People are whistling along to their catchy new single, but the poppy Swedish trio who made it do have a dark side, they assure Kevin Courtney
There have been a few great whistling songs down through the ages; Otis Redding's Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay, John Lennon's Jealous Guy and, er, Wind of Change by the Scorpions are just three that come instantly to mind. When you hear these tunes, you just want to pucker your lips and blow like a chimney-sweep who's just won the lottery. Now, add a new number to that venerable list: Young People, by a Swedish trio named Peter Bjorn and John (yes, there are three of them, but no comma). It's become a bit of a summer hit round these parts, thanks to its retro beat, shagadelic boy-girl vocals and, of course, that ridiculously catchy whistly bit. The venerable art of tootling has fallen out of vogue in recent years, but now it seems that every hipster, beatnik and nu-jazz singer is happy to pipe up in the middle of a song, and to heck with the guitar solo. If Roger Whittaker is planning his chart comeback, now could be the right time to do it.
Young People is the flagship single from the Swedish trio's third album, Writer's Block, and two of them, Peter and Bjorn, are in Dublin to promote the album and try to build up a profile outside their Stockholm base. The album's title is "like a wordplay, a really bad joke", admits sallow, goatee'd singer Peter Moren, who hails from the northern Swedish town of Dalena. Beside him is the big, bearlike Bjorn Yttling, from even further north, in the town of Vasterbotten. The writer's block of the title is a slightly dodgy area of Stockholm called Hornstull, which has lately been taken over by the hip crowd, and where the trio now live and work. A Swedish Hoxton, if you will. Peter and Bjorn have been friends and songwriting partners since school, when they first met and realised they agreed about a lot of music - and disagreed about a lot more.
"We had these small songs, and we took two guitars and played with a drum machine," recalls Peter of the pair's early encounters. "We had been writing songs separately long before that. At that time when we were teenagers, I suppose it was a lot of Manchester and shoe-gazing bands that really influenced us, but also a lot of old stuff like Beach Boys, the Byrds and Burt Bacharach. When I was 10 years old, I only listened to '60s music, but then the Housemartins came along and I started listening to that."
In the small towns where Peter and Bjorn grew up, there was also an indigenous form of rockabilly known as raggare. Its aficionados dressed like a scruffier type of teddy boy, and drove around in hot rods. Luckily, the boys' parents had plenty of 1960s music in the house to counteract the influence of raggare - otherwise the trio may have emerged sounding like Shakin' Svens.
When they were teenagers, Peter and Bjorn formed a lounge duo with the fantabulous name of the Polo Necks. But when it came to writing and recording their own songs, the pair decided to simply use their own Christian names, and spare themselves the agony of trying to think of a cool band name. They replaced the drum machine with a chap named John Eriksson, and Peter, Bjorn and John were bjorn, sorry, born.
At first, their roles were clearly defined, but on the new album, they share songwriting, multi-instrumental and vocal duties. That's Peter singing lead on Young Folks, along with Viktoria Bergsmann from Swedish indie band the Concretes. Bjorn, meanwhile, sings lead on the evocative Amsterdam and the fuzzed-up Roll the Credits, while John handles lead on the gorgeous Start to Melt.
Add in washes of My Bloody Valentine feedback and some moody, Scott Walker-esque reflections, and you have an album that neatly blends happy-clappy with doomy-gloomy. So, if you get sick of whistling along to Young Folks, there are enough deep, dark and soulful songs to justify keeping Writer's Block on your Dansette. And enough strange sounds to keep the most fervent sonic trainspotter arrested for hours. For the trio, leavening the album's poppier moments with edgier, more experimental fare is crucial to keeping the balance.
"I think we like to explore both the dark side and the light side," says Peter. "But we write melodies, it comes naturally; it's not something we have to think about. But I think there are some dark sides here as well."
"I think even with Young Folks, the lyrics are quite melancholy," says Bjorn. "In a musical way, it's like real deep, it's got a lot of things going on in it, so you can play it a thousand different ways."
The song has already been a big hit at home, and is now nestled nicely in the Irish Top 30, and no doubt embedded in everybody's brain; but the potential is there for Young Folks to turn from an asset into an annoyance.
"Actually, people have started whistling it when they see us," says Peter with just a tremble of trepidation in his voice. "When you sit with someone on the bus or something, and then they start whisting it . . . But we don't really care about that. We didn't think about that when we did the song. It wasn't even obvious to us that it was the single. But then everybody seems to like it, from the hip-hop guy on the block to the guy at the store."
Writer's Block is out now on Lakota Records. Peter Bjorn and John play Dublin's Crawdaddy tonight