissan billowing outside the windows. - Everything's got its time, he said. So true, so true...

 P.G.

Halmstad