“Peter Bjorn and John are complete jokers,” a man In The Know informs me ahead of chatting to one third of Sweden’s most thrilling indie-pop three-piece. “One of the few bands I’ve met that are a real laugh.” The Stockholmers’ sense of humour is no big secret. The first video from their forthcoming fifth album Living Thing features masked PBJ fans dancing at a shoddy indie disco chanting “Hey! Shut the fuck up boy! You’re really starting to piss me off” in the sweetest singalong melody to drip from our stereo since… well, the last Peter Bjorn and John single. They got Jan Hammer (yes: the Miami Vice keytar-wielding composer) to remix their next sweet single. The promotional packages from their Writer’s Block album cleverly included writer’s block post-it notepads. Rather than follow up their whirlwind success in light of the ubiquitous ‘Young Folks’ single with another killer album they made every fan do a double-take with a wholly instrumental album, Seaside Rock. Even their name is a sly wink at pedants everywhere: they omitted the comma for ‘typographical considerations’. Best of all, though, they give gusset-splittingly funny interviews. John Erikkson gave us one of their most chuckleworthy yet.
So I just realized PBJ are 10 years old this year… If you were going out with a girl for 10 years you’d probably be getting married around now.
Hahaha, yes! Tomorrow we will go to church.
Do you think you could marry Peter and Bjorn for life?
Yes, but not with actual God. With some other god maybe. A sea god, or some big Space god
You did your first gig on a boat, right?
We did. I felt a bit sick because the boat was so wobbly, but apart from that it was probably one of the least attended concerts in history. It was two people, people who were paid to be there, and then two or three friends. We got paid in shrimps. Shrimp cocktails. It was… not so good.
You ‘re not really getting paid in shrimps anymore…
No. Now we’re paid in caviar.
Is there more pressure on the band now there’s caviar at stake?
There’s actually no pressure. It’s more something we still do for fun, and something we impose a very high standard on ourselves when we do it. We’re still doing it to make hits and to surprise people. The mixture of that I hope will still work. We are so proud of what we make, so whether things go wrong or right we’ll still be making another record in a short while, it’s what we care most about doing.
I think Peter Bjorn and John are associated with the summer really strongly, because Young Folks was such a hit at festivals and really broke out in the summer… The new album seems to be a lot darker, and the artwork makes it look quite claustrophobic- Is it a different kind of mood to Writer’s Block?
Oh yeah, you’re absolutely right. If the last record was like a movie it would be a comedy drama, and this one would be…. Space Odyssey. A really dark sci-fi film. It’s spooky, and sexy, and strange.
What made you move towards that? Did you binge on Battlestar Galactica coming up to recording?
We tried on Writer’s Block to do this as well. We wanted a sound that’s more modern, to create noises we’ve never made before, never even heard before. The sounds that we did end up with were strange and spooky ones, and the songwriting changed for them to have more… to be more obvious. We stripped off lots of the psychedelic guitars that we used before so that it’s a lot more naked.
The Living Thing artwork is beautiful – who made it?
Isn’t it? That was Thomas Broome. I saw it when I was at an exhibition in Stockholm and thought it would fit the album perfectly, that it really reflected the strangeness of the album, but also the beauty of it. It’s incredible that he made that art using a computer, but it looks so natural. It’s like how we’ve made these very electronic sounding noises but using acoustic instruments on the album. It represents it perfectly, I think.
I absolutely love the Lay It Down video too. Where did that come from?
Hahaha, that was a lot of fun. I was travelling in South America, mostly Cuba and wrote a script, and we had a girl we know in a dance school in Stockholm do the rest. It’s really weird, and our new video is going to be… weirder possibly.
The Japanese one (Nothing To Worry About)?
Yes. Have you seen it?
A snippet…
And your brain… survived?
I’m a different person after it, I think. There’s a great sense of humour involved in it, how it starts with a broken-down Young Folks and the masked dancers… Do you think most contemporary indie pop bands take themselves far too seriously?
Yes. Yes. [emphatically]
What were the motivations behind the instrumental album? I loved it, I think it’s my favourite PBJ album. How did you find the reaction to it?
I think we’re united, I love it too. People were expecting us to do something weird, and some weren’t, and so some love it and some really, really hate it. It was a fun thing to do, and most importantly it was a stage to the new album, in how we work in the studio and stuff. The music is very special to me on it.
You leaked your last song through Kanye West’s blog… Are you guys friends now?
Yeah, we hang out every day. Actually, we live together. No, seriously though, he’s a nice guy. We met him once, when we played in Gothenburg and loved his shows. We’re supposed to meet him in the States when we go over. People are closer than you think in the industry, from a music listener’s view, I think. We spoke to Jan Hammer who composed the Miami Vice soundtrack, and we got him to remix the new single, but that was just through knowing a friend who has a friend who… knows the guy who composed the Miami Vice sountrack, you know?
You were talking about the new album being quite minimalist… I reckon the new songs sound like warped versions of Kanye West’s stuff from back on The College Dropout… Would you count him as an influence?
I never actually related them to songs off that particular Kanye West record, but certainly it’s influenced by some other hip-hop records. The great thing about hip-hop is all you need is a really great beat and a really great bassline, and really great lyrics. That’s what we tried to do. We took away all the strange guitar and focussed on doing a lot with a little.
You jazz a lot too, right? Does any of that influence creep into the PBJ sound?
Yeah, I love jazz. All this stuff has an effect. At the time of the album we listened to a lot of John Cage’s string quartets, the way the strings are played on his first string quartet was something that affected us a lot.
You’ve used steelpan before on your records – did you use any new weird instruments on Living Thing?
Yeah, and stuff that’s not instruments. Matchbox. Balloon. Umbrella. Eh… a lot of stuff we managed to build ourselves too. It’s like making a cartoon with music.
What’s your 2009 calendar looking like now? Is there anything you’re genuinely excited for coming up this year?
We’re speaking about, after this tour is over, doing an Irish pub tour. It’s something we’ve always talked about. We’ve played this little place called… eh… Galway before?
Yeah, I think I’ve heard of it. Tiny little village.
Lots of places like that. I think this album is much more pub-oriented (!).
Have you done a non-music related pub tour of Ireland before?
No, we have to stop letting music getting in the way of what we want to do.
Peter, Bjorn & John play The Button Factory on Saturday, March 7th. Their new album ‘Living Thing’ is released on March 27th.
Words by Daniel Gray
