SAY "Abba" to Nina Persson, lead singer and songwriter with the Cardigans, and she'll probably yawn. Suggest that her band tapped into the "lounge" music phenomenon for their languorous first album, Life, and she'll probably leap at you. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.)
Why does her attitude tend to be that of terminal boredom when Sweden's latest are compared with Sweden's greatest pop band to date?
"Because I've heard these comparisons quite a few times, as you can imagine," she says, laughing. "And even when people say my voice is as `light and fluffy' as Agnetha's or Anna Frid's, and that our music is the same, I really think they miss the darkness and hedge underneath. And on the new album we do move more away from pop than before, into rock. But then that's where we started out, so this, too, is why I get angry when someone says we jumped on the bandwagon with Life and made `easy listening' music.
"At the time when we made that album we had no clue that this whole revival was going to take place. We wanted to make a 1960s album but when people then started describing it as `lounge' and `kitsch' we were offended because we felt we were doing something really sincere and more multi dimensional. Though I hope by now people see there is more to us than that."
As in, perhaps, the band's love of heavy metal groups like Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath? What for example, is it about Philo and the boys that Nina finds so exciting?
"Well, although those are the bands we nearly all have in cornmon in the Cardigans, I have to confess I listen more to Sabbath. But with Thin Lizzy what I like is that despite the fact that they have a heavy sound, their songs have good lyrics. And, same as Sabbath, they have that great melodic thing which many hard rock bands don't have," she says.
This lyrical quality in Lizzy's work clearly was rooted in Phil Lynott's talent as a poet who also, of course, published a collection of verse. But when Nina says you need to be a "splendid poet" to sing in Swedish, what exactly does she mean?
"Because it's a very harsh and direct language," she explains. "You couldn't sing `come on and love me now, love me now' and get away with it. Swedish is more precise than that. Whereas English seems more of a floating language, softer, even in terms of the way it is pronounced.
"I'm not putting down Swedish, because it is fascinating and very beautiful. And very few Swedes have written good pop lyrics in English." She prefers performers of the singer songwriter style whose emphasis is on lyrics. "Whereas Swedish pop bands, in general, tend to be rather tacky, in terms of the lyrics. And even with our lyrics there is a difference between Magnus and me. He likes allegories and stuff but I am more direct."
DIRECT, Nina Persson certainly is, if we are to judge her in terms of the half dozen lyrics she contributes to First Band On The Moon. In Been It she gives vent to those dark characteristics referred to earlier and which definitely differentiate the Cardigans from you know who. I mean, can you really imagine Agnetha singing: `I've been your mother, I've been your father/who can ask for more/I've been your sister, I've been your mistress/Maybe I was your whore'?" Mama Mia, indeed!
"That lyric was me reacting against being pushed to play those roles for someone who couldn't be those things for themselves, yet still believed they were going their own way and didn't acknowledge who is behind all this, doing these things for them" she explains. So is Nina a "Lovefool", to cull a title, and concept, from her new single?
"Yes" she says, emphatically. "But not at the moment. Yet, in between relationships I am always a lovefool. But I am not very romantic. I have a very sharp way of looking at love, in that I am very interested in all the phenomena that take place whenever it comes to attraction, sexuality or love. As in the idea that you would do anything, at times, to get some love. That's what all my lyrics are about. Because I believe we are all primitive people that want to, in the end, have children and feel we belong.
"So we are in a constant pursuit of the perfect partner. But I do not agree with many girls who think they are only valid if there is a man in their life. I'm positive that isn't so, but (laughs) you do tend to lose all your former ideals when it comes to attraction, don't you? And deny all the things you said you would never do again! I could turn into a Nazi, if I would fall in love with a Nazi! That's why it is easy for me to sing, in the song Greit Divide, about the monster in our heads'. That's what we can become when are in love. At least, I can."
She explores this feeling in Happy Meal II where she sings: "Hungry for the meeting/ The dinner we'll be eating/ And kinky thoughts I'm thinking/ All because of you." However, this doesn't mean that Nina believes in feeding into any "rock chick" stereotype. She may be thinking "kinky thoughts" but she's not about to join Shirley Manson, from Garbage, who clearly teases and maybe even manipulates male fans with lines like: "I love it when I pull down a boy's pants and he has got no knickers on, and I think most women feel the same." Nina disagrees, on all counts.
"It's just a line, isn't it? And journalists always try and get me to say things like that." She reflects. "I can say those things, of course but not to someone I don't know. And, besides, it's better to suggest something, as in my using the phrase `kinky thoughts', rather than stating things so obviously. Besides, all these ideas about `rock chicks' and `rock goddesses' are strange to me . . . As soon as there is a girl in the music business, she's supposed to be either extremely ugly and a lesbian, or extremely sexy. And I have never considered myself either as a `goddess' or `sexy', though this is how I am tagged. Another tendency is to reduce women to dolls and fantasy figures men can cuddle and play with, and in that way control which again is something I fight against. I'm going to stay out of all those ways people view women, in music."
THERE also is, in rock, the tendency to reduce the music made by women into lazy little "pop" or "angry singer songwriter" or "balls breaker" categories. Again, Nina is having none of this and suggests that this, too, is why she draws back from that Abba comparison. Not surprisingly, perhaps.
Listen closely to the lyrical lilt and fractured rhythms that define her vocal lines and this will bring to mind more the kind of work Astrud Gilberto did with Stan Getz. And it is more in the direction of working in a duo "though not necessarily jazz based" that Nina believes she may be moving after she outgrows this particular set of cardigans.
"I am happy that people are beginning to see that even the music I make now, though maybe white on the outside, is black inside, not `fluffy' at all," she elaborates. "But at the same time, I can't bear listening to music made by artists who take themselves too seriously and only base their music on melancholy and misery. There has to be a tongue in cheek aspect to it all. Yet in terms of jazz, many of our songs do contain that influence. I believe my voice is pretty suitable for that music. And I listen to people like Gilberto, though my big love in this music is Monica Zetterlund who worked with Bill Evans and Louis Armstrong. She is old and very ill now. And even though the big part of her career was in the 1960s, when I wasn't even born, she has been doing that all my life so I see her very much as part of my generation.
"But I am thinking more of working in some kind of duo format at some point in the future because there is a lot of other music I should do that just wouldn't match with the Cardigans."
