The Cardigans will also play in Moscow, Russia July 11, 2012.

A summary:
Hultsfred festival, Hultsfred, Sweden, June 14-16, 2012
Ruisrock festival,Finland, July 6-8, 2012
Moscow, Russia, July 11, 2012
Butka Open Air festival, Tromsö, Norway, July 19, 2012

January 12, 2012

From Marcus Samuelsson’s blog

Recently I got to cook with famous singer Nina Persson from the world-wide acclaimed Swedish/Danish band The Cardigans for Gourmet Sweden Magazine. Nina and I not only share the home country of Sweden but also now the neighborhood of Harlem. She proudly calls Harlem home alongside her husband Nathan Larson and 1 year-old son, Nils.

We came together to cook for Gourmet Sweden Magazine and with a mission: to put together a dinner for two, plus a 1 year-old. But the greater challenge was to get her husband, Nathan to like fish. He’s not a big fan of fish and our goal was to come up with something so tasty, it would change his mind. My aim was to help Nina bring out her husband’s taste buds and make him like fish, or at least help.

We came up with a menu for a romantic dinner for two that included a Champagne Cocktail, Roasted Nuts, a Red Caesar Salad, Spinach Soup with Melon and Crab, Pomegranate Panacotta with a Basil Gele, and for the “pièce de résistance”: Grilled Fish with a Sour Tomato Broth. Needless to say, he loved the meal and after that, was a bit more open to eating other fish dishes. Glad to be of service, Nina!

These and much more can be found in the Nina Persson picture page.

The band will be playing the Gran Turismo album and will be without guitarist Peter Svensson who cannot attend due to family reasons.

thanks to reader vera kiss for the tip

Yann has been a long time Cardigans fan since 1995 and is still very active with his own site, Sick and Tired.

Most importantly – he and I have swapped live shows for many years prior to You Tube. Perhaps you don’t realize how hard it used to be to get video footage of the Cardigans!

Like most Cardigans fans, Yann has a unique story in how he came into contact with the Cardigans and how their music has changed his life.

My Cardigans stories (part 1)
What follows is based on an idea by Jason, who runs the cardifans.com page and asked Cardigans fans to record videos where they would tell their experiences and thoughts about the band. I was not too keen on auto-interviewing myself, but I thought I could write down all my experiences about/with the Cardigans, for your enjoyment (hopefully) but also to make sure that my memories don’t disappear too quickly in the mists of time – I noticed while writing this it that there were already some blurry parts about things that happened not even ten years ago, so I guess it was time to do this !

While you read this, I suggest you listen to the following selection of tracks from concerts I attended, so that you feel like you were there too !

1. Hey! Get Out Of My Way (Paris, Erotica 1996)
2. Celia Inside (Paris, Erotica 1996)
3. Been It (Paris, Elysée Montmartre 1999)
4. Lovefool (Paris, Elysée Montmartre 1999)
5. A Camp – Frequent Flyer (Paris, Le Cabaret Sauvage 2001)
6. A Camp – I Can Buy You (Paris, Le Cabaret Sauvage 2001)

Download

I discovered the Cardigans in May 1995. Wow, that was 16 years ago ! I was in my room while some radio played Sick & Tired and I was simply amazed by what I heard. I was staring at the speakers, trying to understand how something could sound so beautiful. I taped two thirds of the song and the next problem was : who was that ? They played this song as a filler and no DJ said anything about it.
No Internet yet to search info. I tried to find who they could be with my meagre clues by browsing endlessly in my usual record shop, but I wasn’t successful. Fortunately, about a week later, some local radio played In the afternoon (or maybe Black letter day ?), I recognized the voice (THE voice!) and they were kind enough to tell the title of song and the name of the band. I rushed to my record store the next day to buy Emmerdale, and that was it, I was hooked.

What was kind of frustrating is that I only had this single album to play, as, I guessed, this was their first one. I only had to regularly check my record store, hoping there would be another one coming one of these days. And it did, late 1995, Life was released, with a slight disappointment that it included some songs already featured in Emmerdale (it was the UK version and not the original Swedish one). Around this time I managed to make a friend addicted to them too (although not as seriously as me).

I first saw the Cardigans in concert in May 1996. Purely by chance I happened to find that they would play a very small venue in Paris (they were virtually unknown, not played on national radios or TV channels or anything). So I travelled 400 km to see them (that was a short trip compared to what was to come) in this “Erotica” hall. Maybe 200 people, and funnily, maybe more Japanese people than French. I didn’t know about the success of the band in Japan yet, but it all made sense later. And they were screamin “En gång till” (“one more time !”) in Swedish, now, that was exotic. I remember thinking later that I was in France, along with Japanese people, listening to a Swedish band singing songs in English. About the concert itself, well, it was obviously fantastic, with this funny contrast between Nina, very calm, snapping her fingers as the ultimate stage action, and Peter and Magnus who were jumping everywhere all the time. They played Step on me which was yet unreleased at that time and had me clapping at the wrong time, thinking that the song was finished when it wasn’t… I also remember Lasse’s old-looking keyboard with a Star Wars “May the force be with you” sticker on it. Great concert, but way too short, barely one hour. But you can’t expect more from a band that had only two albums released, I guess. Another regret : they had theses great “We’re the Cardigans, and you’re not” T-shirts for sale, and I didn’t buy one, as they were extremely expensive. Now I wish I had.

Came Lovefool and everything changed. Until then when I spoke about the band to some of my friends, I always had to explain who they were, nobody had heard about them. And suddenly I found myself being a fan of a fashionable band, which I certainly didn’t see coming. I was probably slightly less enthusiastic about First band on the moon than about the first two albums, but I still enjoyed it very much, Lovefool included.

But when Gran Turismo was released, I was at first not thrilled at all, except by the instantly catchy My Favourite Game. I have a tendency to prefer “natural” instruments to electronic ones, so it took me a while to get used to this album, and find that there were still great melodies (which is always what attracts me in the first place) buried under the electronica.

I think that’s around the First Band On The Moon era that I wrote to Stockholm Records to request autographs from the band. They were away on tour at the time, but I was sent a great (real) autographed picture of the band in tennis clothes.

My next opportunity to see the Cardigans in concert came in April 1999. Once more I had to travel to Paris, book a hotel room close to the Elysée Montmartre hall where they played (a much bigger venue than the Erotica !) I had just dropped my stuff in my hotel room and went down for a walk in the streets, when in Rue Dancourt I stumbled upon Nina and her boyfriend (was it Nathan Larson yet ? Can’t remember). I just couldn’t believe it (what are the odds ?), I somehow managed to ask for her autograph (I had a pen and some paper, just in case), tell her “see you tonight at the concert” and that was it. I certainly didn’t want to disturb them more, and away they went. And away I went with a big silly smile on my face. I hope they erected a statue in Rue Dancourt to commemorate the event !

The concert itself illustrated how things had changed for the band since I last saw them. Bigger hall, I was much further from the stage, which was disappointing. Magnus wasn’t there, being too tired and stressed by life on the road, Nina was experiencing throat problems (some gigs had to be cancelled to preserve her voice) and seemed rather gloomy. At one point during the concert, she said “You’re very quiet… Do you hate us ?”, which is something that might be a bit dangerous to tell the audience… It goes without saying that I enjoyed the concert, anyway, but things had clearly changed. Later, Magnus told me how much pressure there was on the band then, and how close they were to breaking up.

By the way, got my first Cardigans T-shirt there. “Gran Truismo”, it said !

I saw the band perform again a few months later, in July 1999, in La Rochelle, on the Atlantic Coast, in a festival called “Les Francofolies”, usually devoted to French-speaking artists only, but for whatever reason they had decided to bring a few English-speaking bands, so they were there, playing a slightly shorter set than in Paris, mostly Gran Turismo songs. Once again I was too far from the stage for my taste. I can’t say I have lots of memories from this concert.

A few days later I went to Sweden for the first time. I had been invited there by a girl that I had met through the Cardigans’ website forum a few months before, who had also bought for me Peter Svensson’s solo album, Paus, that wasn’t available outside of Sweden. She was a Cardigans’ fan, especially interested in Magnus, but maybe not only for musical reasons. We were staying in Lund, a beautiful little town close to Malmö. We had a phonebook for Malmö (a Swedish phonebook is a funny thing : dozens of pages of “Svensson”, dozens of pages of “Persson”…) and I can’t remember how, but she got what seemed to be the right address for Magnus. We went to Malmö, found the right building, but we were both too shy to try to ring at Magnus’s door. Just took a pic of me in front of the door. With stalkers like us, he was safe, really. We also went “where the magic happened”, to Tambourine Studios, which we had a hard time finding. The doors were closed, quite obviously.

Later, my Swedish friend got to meet Magnus when he was DJing in a club in Malmö. She told her about our attempts, he said we should have rung, he would have given us a tour of Tambourine… Oh, the regrets !

During this stay, we also went to a music festival that took place in Malmö. Not that the Cardigans were performing there or anything, but that was nice to hear some good Swedish bands, and the icing on the cake was that Peter Svensson was there in the crowd, and I got to shake his hand and tell him how much I enjoyed his Paus album. (I might be the only, or one of the only person(s) in France to own this album, by the way…)

Later that year I created a website dedicated to the Cardigans, that I naturally called Sick And Tired, both in French and English.

Then it clearly appeared that the Cardigans were on a hiatus, and the spotlight was now on Nina who released her first A Camp album in 2001. (I received mine in the mail on September 11, 2001.) One more trip to Paris in October, to see her perform in a small hall this time, called “Le Cabaret Sauvage”. And she looked the opposite of what she looked like in ’99 : now she seemed relaxed, happy to be there, as she was free from all the pressure she felt with the Cardigans. And I enjoyed myself a lot too, I especially appreciated the fact that the songs were free of what I would call the “beeping sounds” that were almost all over the A Camp album to make it sound “modern” or whatever, and were, in my opinion, useless and distracting.

To be continued !

Not sure how long the link will be up – so do it quickly.

The first one is called “The Name of the Game”

The second one is called “Johnny Cash and Nina P”.

Nicky, 42, said his career high-point was working with The Cardigans’ singer Nina Persson on Your Love Alone Is Not Enough.

He said: “I think our greatest single is a toss-up between something more intellectually stimulating like If You Tolerate This or just something raw and honest like Motown Junk, Design For Life, or Your Love Alone with Nina, which was certainly from my, Sean [Moore] and James’ [Dean Bradfield] view a career high-point.

“Working with someone like Nina, and her voice, we just want to make an album of duets with her.

“James wants to stop singing and get Nina in the band instead.

You can read the entire article here.

The track is called Cowboys and Hobos and you can preview it here.

Thanks to vera kiss for the tip