“SAVED!” is a deep dive into Sweden’s 1970s Christian Psych Underground
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By J. Edward Keyes · March 7, 2022
When Stefan Kéry first started thinking about what kind of collection would join the acid rock collection Stumbling in the basement and the lounge album Bo Axelzon & His Exotic Sounds on his label Subliminal sounds in the mid-90s, “Swedish Christian Psych Rock” was not at the top of his list. What had captured his interest was somewhat related, but much more obscure: Christian abdominal records. “When you start looking at it, you find a huge amount of very, very strange records,” laughs Kéry. “And finally I reached a point where I had gathered so many that it was like ‘I can not bear to listen to this anymore.’ I kept one, called Jigger’s Story Time. It sounds like there are actually some stony hippies making an inner joke about it all. But it’s not, it’s just very sincere to try, you know, to aim at the children. “
After realizing that the audience for a collection of songs by Christian belly talkers was, let’s say, “limited”, Kéry returned to his first love: psychedelia, where he had noticed an interesting trend. “I’ve been collecting records all my life,” he says, “and when I started getting into the psyche in the ’80s, I soon discovered that some of the rare records that were really good were actually Christian records.” One of those records was the debut from the group Vatten 1975, which had been released by Prophone, a Swedish record company mainly known for classical music. Kéry looked up the address of the Prophone offices, showed up unannounced and bought the remaining copies that had been on their shelves for 20 years to sell via Subliminal Sounds mail order. “They sold so fast that I thought, ‘I have to get this music out to people and make a collection or something.’ But I was shut down. Now, 15 years later, there is a huge interest in this music in Sweden – there are even Facebook groups with all these younger collectors. So I connected with the toughest of these younger collectors, Emil Karlsson , and that’s how this compilation started. ”
The summary in question is SAVED !: A Selection of Swedish Christian Grooves, 1969–1979, a dizzying collection of songs – 20 on the digital, 21 on the vinyl – which combines freewheeling folk rock and psyche with lyrics (sung mainly in Swedish) that speak of divine love. The songs, many of them originally released via small private press labels, exude both a sense of delightful optimism and charming youthful amateurism. Their seriousness is part of the charm. Songs like “Jobbig Tid” by the group Obadja have a kind of appealing intensity for them – that a specific, with its sounding piano and deceptive chorus, sounds as if a teenager Elton John had scored. Jesus Christ Superstar.
Although the Swedish Christian rock scene took place more or less in parallel with the emergence of Jesus Music in America, the two movements were markedly different. For one thing, the artists on SAVED! are mostly younger than their American counterparts – many of them recent graduates of high school – where American artists such as Larry Norman and Rez Band were already in their mid-20s when they started recording. A large part of the motivation for the American Jesus Rock was the dead end of the hippie movement – the promise of utopia that had curled up into empty slogans. “In the United States, these musicians were hippies who then moved into the Jesus movement, and there was still a strong hippie factor – they were pretty wild people,” says Kéry. “But everyone here [in Sweden] was very calm and nice, and much more spotless – it “did not happen at all”. I tried to find more crazy Swedish bands, but there really were none. They may have tried musically, but they simply did not have that kind of personality. ” Consequently, the spirit that courses throughout SAVED! is not harsh and cynical, but full of joy: From Siw Sjöberg’s jubilant, gospel “Hallelujah” to Alea Jacta Est & Olle Kassell’s aptly titled folk rock “We Are People, Happy People”, the atmosphere on SAVED! is relentlessly optimistic.
Unlike American Jesus Music, which existed almost entirely outside the church, the Christian rock movement in Sweden was practically church-sponsored. – In the mid-60s, Sweden had not yet been secularized, Kéry explains. “It was a total, 100% Christian nation. You sang a hymn in the morning at school and the teacher played the organ. It was just a part of everything – the structure of the country. We had this free church movement which had already happened. If you went to a free church, you went to Sunday school on Sundays, and you got to play music there, and eventually you got to perform in church. That’s part of the reason why everyone is so damn professional in all these bands – because everyone here in the Christian community started playing early in Sunday school, and they were forced to perform in front of the church. Soon the children began to say, ‘We want to play pop music so we can start inviting all our friends to church.’ Because at that time, most teenagers in Sweden were tired of going to church. ”
Including, as it turned out, some of the teenagers in the newly formed Christian bands. In one of the more fun anecdotes in the liner note that comes with it SAVED !, Roger Björklöf and Alf Carlsson from the band The Vergers – one of the more popular groups on the collection – believe that there was more than a little fiction in their marketing as a “rock group consisting of teenagers who studied to be priests.” Like Björklöf – who actually was not studying to be a priest – remembers: “I remember that I was so drunk that I could barely perform on a TV recording in Copenhagen. And you should know that I was not even the one who was most drunk! [Our manager] said: ‘You have to pretend to be a Christian band and study to be a priest. Otherwise, the whole concept will fall apart. ‘”The Vergers’ contribution to SAVED! is one of the collection’s foreign tracks, a jig-like number surrounded by loopy wah-wah guitar.
Other artists are more sincere. Ingamay Hörnberg, whose delicately beautiful folk number “Love’s Song” is on the vinyl version of the collection, says: “I did not want to judge anyone, even if they were not like me. For what right do I have to say that they are not good enough as they are “For me God has always been love and divine love does not judge, it helps and lifts us.” (Hörnberg ironically had a second act as host of a children’s TV program in Sweden where she, you guessed it, was a belly talker.)
Even if the compilation clocks in at over an hour, as Kéry says, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. “When people heard I was doing this collection, they said, ‘You’re doing a double LP? Is it only enough for one LP? But what surprised me is that it’s almost like a bottomless pit. I thought I had a good grip already in the early 90’s, but we still find more things than today. ” And as for the band members themselves, four decades later, they are happy that their work is being rediscovered. “Everyone is so happy that it’s happening,” says Kéry. “We had no negativity at all. Everyone has said things like, ‘We are so happy that our music will be out there.’ In the end, it is the enthusiasm that gives the review back to the earliest days of music.” It’s fun – in Sweden this movement was going on at about the same time as it prog movement, says Kéry. “And those kids thought, ‘Oh, I should not wear a headlight, I should probably turn my back on the audience, we should not be commercial.’ But to these children they believed that they were spreading the gospel wanted to be in the spotlight. They wanted to be as good as they could ever be. ”