The year was 1985, and I had moved to Lund, very much against my will. My girlfriend at the time had left me after two years together, and my studies were limping along like a shopping trolley with wonky wheels. Most of what I actually did during my few years at university in this particular university town was partying and getting involved in student union activities. Despite this rather unpromising introduction, and the shackles of academia, I was fundamentally quite a positive person – and definitely tireless.
Anyone who knows how cramped a student room can be will also understand why my place became particularly attractive towards Friday afternoons, when everyone wanted to make up for lost time and live out their dream of being a newly liberated student. You see, I lived right in the centre, in a flat that was about five times the size of an ordinary student room. It also had two entrances – one proper front door and one for making a getaway – and, as the icing on the cake, a balcony. I was, as it happened, "looking after" a relative's flat before it was eventually put up for sale.
Blå himlen blues was released that very year, in March, and I absolutely loved the LP. It had such a strong sense of "to hell with it" and freedom about it that you simply wanted to bellow along to the songs, sober or pissed. I had brought the LP with me from Gothenburg, along with my Lenco L75 and the rest of my stereo equipment, intending only to blow the speaker cones out of their boxes whenever I got the chance. I'd painted those speaker cabinets myself, red and gold, and I exercised them like an unemployed man with nothing better to do. Yes, I hear you thinking: so what? Well, this particular evening, one that remains especially deeply etched in the memory lane, came about when my temporarily live-in mate Jakob had brought six or seven friends over from his home town. Jakob's dad was a fish farmer – salmon, to be precise – and his mum was forever sending him salmon pies to improve his otherwise rather disastrous diet of instant macaroni and ketchup. As a result, I was eating salmon for breakfast and dinner.
The mixture of old and new friends, tequila slammers, the stereo at full volume, a fall, and one of Jakob's old homeboys planting his face straight into a pizza-wrapped wall, bleeding down into the gap between "wall and bowl," created an evening that, by today's standards, might not seem entirely well thought through. The atmosphere itself wasn't particularly unusual. It was more the natural consequence of underdeveloped frontal lobes, generally poor judgement, and an enormous amount of flight instinct thrown into the mix. Escape. That was the key. When C.C. Cowboys, the first track on side one, was playing at full volume for the third or fourth time. When "We are the great..." kicked in, the chaos became so uncontrollable that I escaped through the other "entrance" and disappeared into the night, just before the Old Bill turned up.
