Per Forssell - "Hantverk", a Swedish remarkable album from the 80s

    What if The Rutles had been a one-man powerpop band from Sweden? Aged just 13, Per Forssell started fooling around with his parent’s Tandberg tape deck and figured out how to layer recordings by blocking the erase head with pieces of paper. He also wrote music and played in a local pop band. “I still have some recordings from 1965, and they sound pretty awful,” he tells us today. By ’67, he could do eight to 10 overdubs, although still in mono. “I started to play around on more instruments,” says Per. “But the recordings just ended up in a drawer.”

Per Forssell eventually moved from his parental home in Uppsala and took up work as a press and advertising photographer in southwestern coastal town Helsingborg. There, he created a home studio with a Revox A-77, and later also a 4-channel Teac open-reel deck, giving him the opportunity to record jingles and eventually landing him a job as sound engineer at Swedish Television. He would bounce recordings from one machine to the other, and this setup was used to record Hantverk. “I started dreaming about making an LP,” says Per. “And I wanted to do everything myself.” Hence the album title, literally meaning handicraft.

Album opener ‘Lazy Weekends’ has an exaggerated British accent, sounding like The Rutles (who were aiming to amuse American audiences at the time). But while the melody fine is also reminiscent of their ‘I Must Be In Love’, Per was unaware of this. “I had listened to The Small Faces and was trying to emulate them.”

Although there are other influences (“People told me ‘Tack alla gamia vànner’ sounded like The Mamas & The Papas”), The Beatles were the obvious benchmark. “I remember listening to Radio Luxembourg as a kid, using headphones and dozing off due to the radio static, but then being jolted awake ‘What was that?!”’ A prime example is ‘Get It Right’. “That’s just a song about fucking,” laughs Per. “Although the music was inspired by Badfinger.”

Per’s production ambitions are noticeable on instrumental ‘Bomullsdrommar” that employs a monophonic synth, and ‘Electralyx’, intended as a jingle for appliance maker Electrolux. “I put drawing pins on the piano hammers to create a harder sound,” explains Per. On ‘Skogens djur’ Per also borrows bird and water effects from the Swedish TV archives.

Unfortunately, the LP ends with some less successful parody songs. “I had recorded many other tracks,” muses Per, who had compiled a selection of his recordings for the LP. He would release Dagbok in ’89 and Ensamlek in the 2010 s, but although technically superior, they lack the naively infectious charm of his debut. Had Per avoided trying to make fun of punk, folk and chart music, Hantverk might have become a Swedish DIY classic. And maybe that great pop album is still hiding in his tape archives from the time.