Ulf NOTP Interview
Ulf: We have to do small changes. We think about doing a few arrangement changements for next week, and .. To mix as well, out in the audience..If you have less choir, more of the orchestra..I mean 130 instruments..
Well, 8 instruments and 50 voices, you can do a lot of variations. Now is the big tryout. (?)
Marlous: We didn't hear a lot of choir on BL, which is a song with a lot of choir.
Ulf: It should be more choir sounds. It is possible, everything is possible, it's a matter of..We're using gospel choirs, which is Black. And there's not much Black choirs here, they're all white. So they sing more classical, it's difficult to make them more gospel.
Marlous: They've got a more soul thing in it.
Ulf: Yeah. So we have to.. We're talking to the choir now and trying to find a balance between classical and gospel. We want to add a few more parts with the choir. It's fantastic to have so many people on stage.
Marlous: It's beautiful, you should come in the crowd and hear when they sing LIAF. Everybody's like, wow, where does it come from?
Ulf: Also the orchestra. In a normal live performance you cannot have 130 people on stage, it's impossible. 130 of these unbelievable professional musicians, it's once in a lifetime that you have this opportunity. So of course it takes time.. first of all, we had to just put the arrangements together. Now we're just fine-tuning everything. Now when all the technicalities are set, there's always some problems in the first premiere, now we can fine-tune the musical puzzle. And there's a few things we're discussing to change, but also there's.. One thing, the audience here is different everyday. Sunday for example, there's only (a conference??) here. It's like 40 000 50-year-old people sitting down, all sit down. And it's a different way of performing in front of somebody that is average 50, sitting down, than average 25 standing up. So that's gonna be interesting on Sunday.
Marlous: 31st of Oct everybody will be sitting down, except for us?
U: Yeah. 31st of.. Is that on Sunday?
Marous: That's on Monday.
U: That's on Monday. So I think it's both Sunday and Monday are sit down. So all on Sunday sit down.
Marlous: I think you will have some ppl jumping up on Monday.
U: We'll try to have people..
Marlous: Yeah, jump jump.
Ulf: Standing up. It's gonna be interesting. We've done a few sit-down..not that many sit-down. We did UNESCO gala in somewhere the south of Germany a few years ago. That was a sit-down as well. That made everybody stand up. It was nice, the local villagers form Germany, everyone dancing around..it was very fun actually to make that.
Marlous: I think it's hard for people sitting down..
Ulf: It is. Especially in the beginning of the evening. I think it's easier after ppl have maybe a few drinks, and also get into the mood of the music.
Marlous: Safri Duo was a good entrance, people were..
U: Fantastic. It's also very difficult to follow up that very heavy techno song. Because ppl get in this mood and .. follow up.
Marlous: That's the beauty of the show.
Ulf: Totally different balances. I wish I could be in the audience one day to see the show.
It's difficult now for us to understand that. Now you just focus on how it sounds on stage. On stage it's a completely different sound than out in the audience.
Marlous: Friday I was above.. on the balcony, because it's very good..
U: Acoustic.
M: Yeah. There were some rumors about Melodifestivalen. Are you going to do that?
U (laughs)
M: Yeah, I have to ask you, because you know, there have been rumors, and..
Ulf: The Eurovision contest. Two days ago..3 days ago.. We didn't tell the media in Sweden we're doing this, they found out. It was kind of a big thing for the Swedish media that we were here and performed. Aftonbladet, which is a Swedish magazine, called me and asked "Would you be interested in performing at the Melodifestivalen", which is the Swedish version of the Eurovision contest. And I said, well.. I mean, wer'e discussing it. Ten years ago it would have been definitely "No". I think the whole contest itself have changed a lot in ten years, it have become quite a good platform to perform on, I think it's quite poppy, very professional, it's very international, there's a lot of very good bands performing and it's not just schlager music anymore. Now it's actually.. it's good songs, the show (??) So we have not closed that door, but we have not really opened it either. And the question, "Would you say no to Eurovision contest?" I can't say no to something we haven't been offered yet. So with the right song on the right moment, maybe. But it's not like we're planning to go to the Eurovision contest. I don't know if that's the international rule, but in Sweden there's four so-called Jokers.. First of all, you have to compete, people send demo-tapes, there's thousands of people trying to get into the 20 or whatever it is, competing, and then there's a big jury voting on who's gonna be in the final. But then after voting, there's four Jokers, which is decided to be.. Commercial, whatever, old bands comeback.. I'm not really sure what criteria, because it's quite a new thing, it hasn't been around for a long time. So they asked, basically, “How would you react if you became one of the Jokers?”
Marlous: Joker.. (laughs)
Ulf: Yeah, Jonas and Joker. (laughs) And yeah, it would be flattering to be one of the Jokers, and of course if we could be one of them, we'd of course have to consider it. Of course, we'd need a song and.. It's quite far away to be that. But then it suddenly becomes, “Ace Of Base is gonna be a part of Melodifestivalen!” And then actually a radio station was talking about it and it became a big thing in Sweden. But we have at the moment no plans to be in the contest.
Marlous: But I think.. Eurovision is a good way to get famous and there are lots of people who try to make a comeback and then it doesn't work for them. So how do you think of that, is that also maybe tricky..?
Ulf: For us.. We don't have to prove ourselves. Melodifestivalen, locally or internationally, is a fantastic platform to be famous. We are already famous and for us, to be number 2 in the Swedish Melodifestivalen is really bad, you know, if we go in we have to win. We can't be number 2, because it's not good for us. So it's quite a high bet to get in. I'm not sure, because it's not.. Yeah, well let's see. It's a hypothetical discussion at the moment, so.. I would doubt that we would be in the Melodifestivalen.
Marlous: You're open to it, OK.
Ulf: Yeah.
Marlous: OK, the next question, how is the new album going to work out, because you have children and families and.. How is this going to work, because Jonas said he wants to spend more time with his kids and I think you want and Jenny wants.. so how is this going to work?
Ulf: (thinks for a bit) Good question. We don't know. We, as we always did, take one day at a time. Music always comes from the heart and it has to be fun to perform and to be together. We had a little break from each other for a few years, and this is just trying.. to get a taste of performing together again. And this will probably give us more courage and enthusiasm to record more songs and to get into the mood to really create an album. We've been in the studio writing songs, but you need more than just to write songs, you need to really get in the mood, you need to write a lot of good melodies, but you also need producers.. It's a big circus to do that.
Marlous: You had lots of problems in the past with record companies, trying to get signed, everybody was like, “What's going on?” I mean, you've got good songs, you have 100 songs or..?
Ulf: Yeah, we had a little bad timing with the whole.. the first bad timing was that Polygram, which was our main company in Europe and Asia, was bought by Universal, when Flowers was released. What happened then was that all the people that we worked with got sacked, basically, were fired, because 50 % of the working force at Polygram were fired when they made the merger with Universal and it all went together. When we released the first single, suddenly we had no people working with the record company. We had to create new relations and that took time. There were a few exceptions: in France, Barclay, always with the same.. But England, for example, was completely disastrous. So that affected, of course, a lot with the release, it becomes new people who never worked with us and no relations and suddenly there was a single out and nobody really worked on it, because they were so afraid of getting sacked or on the way to get sacked or just.. totally confusing. (baby crying in the background, Ulf seems a bit distracted by it. May be Viggo) On the fourth album, we had the problem that the whole music industry collapsed. It was probably even worse..
Marlous: Yeah, we heard about that.
Ulf: There were no people, there was no money.. It was nothing and nobody did anything, people were just going, “Oh, let's just wait and see what's happening here.” It was, of course, not only us, I think most artists had that problem. So now it's a more interesting situation, where we had to sit down, cos it's incredibly important to have the right partners when you release an album. You work two years in the studio, and then you perform bla bla bla, promoting, it's important that you have the right partners with you. Not only people who believe in you, but who have the right muscles, and also now you need new vehicles to reach out and to work with internet much more for example, than what you had to 5, 6, 7 years ago. This is what we have to find out, who is the right people in each country worldwide? We're going to be released in 150 countries worldwide, that is 150 local organisations that have to be good together. It's very.. it's a big undertaking. That is an incredibly important part as well, not only to do good music. Obviously, now we don't have to.. We're trying to release ourselves from those contracts, we create everything from scratch. We're quite comfortable with that, actually. That's gonna be a major.. an important part of the next release, to get the whole organisation together.
Marlous: They're saying spring, but maybe spring is a bit..
Ulf: I would say.. I would be very surprised if we had a single out.. I mean, to find a single is one thing, but I think we have to decide if we're gonna do a whole album or not. If we do a full album, we need the album finished before we release the first single. To have the first single before the summer.. Maybe.. But I would say it's a very big maybe. We have a lot of good songs now, but we definitely don't have an album yet, so..
Marlous: And a last question from someone was.. Way back in the old days, is there an album called Ce Soir, which you taped when you were TechNoir? You know, like 1990, very old songs..?
Ulf: Ce Soir..?
Marlous: Yes, something like that. There's been a rumor and it's very old and no one actually got to ask, but I mean, a lot of people are interested in how did Ace Of Base form.. We have some old demo tapes, I even heard Mr Ace, which is very cool.. It's very interesting to see which parts get cut out.
Ulf: There's a lot of songs from the late 80's, actually, and the early 90's, which is obviously not recorded properly. There's one song called Moogoperator, which Denniz Pop, who's obviously a very important part of Ace Of Base, who unfortunately died early 90's, but that was one of his favourite songs. But he never really succeeded to get that.. He had an idea, we had an idea, unfortunately he died before we could finish off that idea. Trying to get the song together is still out there. We haven't been able to create the sound we want to produce, that's one of these virgin songs which I'm not sure will ever be released. There is actually a lot of songs from the past, which is just good.
Marlous: Do you want to take some old songs and old styles and make a new song out of them, maybe?
Ulf: We'll see. I normally prefer to write new songs, but we have a lot of songs from the past, and we try to fit them in. Some songs have been, you know, in the second album, third album and the fourth album as well, old songs. But sometimes it's more interesting to try to write new songs, for sure.
Marlous: Yeah. For yourself as songwriter, as musician..
Ulf: It's more developing to do that. We gotta run up on stage now.
Marlous: Yeah, I can see that. Thanks very much for your time..