This Swedish tribute band awakens national treasure Bellman from beyond

“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know Bellman existed,” says Jocke Åhlund. “You get him with your mother’s milk when you’re Swedish.” Åhlund, an accomplished musician and producer, is sitting at a white tablecloth-topped table upstairs at Gamla Stan’s Den Gyldene Freden, the second oldest restaurant in the world to have retained its interior and the site where the Swedish Academy convenes weekly to discuss, among other things, the Nobel Prize.

To his left, his friend, the artist Jockum Nordström, nods in agreement. “There were all of these Bellman jokes,” Nordström says, before launching into a not-especially-funny schoolyard yarn involving Bellman, a cave and a smelly pig. Åhlund laughs, the white periwig sitting precariously on his head bobbing about (we’re very much in the Bellman mood), adding, quizzically: “That has to be the same Bellman, right?”

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It wasn’t until later in his adolescence that Åhlund came to learn who Carl Michael Bellman actually was. A prolific poet, musician and composer who came to prominence in the late 1700s, Bellman is one part Shakespeare, one part Mozart, with a dash of Monty Python for good measure. While his comical poetry captures themes of drinking and prostitution, the music to which his words are set is romantic and sophisticated. In his time, the artist’s most famous fan was King Gustav III, but these days you’d be hard-pressed to find any Swede who can’t rattle off his drinking tunes ‘Gubben Noak’ or ‘Fjäriln vingad’ (both from Fredmans epistlar, a collection of 82 poems set to music and Bellman’s most indelible work).

Today we have gathered, in this historic place once favoured by Bellman himself, to pay homage to the Swedish icon. And who better than Åhlund and Nordström, two similarly prolific multi-hyphenates, to lead Vogue Scandinavia’s very own Bellman tribute band? Best known for his roles in beloved indie rock bands Caesars (in which he is the frontman) and Teddybears, Åhlund, 52, has also written and produced for the likes of pop legends Robyn and Charli XCX.

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Meanwhile, 59-year-old Nordström has exhibited his instantly recognisable works (drawings and collages, mostly) with regularity since the early 1990s, leading to a solo show at Moderna Museet in 2005 and countless other noteworthy exhibitions across the globe (his latest is currently on view at Liljevalchs). He is also a talented musician in his own right. “Music, dance, writing – everything is art to me,” he says. “Music is a small branch of my tree.”

Åhlund and Nordström met some 25 years ago, when the former contacted the latter to lend his artwork to a record sleeve for Caesars. “He’s designed all of our record sleeves since then,” Åhlund says. “We became friends instantly.” Conversations quickly turned towards “music and jamming” and, inevitably, the duo were holed up in Åhlund’s studio – Åhlund on guitar, Nordström on bass – freestyling jazzy tunes just for the hell of it. “We have always been having fun,” Nordström says. “It was a good time from the beginning.” The artist’s dog, Rio, saunters into the room and lands at his feet. Gentle rococo melodies – sounds of the past – play off an iPhone.

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Initially, there were no plans for these jam sessions to culminate in a record or a live performance. “It started out as a social thing for us – a way to hang out,” Åhlund says. Still, they would record almost everything; it’s in both artists’ natures to, as Åhlund puts it, “instinctually create stuff”. “After a while, we had a lot of material,” he says. So in 2012 they put out an album: Paddan och Hunden (The Toad and the Dog).

Eschewing a band name, the duo simply release their groovy, freewheeling songs under their full names. “We thought it was fun, in a pretentious way, to just call it our names,” says Åhlund. In fall of last year, they released a follow up entitled Joakim Åhlund & Jockum Nordström – Meets Moussa Fadera (“If we have some guests, we just put in more names,” says Nordström). Fadera, a drummer, joins the duo in our Bellman band along with Isak Hedtjärn on flute and saxophone.

But who is the toad and who is the dog? “People always ask us that,” says Åhlund. Really the album is named for Nordström’s late dog (the grandmother to his current dog) and his pet turtle (there was a mixup between the word for turtle and the word for toad, apparently), who is very much alive. “He’s a great guy,” Nordström says, of his 35-year-old pet. “He escaped for a couple of months in the winter, in Gotland,” Åhlund adds. “And he survived! That’s insane.” “When he came back, he was better than ever,” Nordström concludes.

You can’t have a tribute to Bellman without lyrics, so Åhlund and Nordström called upon actress Clara Christiansson Drake and poet Elis Monteverde Burrau to round out the group, performing a dramatic reading of ‘Drick ur ditt glas, se Döden på dig’ (‘Drink from Your Glass, See Death on You’), the 30th poem from the aforementioned Fredmans epistlar, as the band plays. The poem is directed towards Movitz, arguably Bellman’s most recognisable character, who is, unfortunately, dying of pneumonia. Naturally, his pals encourage him to drink to drown his sorrows. It begins: “Drick ur ditt glas, se Döden på dig väntar, Slipar sitt svärd, och vid din tröskel står” (“Drink from your glass, see Death awaits you, Sharpens his sword, and at your threshold stands”).

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“I didn’t know that much about Bellman at all,” admits Christiansson Drake. “Just that he was this guy that lived hundreds of years ago and drank a lot and wrote songs.” Soon, however, her hair in a flamboyant period undo, face powdered white, the Bellman spirit took over. “I felt like Bellman’s long lost lover woken up from the grave with a really bad hangover,” she says. “Dusty ghost vibes.” Monteverde Burrau, meanwhile, became a different sort of Bellman character. “I thought I was going to look more like Jocke, with a Bellman wig, but I was happy that I got this really slutty, whore outfit,” he says. “Bellman also wrote a lot about prostitutes.”

Under the watchful eye of the last remaining painted portrait of Bellman, Åhlund and Nordström change into their modernised period garb to prepare for their performance. There are frilly socks and shiny satin suits, buckled loafers and, yes, wigs. “I love an opportunity to dress up,” says Åhlund, when I ask why he was game to play in the Bellman band. “It’s so crazy,” adds Nordström, with a cheeky grin. “And it was just a nice chance to see these guys and jam a little bit,” says Åhlund. “It ’s nothing deeper than that.”