We’re right in the middle of the two week festival taking place in Stockholm at the moment. From Sweden’s national day last Sunday, to the day of the Royal Wedding next Saturday, Love Stockholm has been hosting all kinds of free events for the people of the city. And one particular theme featured heavily, is live music! The town square of Kungsträdgården has played host to a huge stage, with a seating area, a standing area, a bar, and a restaurant, for people to come and see artists perform live.
Obviously, it’s the scandipopstar live performances that we’ve been interested in most of all, and so far we’ve already been utterly spoilt! On Friday night we got to see Carola do an hour long set. We’d seen her before, at a church benefit concert for Haiti. But it was great to see her on Friday night, as she performed her schlager hits which we hadn’t seen live before. She did a full version of ‘Evighet’ and a medley of her other two Eurovision songs and some more schlager hits. She also sang her new single ‘Tänk Om’, composed especially for the royal wedding. Plus she did a few slower songs, and some covers. As always, she proved herself to be a great performer, and the crowd absolutely loved her. The TV4 website has uploaded a video of some of the concert, which you can see below;
Yesterday was even more exciting for us though, as there were no less than 3 of our favourite schlager stars lined up to perform a 45 minutes set each, back to back – Anne-Lie Ryde, Shirley Clamp, and Sanna Nielsen. We’ve seen Shirley Clamp before a few times (and last night she was as amazing as always), but we’d never seen Anne-Lie or Sanna before. Sanna was great, and probably the most popular with the crowd last night. Everyone seems to love her, and she did have an infectious smile on her face throughout the whole gig. She performed plenty of our favourites, ‘Hela Världen För Mig’, ‘Vågar Du Vågar Jag’, ‘Empty Room’, ‘Devotion’, and ‘Strong’, plus a few others. TV4 have also uploaded a section of her gig too;
But our absolute favourite of the whole festival so far was Anne-Lie Ryde. She was just amazing in every single way! She had bags of energy from the start, which only seemed to increase as each song went on, until by the end of the gig, she was still getting even better and you could tell she didn’t want it to end. We didn’t want it to end either. Our Swedish is limited so far, but we did love her humour and her banter between songs. It ranged from self depracating jokes, to standing up for how brilliant she thinks ‘Så Nära’ is, and how it deserved to do better at Melodifestivalen, to introducing her cover of ‘Alla Har Glömt’ by describing the song’s original singer, Towa Carson, as Eskilstuna’s very own Shirley Bassey! Yes!
She performed a great mix of genres and covers, but our favourites were of course the schlager songs. As well as her brilliant cover of ‘Alla Har Glömt’, she performed her Melodifestivalen 2004 song, ‘Säg At Du Har Angrat Dig’, plus an amazing song that we hadn’t heard before but which sounded just like ‘Säg At Du Har Angrat Dig’. We think she introduced it as ‘I Mitt Liv’ but aren’t sure. Our favourite song though, was the seminally incredible ‘Så Nära’. We love that song so much, and we literally just stood there in awe as she performed it live. It’s just such a joyful song, and her performance of it made it even more special as we watched it. We know it’s verging on the ridiculous to say so, but those three minutes were seriously some of the best live music we’ve ever seen! 🙂
And finally, the outfit she had on. Oh, the outfit! Tight jeans, a see-through shirt that generously displayed most of her midriff, and a green leather jacket. And with her red hair sclupted high on top of her head, she’d clearly come dressed as the Poison Ivy of schlager. What a woman!
For some unfathomable reason, TV4 have neglected to upload any of Anne-Lie’s gig from yesterday. But for the uninitiated, we feel we should post two of her classic Melodifestivalen performances here. Enjoy;
Phew!
Coming up this week, we’re going to be seeing the following acts at Love Stockholm. Hopefully they’ll be even half as good as what we’ve seen so far. We’re especially excited about Gravitonas though, as it’ll be their first ever live gig.
Darin
Ola
Gravitonas
Alice Svensson
Amy Diamond
Nanne
Timoteij
Play
Linda Sundblad
Caroline Af Ugglas
Erik Grönwall
REbound
