Various British Beat In Sweden - The Original Vinyls 1957 - 1969

A surging wave of British rock and pop acts washed all across Sweden as the Beatles led the frontline of the powerful British beat boom in Scandinavia during the early to mid sixties and onwards. This book compiles in a most comprehensive way all 396 UK groups and artists having a record released in Sweden during 1957-1969, with either a single, EP or LP manufactured domestically for the Swedish market.

ILLUSTRATED COLLECTOR´S GUIDE
Over 2.000 original vinyl releases are shown here in full colour! Most of them are here depicted in a book for the first time. Also shown are the numerous colour versions in existence of the often so beautifully made 45 r.p.m. picture sleeves.

All the vinyl records (with variations) have been designated a valuation grade between 1 – 10 stars in order to guide you  as to how rare and in-demand a certain vinyl is on the collector´s market today.

CHALLENGE YOUR MUSIC KNOWLEDGE

Renowned Swedish music journalist Pontus von Tell has provided 396 compressed biographies of all those UK acts that were so important, or sometimes unknown, in Sweden during those seminal years in pop music history.

Fabulous reading!
320 pages. Fully illustrated in colour.

HELLO BEAT FANS!
When the Libyan-Greek poet/scholar Callimachus started working on a bibliographical survey of the contents of the library in Alexandria in the third century BC — eventually re-sulting in a formidable 120 volumes called "Pinakes" — he was driven to utter, on account of the sheer scope of the project; "Big book, big evil". A man with a penchant for few words instead of long-winded epics, we'd like to think that Callima-chus might've found some merit in this book, which although voluminous in its totality, despite spanning but one instead of 120 volumes, contains 392 short stories, each comprising a career (or a part thereof).

Not daring to compare our humble tome to what Callimachus achieved over 2,000 years ago without the slighest hint of a computer, I can still vouch for the fact that schlepping this book together involved a huge toil that took exactly 20 years to bear fruit, after the concept was first broached at Premium headquarters in 1998. A lot of Swedish record collectors have for years been asking themselves, or other collectors, why someone hasn't got to grips with compiling such a book? The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind. It's festering in the void created by short-sighted Swedish record companies, most of which have long since ceased to exist.

Unfortunately these organisations lacked the foresight to realize that what they were peddling in the 50's and 60's would one day consti-tute music history, with the regrettable outcome that nobody bothered to save for posterity the information as to what discs they handled. With all such information being lost, it meant that anyone trying to collate a detailed account of what was actually sold in the Swedish record shops at the time, would have to roll up the sleeves, don rubber gloves and dig deep into the Swedish kok-kenmodding of vintage vinyl.

Fortunately Premium Publishing has had the services of just such a badger with a sleuth-hound's scent to rely on, Leif Aulin, who's spent the best part of his life trying to fill the gaps in the discographies through all available sources (ancient music papers, record collections, oldies record shops etc) to establish which records were issued in this neck of the woods. It goes without saying that Leif's discographies have
formed the backbones of this book, to which I've tried to fit a suitable structure of biographical flesh, for the artists involved.

I would hesitate to say that my burden was much lighter than Leif's, since some of the artists who had discs out in Sweden were hopelessly obscure at the time, and have in many cases remained so, which means that even trying to find any info on them in their homeland today has proved quite tricky. There-fore unearthing info on these unfortunate souls was no less an ardous chore. Yet no-one (least of all me) can deny that from the time when I started writing about UK artists in the mid-70's, one thing has changed to facilitate the gathering of infor-mation: The internet. With the Orwellian warning of "1984" ringing in the back of my mind, I was for years reluctant to delve into this cyberspace underworld. Luckily people a good deal wiser than myself, and whose judgement I trust more than my own, persuaded me to investigate the world-wide web.

I must confess that I've now embraced the web whole-heartedly (although you may be disappointed to learn that you won't be able to glimpse what I had for breakfast on Facebook!), and with equal candour I'm compelled to agree that the internet has proved a most helpful medium to acrue info on the artists in this book.
Be that as it may, I must still be fair and say that much of the biographical information contained herein was originally obtained in the 70's and 80's, when I was able to travel to the UK intermittently and meet the musicians/artists that I had an interest in. To those who took their time to speak to me goes my immense gratitude. Of all the people who helped me in the 70's, a special thanks must be extended to my friend Dario Ochoa, whose tiny flat in Muswell Hill (North London) proved a strategic place from where to stalk my victims in the music business, and to frequent concerts and record shops. A list of good people who helped in various ways will appear at the back of this book, and my hope is that they — and you, dear reader — will find my scribbles worth perusing.