[ THE START ]

At the age of thirteen me and my buddy Anders Hedlund was playing squash towards a garage door on a parking lot in the small town of Umeå in the north of Sweden when one of us came up with the brilliant idea of turning the racket around, playing it as if it was aguitar. At the time I had no idea what an impact this would have on my future! We were heavily into Deep Purple and Uriah Heep, and we decided to form a band then and there. Unfortunately we didn’t have a dime to our names, neither any musical instruments, so the dream was seemingly impossible to catch. After weeks - months of relentless persuasion of my parents into buying me an electric guitar, my prayers (read brainwash) seemed to have panned out. On Christmas eve 1973 I opened the case and laid eyes on my very first guitar – a second hand Hagstroem Impala. It was love at first sight. Six years of practising and playing in bands later I’d discovered that I was outgrowing Umeå. I packed my guitar and bags and took off for the bright lights – big city: Stockholm. I got a job in a hospital emptying trash with hepatitis infected syringes and tran-sporting dead people to the morgue. It wasn’t a great job, but it had an obvious upside … if I did my ”stiff runs” fast enough I would get lots of time over to go down to the dressing room where I kept a guitar in my locker. Thanks to those corpses I got lots of invaluable practising done every day during fully paid working hours. Thank you dead guys. Or as Alice Cooper would have put it; I love the dead.

[ THE OPENING ]

When I joined the glam/punk act Noice in 1982 I got my first taste of the rock’n’roll life style. The platinum selling band was creating hysteria, pulling major crowds wherever we played. The tour I did with them has gone down in history as ”the tour of scandals”. We ended up in the tabloids more often than not, and we had to get police escort back and forth from almost every gig. During this tour I learned how to play a guitar solo while running and ducking for eggs, tomatoes and even rocks, because not all the guys in the audience appreciated the effect we had on the women in the crowd. I got along especially well with the bass player, Peo Thyrén, and it wasn’t long before we started scheeming on ideas for forming a new band, since we felt that Noice was doomed to fall apart anytime. A lot of this had to do with the keyboard player Freddie Hansson and his self destructive way of life. Between gigs me and Peo started to hang out in London, picking up the club vibe and listening to bands like The Southern Death Cult (later just ”The Cult”), Killing Joke and The Specimen.

Back in Stockholm we hooked up with vocalist Zinny Zan, former drummer of The Nymphomaniacs (whom later became Hanoi Rocks), Freddie Von Gerber, former drummer of Intermezzo and Noice and Danny Wilde (later to form Road Rats with Conny Blom from the Electric Boys). This five piece band felt ultimate and we were psyched, completely ready to take on the world.

[ THE CALLING ]

In 1983 the self entitled album by Easy Action was released on SIRE Records world wide. Our music was a witches brew of hard rock, metal and punk, and you could hear influences from Alice Cooper, David Bowie and The Sweet but also from The Clash and Ratt. Our manager had met record industry legend Seymour Stein at the Midem fair in Cannes, and we subsequently became the first Swedish band to ever sign a US major label world wide recording deal. Danny Wilde decided to leave the band and was replaced by Chris Lynn, who had quite a reputation for his mean riffing in the band B-Films. We did a lot of touring in Scandinavia and loved every minute of it. Lots of people came to the concerts and we had some memorable pyrotechnics going on in the show. At one point a girl ended up in the hospital after trying to get up on stage when she got too close to the Bengalian fires.

Easy Action (and Hanoi Rocks) created the Scandinavian glam wave that a lot of US bands were influenced by, but for some reason we never got properly credited for it. Zinny Zan later moved to Los Angeles and formed Shotgun Messiah, while I found a new singer named Tommy Nilsson, who just had moved back to Sweden from Paris, France where he had a million selling record. With this amazing singer and a state-of-the-art production of the album; That Makes One, we know got lots of interest from US Labels and David Geffen of Geffen Records was keeping the hot line open with EA:s manager Niels Kvistborg.