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How it all started ...
Once up on a time in a small town called Umeå in the very north of the
Kingdom of Sweden there were some songs written by Henrik Andersson, a
former member of the group Komeda. In the same town at the same time
there was a rehearsal place called "PING" were most of the
bands in Umeå rehearsed at that time.
One day when Henrik was down in the rehearsal place he bumped into Toft
Stade, at this time bass player in the very fine band Shredhead, and Per
Helin, at this time singer and guitarist in another very fine band
called Puffin. Henrik told Toft and Per about the songs and asked them
if they wanted to play them together with him. Toft and Per looked at
each other and said; OK, but what instruments are we going to play? Play
what ever you want to play, Henrik said. "I want to play the
drums", Per said. "And I want to play the bass", Toft
said. "Then I will sing and play the guitar" Henrik said, and
then they started to play. After a while they all stopped playing and
said to each other; "There's something missing!"
A couple of days later Per sat in a cafe in Umeå. A tall man came to
him and said; "I just moved to town and I wonder if you know
anything about the music scene here in Umeå?". "You
bet!" Per replied. And then he realized that The tall man was the
missing piece. "Whatever your name is, tall man, I want you to come
and play with some good friends of mine, at once!". "My name
is Ludvig", said the tall man, "and I would love to come and
play with you and your friends". Said and done. The very same day
they rehearsed for hours.
Some weeks later when they all sat down after rehearsal they realized
that they had formed a band. Now the question was; what were they going
to call their band?
Lets just call the band; Ray Wonder, they all said. But why Ray Wonder
you might wonder? The truth is that they didn't know themselves.
And Then what happened?
When we had rehearsed for a couple of months we started to think about
playing the songs live. The idea then was to do one show only and then
quit. We did the show as support band for Per's "real" band,
Puffin at a venue called "Scharinska Villan" i Umeå. We
played all the thirteen songs we had at this time and the success was a
fact. After the show we started to discuss the possibility of recording
the thirteen songs. We decided to record them in a studio owned by Tofts
stepfather; Pelle Henricsson.
The thing was, though, that none of us had any money. We earned some
from the gig but we did need more. Some one came up with the brilliant
idea to buy lottery tickets for our money to earn some more. We lost
everything. OK, no money, no recording. Toft told his stepfather about
the lotteries and he felt so sorry for us that he offered us one day in
the studio for the price of forty lottery tickets. We recorded all
thirteen songs on that one day. At night when Pelle wanted to go home he
decided to give us one day for
free to mix the songs. We mixed the songs the day after and that was it.
A couple of days later Per played the recording for His mates Robert and
Helena at NONS Records. They went crazy and asked if they could release
it. Since we were about to quit we got a bit confused. We decided to go
on for a couple of more months and to release the record. We talked to a
good friend of ours who is an artist. He helped us with the sleeve and
he also made our first poster. On the front cover there is a painting by
this very fine artist. The guy´s name is Ludvig Franzén.
During the spring we also recorded thirteen super8 short-movies, one to
each song. Unfortunately we lost the movies, but before we lost them we
showed them at our release party. We can ensure you that they were more
strange than good.
Spring came and the record "hurray " was released and it was a
minor success, we played at the biggest festival in Sweden called
Hultsfredsfestivalen and we thought everything was just great and we
decided to stay together and record some more stuff.
We recorded a six track ep four days in September the same year called
Superwonder which were released in December the same year. Since this
record was the first one we recorded "for real" it was very
tricky to be as spontaneous as on the Hurray session. Ludvig Franzén
helped with the cover again this time together with Magnus Åström.
During this time another Swedish band called Eggstone started to get a
lot of interest from Japan. Since Ray Wonder thought Eggstone was one of
the finest bands in all time we sent our records to them. It turned out
that they liked what we were doing as well, so they helped us out
getting or records released in Japan. Before they even knew about us
being released in Japan Eggstone were touring there. When we did our
first tour in Japan six months later we found notes written on the wall
in all the dressing rooms we came to saying things like; "have a
good one tonight Ray Wonder", "welcome to Osaka Ray Wonder and
good luck". All the notes were signed by Eggstone. Guess if we were
surprised?
Before this tour in Japan we recorded another ep. It was recorded in
February -95 and was called "Get Back Inside". It contained
seven songs and was released in June the same year. This recording were
the first one were we really started to use other instruments than the
one we played in the group. On some of the songs we might have overdone
it... Anyway, we learned a lot from this recording. This time Magnus Åsröm
did the cover design and he used a painting by Ludvig Franzén on the
back of sleeve.
We did some touring after this record. The one we will remember most is
the Icelandic tour together with The Cardigans. We did three shows in
Reykavik and one show in a small town up north called
"Akurejri". It was very fantastic, beautiful, dramatic. The
fantastic and beautiful things were "The Blue Lagoon",
"The huge ice waterfall", "The Geishirs", "The
Crater", "The Mountains" and of course, The people. The
dramatic part was when we were going to leave for Akureiri by bus. The
first attempt failed. We were caught by the worst snow storm we´d ever
experienced. The whole buss was shaking and you could hardly see
anything except for snow. Since we're from the very north of Sweden we
are used to such things as snowstorms but this was way over the top. We
had to go back to the hotel. We slept for a couple of hours and then we
were woken up by the promoter. He told us that we had to go there
because it was sold out. He told us that he had hired another, much
stronger buss and the best driver in Iceland. Said and done, some hours
later we all sat in the bus. It looked like a giant monster truck with a
ordinary tourist bus put on top of it. The driver wasn't a man of many
words, but of many pounds. We still can't understand how he managed to
get us there. Imagine driving through a snowstorm in 70kmh (50mph) for
nine hours without seeing a thing. After getting there we had a
memorable evening, but that's another story.
After being busy doing other projects we all got together again for the
recordings of our second album "Good Music". This time we
worked with Per Sunding from Eggstone as producer. We recorded at
Tambourine Studios during spring and summer -96. The recordings were
very chaotic in many aspects. You could say that the four strong wills
of Ray Wonder wasn't synchronized to 100% this time. We almost spent as
much time arguing about what to record as we did on the actual
recordings. In the end we managed to get the recordings together, with a
lot of help from Per Sunding and a really good work by Pelle Henricsson
who did the mixing part. We took a break after the recordings and the
record were released in November that year. This record was growing
slowly both on us and on the crowd. Slowly more and more people
got to hear about it and after a year it had reached all the way to the
USA. One man that got hold of it was Beck Hansen who became a fan of the
record. When we in springtime -98 played our first show in the states
(L.A), Beck was one of the twenty-five persons in the audience, which
was really great. Two years later we did tour the UK with him
which was very honorable.
In the Autumn of '97 we started to work on our third album. An album
that almost never were finished. We started the recording in Umeå
spring -98 together with Henric Oja and Eskil Lövström as producers.
We mixed it once but we all felt the lack of something. We wrote more
songs and in February -99 we all moved from Umeå in the north to Malmö
in the south. We all felt for changing something in our lives and that
it was time for something new to happen. The move became very important
to us as a band. We all came together as a band, and without it we don't
know if we still would have exsisted. It became clear to us that we
really wanted to go on as a band and finish what was once started. We
finished the recordings together with Batti and Mopeds in Gula Studion
(a part of Tambourine). In October the recordings were done and Eskil Lövström
came down from Umeå to do the last mixing parts. At that time we had
recorded twenty-five songs and been in the studio back and forwards for
two years.
The rest is about to be history...
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