You can't stop the music

In October 1991, Bowie and his then-band Tin Machine were touring their second album, imaginatively called Tin Machine II. On October 20, they had a night off between the Copenhagen and Stockholm shows, and went out to first see Bowie's old friends Kraftwerk at Solnahallen on the The Mix tour, and later Graham Parker and Mick Ronson at Berns. As it happened, I also saw Kraftwerk that night. I was 17, and it was only my second major concert (after Roxette at the local arena in my old home town a month earlier), and also the first time I visited Stockholm on my own.

The story doesn't tell if he got to hang out with Ralf and Florian, or if anyone in the crowd recognised him:

"Fuck me, you look just like David Bowie!"

"Yeah, I hear that a lot..."

Today, ten years ago, I saw I Satellite, Sista Mannen På Jorden, Marlow, Psyche, and Rational Youth at Nalen in Stockholm.

That is also where I got the "Saturdays in Silesia" 12" at the top left and the Cold War Night Life CD (third row, first from left) autographed. (In fact I already had Tracy Howe's autograph on the CWNL CD from when I bought it, at the 1999 Stockholm concert, but this time I got Kevin Komoda's as well.)

For anyone who is interested, this is what I looked like 50 years ago today. I was my mum's first baby, and we had to stay for a week in hospital (not sure why, and I can't ask my parents: Mum died in 2017, and Dad doesn't remember the details half a century later). On this picture I had been home for just over an hour. Photo by my father, who still lives in the same house where I and my younger siblings grew up (and Mum died there).

And here are my ABBA LPs. All except Arrival (an Italian release on Dig-It Records) are original Swedish pressings on Polar. (I got Voulez-Vous for my fifth birthday in 1979.)

Celebrating the 50th anniversary with the original Swedish pressing.

For the past nine months I've been indexing and scanning a couple of hundred music magazines, Swedish and English (and a few Norwegian and German), with the goal of finally getting rid of the bloody things. For years they've taken a lot of space in our storage unit, space that both my wife and I are strongly starting to feel could be put to better use, and so I have talked to a record shop owner who is willing to take them for me when I'm ready.

So since last spring I have been spending a lot of time in the back office at my job with our A3 scanner/printer, scanning interesting features (interviews, reviews etc) to a USB stick and post-editing them on my laptop. (Melody Maker from the mid-80s was the worst — it was larger than A3, so I had to scan every page in two halves and stitch them together in Photoshop later.)

I have 24 issues of New Musical Express left to do now, and then I'm done.

1994-11-23, Gino, Stockholm (Occupied Europe NATO Tour)

1996-11-18, Gino, Stockholm (Jesus Christ Superstars)

2000-07-14, Arvikafestivalen, Arvika (Festival program)

2003-08-30, Electric Gathering, Fryshuset, Stockholm (Festival program based on WAT)

2005-08-24, Mondo, Stockholm (WAT)

2006-11-29, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (Volk)

2009-02-13, Uppsala Konsert & Kongress, Stockholm (Laibachkunstderfuge): Played as an instrumental quintet. Ivan Novak on stage for a change, rather than behind the mixing desk.

2011-03-05, Tyrol, Stockholm (Laibach Revisited)

2015-03-14, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (Spectre): Opening with a 20-minute rendition of Grieg's opera Olav Trygvason in Norwegian.

2016-01-17, Debaser Medis, Stockholm (The Sound of Music)

2017-11-11, Kraken, Stockholm (Also sprach Zarathustra): Here I got my NSK passport autographed by Ivan Novak, signing as Ivo Saliger.

Tonight I am out to see Die Krupps and Front Line Assembly with support bands Tension Control and Priest. I'll probably write a little report later.