Live report: Tack! Tack! Tack! @ Heavenly Social, London UK 10/24/05
Three years ago, whilst living in Brighton I jokingly remarked to my housemate that I had enough records to put on a purely Swedish club night. Shortly after leaving Brighton in the summer of 2004 a new club night called Sweden Made Me started up, which proved to be an instant success. Fast forward to the spring of 2005, and Avi (the editor of this very site), put me in contact with Simon, another London-based It's A Trap writer. I propositioned the idea of putting on a night of live Swedish music in London, with purely Swedish records played between the bands. One of the main reasons behind wanting to start the night up was the frustration of watching leading Swedish artists playing to a room of ten people at venues like the Camden Barfly. By the time the launch night took place we also had Jason Christie, the UK representative of Adrian Records on board.
Anyway, back to the present. The launch night of Tack! Tack! Tack! took place on Monday 24th October at The Heavenly Social. Playing live we had The Legends and Cat 5, whilst Jon and Seb from The Pipettes DJ'ed. Although The Pipettes are English, it was appropriate they DJ'ed as they are one of a handful of new English bands who are starting to gain a following in Sweden before getting a national following in their home country. This point only further illustrates how forward thinking Sweden is.
The pairing of Cat 5 and The Legends worked perfectly as it made it hard for people to pigeonhole the night. Whilst it would be easy to accuse Cat 5 of being frothy pop, I rate them as having the potential to be at the forefront in the resurgence of quality pop alongside Norway's Annie, and any other pop acts produced by Richard X or credible dance producers. To boot, Tack! Tack! Tack! is a pop night after all. Indie pop, electro pop: it's all pop music right? Considering Cat 5 haven't released any records in the UK before, they went down pretty well. I'd be surprised if "Sexy" wasn't an underground hit in the UK.
It was a privilege to have The Legends play what I believe to be their first ever gig in the UK. Their set was heavily biased towards their new long player "Public radio", but it was also nice to get "Call it ours" and "The kids just wanna have fun" from the first album too. Whilst the influences of Joy Division, New Order, The Cure et al on the new album are spot on, I think such reference points would have gone down better in the UK a couple of years ago. As I mentioned in my IAT review of "Public radio", The Legends are able to ape these influences better than any of their peers, but such reference points seem a bit old hat in 2005. Anyway, apparently they are already working on songs for their third album so it would be foolish to write off already.
All in all, the first Tack! Tack! Tack! was a great success. We had national and international press coverage, the 150 capacity venue sold out and consisted a good mixture of scenesters, Swedes, Swedophiles, and the generally curious.
The next night is one 14 November with The Lovekevins, We Are Soldiers We Have Guns, and The Fine Arts Showcase. We want to continue to promote quality Swedish music in the UK. If you'd like to help out please get in contact at our MySpace page or by email.
- Nick Levine