In the winter of 2003 I interviewed Caesar’s Palace guitarist Joakim (Jocke) Ahlund by phone as part of a big roundup feature on Swedish rock bands that I wrote for the Big Takeover (it appeared in issue #52).   Because the Big Takeover feature covered so much ground, it was impossible to use more than a few quotes from the Caesar’s Palace interview, so I figured it deserves a standalone feature.  I probably should be chastised for not writing a longer introduction describing their CDs in great detail – suffice to say discs like Youth Is Wasted On The Young, Cherry Kicks, Love For The Streets or the new one, 39 Minutes Of Bliss, are all terrific trash pop.  If you liked the first Blondie album, you can’t go wrong with Caesar’s Palace. 

Steve:  When you were called the Twelve Caesars I got the Youth Is Wasted On The Young CD, I guess three years ago now, and I really liked that one.   

Jocke:  That’s cool.  We’re going to re-release some of those songs again in the US. 

Steve:  Your publicist sent me a CDR of what you’re going to release and it seems like it’s about half from Youth Is Wasted On The Young. (editors note: this became the CD called 39 Minutes Of Bliss (In An Otherwise Meaningless World), this after the band subsequently told me it would be called Cheap Glue, which was the name used in a review I wrote for Big Takeover.) 

Jocke:  Yeah, and some new stuff and some stuff that’s picked form the three lps that we’ve done here in Sweden. 

Steve: Do you know what it’s going to be called? 

Steve:  Well, my suggestion would be – even if it’s a little long – there’s one line in one of your songs that I thought was really good, and that’s A Knife And A Fork In A World Of Soup. 

Jocke:  Yeah, that’s a good one (laughs). 

Steve:  Well, can you tell me when the band started and give me the usual biographical run down? 

Jocke:  Yeah, we’ve been doing this for almost ten years now.  We got together, me and Cesar – we’ve known each other since kindergarten, literally.  We grew up together in the suburbs of Stockholm.  And we were both interested in music and we listened to music together all through our growing up together.  But we didn’t start this band until ten years ago.  We played a little bit together in other constellations before that, but not that much really and nothing serious. 

So Caesar’s Palace is our first band.  We were actually called Hellicopters at first – like Helicopters with two “L”s at the beginning, but then the Hellacopters came along and they’d thought of the same idea.  And we decided to change our name.  We didn’t want to fight about it, so we thought of Caesar’s Palace instead.   

Now we’re going to have to change that again to take away the Palace and just go with Caesars. 

Steve:  So you were Caesar’s Palace from the start, and the Twelve Caesars name was only for that US release? 

Jocke:   Yeah.  The Minty Fresh thing – they needed something to call the band in the US when Minty Fresh were going to release it there.  So we wanted to call ourselves The Caesarians.  But they thought that was too vulgar or something. 

Steve:  That’s funny – I think that’s a cool name.  Really good. 

Jocke:  I like that as well – The Caesarians.  It’s like – when you don’t come out the usual way, you have to cut the baby out. 

Steve:  Of course, yeah.  I think it’s a good name. 

Jocke:  Yeah, I liked that as well.  Maybe we should call the album that.  I dunno.  But we got stuck with the Twelve Caesars.  And now we’re changing it again, and it’s all very confusing for the 200 people who may have bought the first record. 

Steve:  Well, it certainly has been for me, because I had the first record, and I never saw anything else, and I thought, oh, well, this is one of those bands that comes and goes and that’s it.  And then when I started to work on this feature on Swedish bands I started looking around on the web a lot to find out what other Swedish bands I should chase down that I didn’t know about, and I came across Caesar’s Palace again.  So I thought, wow, they’re still here, and not only that, they have more albums, so I’ve got to get these. 

Jocke:  Yeah, well, we were around all the time.  It’s just that Minty Fresh were never interested in pursuing the thing and putting out the other albums that we had. 

Steve:  Is Minty Fresh affiliated with a major label? 

Jocke: I really don’t know.  I’ve never had any contact with those guys. 

Steve:  I’ve never heard of Minty Fresh other than for your CD… 

Jocke: They did put out some early Beck stuff and some…you know the Cardigans from Sweden?  They put out some early stuff on Minty Fresh I think.  And if I’m not mistaken there’s a Swedish band called Komeda, like Christopher Komeda, the movie score writer.  And they put out a couple records there as well.  But it doesn’t seem like anyone knows about Minty Fresh in the US, and especially not over here. 

Steve:  You told me about yourself and your singer Cesar, but you didn’t say much about the drummer and the bass player. 

Jocke:  Well, we met David the bass player and Jens the first drummer – we hooked up with them when we were going to high school.  Then we were just hanging out.  We didn’t play together – we were just good friends.  And then we decided to form the band, we didn’t actually bring in the best musicians that we knew, but rather the coolest friends – the people with the best taste in music and people that we liked to hang out with.  So that’s how we got the band together.  Nobody really knew how – I mean, I started playing guitar when I joined Caesar’s Palace.  I actually took up playing guitar when I joined the band.  Before that I’d just been playing the bass.  And it was basically the same kind of thing with Cesar and David.  David had played a little bass but not much.  He’d been in some mod outfits playing old sixties retro music back in the late 80s, I think.  But none of us were really experienced musicians at all.  We just liked hanging out together and started playing together. 

And then we also knew this guy named Issa, and he ran a record label down in Gothenberg in Sweden.  So when he heard the stuff – he heard our first demo, and he just put that out right away as our first seven inch single. 

Steve:  What were the songs on that? 

Jocke:  There’s one called “Shake It” and another one called “Odd Job”, you know, like that Chinese butler in James Bond.  And then the other one was called “Born Cool”.  So it was a three song seven inch.  It came out sometime in the early 90s.  Or maybe like 1995 or something. 

And then nobody really cared about that when we released that.  We had like 20 fans here in Sweden.  But we got a good review in Maximum Rock’n’Roll for that single, which I’ve still kept.  It says something like “This is good stuff if you like to annoy your neighbors”. 

Steve:  Was it similar to things you’ve done since then? 

Jocke:  What, annoying the neighbors? 

Steve: (laughs) No, I mean, just as far as the general sound of the single, was it like the kinds of things you’ve been doing more recently? 

Steve:  The organ is a nice addition I think.  In the late 80s I was really tired of bands with keyboards because it seemed like everybody ha keyboards, and since the 90s it’s gone the other way and almost no one has keyboards – its all two guitars, bass and drums.   Do you have much influence from that 80s new wave sort of thing?  I hear traces of early Elvis Costello or maybe even the Yachts in what you do. 

Jocke:   Not really.  I’ve never been much of a Costello fan myself.  Nino our drummer, he likes Costello, but he doesn’t write.  We listen to more 60s stuff actually.  For that keyboard sound, it’s a farfisa.  When I found that, I was so glad, because I’d been looking for one, and I knew that I wanted exactly that type of organ, because all the sixties bands that I listened to had that sound.  Like the Seeds – the kind of bands that couldn’t afford to buy a Hammond – they bought the cheesy farfisa instead.  And they sound so much cooler.  More cheesy and less macho than a Hammond.  Like a little annoying wasp in your ear almost.  It’s like a toy organ. 

Steve: Is that you playing the organ? 

Jocke:  Sometimes on the records.  But we take turns.  Nino plays a lot of the keyboard stuff.  He’s really the best keyboard player in the band.  And Cesar can play a little bit as well.  And I play some of the really primitive stuff.  Like have you heard “Jerk It Out”? 

Steve:  Yes – a really good song. 

Jocke:  Well, that’s me playing – I wrote that riff just playing around on the organ.  But when we play live, and for the really difficult stuff on the record, we have a guy named Bjorn, and he plays live and plays all the tricky stuff that we can’t really do ourselves. 

Steve:  But he’s not a full member of the band? 

Jocke:  No, he doesn’t want to be, because he’s got his own band, it’s called Peter, Bjorn and John.  That’s a really good band, actually.  You should check them out if you come across any of their records.  They actually put out a full length quite recently which is really good.  He liked Costello and you can hear that in their music. 

But I’m a fan of all that power pop stuff as well, like the Nerves – like “Hanging On The Telephone”.  Stuff like that.  Ramones, of course, for writing songs.  I like the Cure, but I don’t know if you can hear it in our music. 

Steve:  I never would have guessed that one.  But I’d have said maybe Blondie or something like that. 

Jocke:  Yeah, Blondie, I loved Blondie of course. 

Steve:  So have you heard the Yachts? 

Jocke: No, how do you spell that? 

Steve: It’s like the boat – Y-A-C-H-T-S.  They have two albums – the first is called SOS and it came out in 1979 or 1980 on Radar Records in the UK.  They were a band that was based around a keyboard sound, and when they first started it was a really cheap, cheesy keyboards, and what happened was after they made their first record they went and bought a good keyboard, and of course they weren’t any good after that. 

Jocke:  So their sound changed for the worse? 

Steve:  Yeah, but that first one, SOS, is fantastic, and I think you’d like it a lot.  I think you can probably find it only on vinyl. 

Jocke:  I’ll go looking on Gemm.  That’s the place to look if you are searching for something specific. 

Steve:  You’ll have no trouble finding it – there’s lots of them around. 

Jocke:  The sort of thing you find in the sale department of record shops. 

Steve:  Yeah, 99 cent bins in the US.  Anyway, I understand that you also produce music videos.  You did the video for your song “Fun and Games”, right? 

Jocke:  Yeah, I did that one.  I had a little bit of help, though.  I have to give credit to a couple friends of mine that helped me out.   There’s a guy called Gosta Reiland – he’s quite a hotshot photographer now – he’s doing things like Madonna videos and stuff.  But he helped me out shooting the “Fun and Games” video, and I had help from two other friends as well.  But yeah, I had the main responsibility for that one, and I edited it and stuff. 

And I’ve done quite a few other videos, like 20 or 25, for other Swedish bands as well. 

Steve:  What are some of the best ones you’ve done? 

Jocke:  Um, do you know a band called the International Noise Conspiracy?  I’ve done a video for them called “Reproduction Of Death”.  And you know the band that Dennis was in before the International Noise Conspiracy, he was in a band called Refused.  And I did a video for them called “New Noise”.  And there’s a band called Bob Hund.  They’re really cool.  They might be the kind of band that is kind of hard for a foreigner to understand because they sing in Swedish, but it’s really really good and interesting music.  And I did a really cool video for them as well. 

Oh, yeah, and I did a little bit of a sell out thing and did a video for the Backyard Babies as well.  Which is kind of not my favorite Swedish band but I did it anyway.  But it’s not one of the things I’m most proud of. 

Steve:  That’s a funny band.  They had one album that I liked a lot – that Total 13 one, but then their others sound too much like heavy metal. 

Jocke:  Yeah, I’m not into that sort of thing at all.  But I sort of know the two front guys – I know them all, and they’re really sweet guys, but it’s just not my favorite type of music or style or anything.   

And there’s also a really good band called Broder Daniel – that’s Brother Daniel in English.  They sing in English, and they’ve done brilliant, brilliant stuff that I really like and they have a couple records out – I don’t think that any of them have been released anywhere else but in Sweden.  And I did a video for them as well that came out really good. 

Steve:  What kind of gigs do you play in Sweden?  Do you play much in Sweden, or do you play outside Sweden more? 

Jocke: We play quite a lot in Sweden.  We actually have sold gold here in Sweden and we’re actually starting to become quite popular and quite big here.  We were nominated for two Grammys this year, though we didn’t get any. 

But we try to play more small shows because we think that’s more fun, but we can also play festivals in front of 30,000, or maybe in front of ten to fifteen thousand.  If we play a big gig, maybe it’s about a thousand or 1500 people.  We try to play smaller club gigs mostly, because that’s more fun. 

Steve:  How many places can you actually play in Sweden?  

Jocke:  There are quite a few cities.  You can do a tour here and play like 14 cities if you want to.  You’re not going to have so much fun in some of those cities, but you can play in quite a lot of places.  But the bigger cities are like Stockholm, Gothenberg and Malmo.  Those are quite alright cities, but apart from that it’s really not much fun.  But we’ve been to most of the cities here in the period that we’ve been doing this. 

Steve:  What about outside of Sweden? 

Jocke:  Oh, we’ve been to Norway, Denmark, Holland.  We’ve been to Holland quite a lot actually.  We did two tours of Holland.  Somebody put out Cherry Kicks and Youth Is Wasted On The Young there.  Only for Holland.  So we were huge in Sweden and Holland for a while.  It was fun to tour in Holland really.  That was good. 

Steve:  It’s funny, I just got an e-mail from a guy in Holland telling me that I should check out Caesar’s Palace – the first time I’ve ever heard anyone talk about your band, and it was the day before this interview. 

Jocke:  Cool.  That’s a funny coincidence.  But apart from that, we’ve been to Copenhagen in Denmark.  We were in Cuba for a week. 

Steve:  In Cuba? 

Jocke:  Yeah, in Havana.  We played in a little bar there and we shot a video there for “Jerk It Out”.  So we were there for a week then, and that was great.  We haven’t covered the whole world yet – we’ve just pinpointed a few important cities, like Amsterdam, Stockholm and Havana!  (laughter) 

Steve:  It looks like Virgin in the UK is going to start pushing you hard, just looking at their website and seeing that your video is sort of featured there. 

Jocke:  Oh, I haven’t seen that, but I think so.  They must like what we do somehow or believe in us.  That’s great.  I hope they’re right!  We just think that it’s really cool that we can come to the UK and get a shot at playing for the UK audience and maybe give them the chance to discover our music.  You can feel like you are really away from where things are happening at times when you live in a place like Sweden.  It’s like it doesn’t really matter how good you are because you’re not going to make it anywhere else anyway.  So when we get to come to the UK and stuff like that, it’s really encouraging and uplifting.  It’s cool. 

Steve: Well, I think now with the success of the Hives and to a lesser extent the Sahara Hotnights, there are now record companies in the US and the UK that are looking at Sweden and saying “We have to have a Swedish band on our roster now”.    Do you notice that at all? 

Jocke:  Yeah, I’ve noticed that a little bit.  But it’s also like, it’s really easy when something becomes trendy, and it sound absurd, but if it could be cool to come from Sweden, then there’s going to be a backlash sooner or later.  In fact, it’s already happening to some extent, especially in the UK, where they are really sensitive to trends and stuff.  We got a couple of reviews in the NME and Kerrang for live shows that we did on the last tour, and they were really positive.  They really liked the music and everything, but it started out with “another week and another Swedish garage rock band”.  So there’s starting to be a little bit of a backlash on that, I think. 

Steve:  I think that goes back for quite a while.  In the 80s there were lots of bands I thought were great – everybody knows the Nomads, but I loved the early Wilmer X records, the Shoutless, Psychotic Youth. 

Jocke:  Yeah, there’s been good stuff around here for a while, but this rock music, the more primitive sort of rock music, that’s become a lot more trendy as well.  And it wasn’t before.  The good Swedish bands that were around in the 80s and 90s were playing primitive rock music, and that wasn’t fashionable at the time.  So maybe that was part of the reason for it as well. 

Steve:  What do you think are some of the other good Swedish bands today?  You talked about some you had done videos for – what about others? 

Jocke:  I love Bob Hund, I love Broder Daniel, and there’s a band called Mazarine Street.  You should check them out.  They’re kind of uneven, but they have some really good songs.  Really cool, raw and funky.  A bit of a soul feeling to them, like groovy funky stuff, but it’s really raw rock and roll.  And of course, I’ve loved Soundtrack Of Our Lives since their first record.  I think they are really great.  There’s another band called the Knife which is really good as well.  It’s a little bit more like electronic music.  There's a girl singer and she and her brother make the band.  There’s a lot of good stuff happening really. 

Steve: It’s funny, because all the bands you just mentioned I haven’t heard, except for Soundtrack of Our Lives.   

Jocke:  And you’ve been checking out Swedish music, so you can see there’s even more to find.  Mazarine Street, I don’t know if they’re active as a band anymore, really, but you should check out some of their stuff. 

Steve:  By the way, I wanted to ask you – inside the booklet of one of your CDs there’s a picture of a gig flyer of Caesar’s Palace sharing a bill with Henry Fiat’s Open Sore.  That seems like an incredibly unlikely pairing – do shows have bills that diverse very often? 

Jocke:  But that was back in the day, you know.  It was a little bit more primitive, the stuff we did.  And Henry Fiat didn’t really have – if they’re playing like 250 bpm now – their average beats per minute is like 250 bpm per song – at that time maybe it was just like 200 or something.  (much laughter)  So it’s not as far fetched as it may sound.  That was a really, really good night.  I still remember that gig.  That was great. 

They were crazy.  You probably know the American band called the Mummies, who all used to dress like mummies.  Well, Henry Fiat’s Open Sore used to dress like that, too.   That was a cool night.  That was a good time, but it was a couple years ago, though.   

Steve:  I always like to ask bands if they have a really good story about their band.  When they are put on the spot, most bands don’t come up with anything, but once in a while I get a really funny story, so it’s always worth asking. 

Jocke:  There are really good stories about this band, but it’s always hard.  Because we’ve been doing a lot of stupid stuff for a long time.   Because we never used to take ourselves very seriously.  We dressed up as old ladies once.  But the stories are often really long, and they don’t reach a climax at the end.  It’s just stupid stuff that we used to do like dress up in drag and be really obnoxious and rude.  We used to dress up as Roman soldiers as well.  We did that for a whole tour.  We had those helmets that had like a brush on top, like they had in The Gladiator.  But I’m sorry, I can’t really think of anything.  If we were sitting around having beers for a couple of hours, they would coma around.