BIOG

"Seeing Mando Diao live is like going to church. Our fans get the same feeling from us that some people get from religion."
So says Gustaf Norén, rhythm guitarist, scalp-tingling singer, moody songwriter, and one-quarter of Mando Diao. Like his colleagues -- lead guitarist/singer Björn Dixgård, bassist Carl-Johan "CJ" Fogelklou and drummer Samuel Giers -- he grabbed onto rock & roll to save his soul, once he was old enough to know what life would be like in dear old Borlänge.
"Our town is dangerous and cold," he explains. "It has the highest drug and murder rate of anyplace in Sweden. You had to be bad if you didn't want to get hit by some gang of fools in school. And if you could survive all that, then life became boring as well as dangerous."

The future bandmates avoided homicide through a combination of street smarts and seclusion within the shelter of music. "I was on the outside," Gustaf remembers. "Metallica and Guns N' Roses were all you heard in my school, but I was really into soul music and The Beatles, and then when I heard Nirvana for the first time, I felt that rock & roll would be the one thing in my life that would never let me down. It was something I could count on, just like a Christian could count on God.

"Of course," he adds, a little ominously, "when someone feels he's been betrayed by God, he gets really angry."
That's what happened to our heroes as rock dribbled away into a puddle of gooey pop and poseur punk. Aghast, they came to realise that the only way to keep the magic alive, and to keep their faith intact, would be to do it themselves.
But that took a while. The roots of the band trace back to 1995, with Björn present at the creation of Butler, the first incarnation of Mando Diao. People came and went until, four years later, the rest of the current lineup found itself standing amidst the wreckage of half-assed losers who couldn't keep up with the group's mission. "We got real serious," Gustaf says. "We gave up thinking about school. We gave up thinking about girlfriends. Björn and I locked ourselves away in this summer house and spent six months writing songs. We gave up our lives for the band, because we knew that without Mando Diao we would be nothing."

They were, at that moment of commitment, about sixteen years old.

Like wild-eyed prophets in the wilderness, Mando Diao slammed into the listless Borlänge club scene. A local writer gaped at their performance, a perfect balance of control and anarchy through months of messianic rehearsal, then rushed back to his computer to anoint them as the best unsigned band he had ever seen. "He felt we were going to be as big as Oasis," Gustaf says. "Those were big words."

News spread quickly to Stockholm, as distant a vision as Oz might seem from Kansas. A demo made it to Tommy Gärdh, the Carson Daly of Swedish television, who brought the band up and put them in front of the camera for the whole country to see. With his help, they sifted through the clamor of major label offers and settled on a deal with EMI in Sweden because, as Gustaf puts it, "they understood our music best."

In fact, they were so understanding that, after bringing the band into the studio to re-record the songs on their demo, they agreed with their decision to stick with the original, home-brew versions. "We liked that naïve feeling we had on our demos," Gustaf says. "We recorded, engineered, produced, and mixed them for ourselves with no idea that we were recording an album that people would talk about and write about and hear on the radio. So those demos are kind of special to us."

Just prior to the album's Swedish release, Mando Diao signed onto a national tour with the Hellacopters, Kent, and Thåström -- three acts with strong followings throughout the country. Though sunk at the bottom of the bill, Mando Diao saw this as their chance to seize the spotlight from their toughest competition. Which is exactly what happened.

"It was like women's pro-golfer Anikka Sorenstam taking on the guys," Gustaf says. "We wanted to measure ourselves against the biggest bands in Sweden. We'd done lots of live shows, but we'd never been on a real, professional tour. So here are these other bands that had been playing for ten years and were thirty or forty years old, and here come these twenty-year-old guys, playing real rock & roll and doing it better."

Momentum from the album and the triumphant tour carried Mando Diao all the way to Japan, where bring 'em in had just been released. Their romp beneath the Rising Sun precipitated scenes unlike any they had encountered before. "It was so frantic," Gustaf says. "And after we conquered Japan and came back home, we started getting these letters from Japanese fans who had translated our lyrics from English to Swedish! We didn't even know our songs in Swedish. They're so crazy over there, which is why we love them."

"The whole experience of Mando Diao is about not caring what the outside world thinks as we head toward our goal," Gustaf continues. "This train is moving too fast for us to see the outside landscape. Our songs are our gods: We have to obey them. Nothing can stop us. We honestly believe our record is better than anything by the Who, or the Kinks, or the Small Faces. It may even be better than many of the Stones' or Beatles' records. We're competing with the biggest bands in this world.

"So, bring 'em in. We'll take 'em down."