There’s a danger of retrospectively lumping groups together. “We were aware of other Swedish bands playing simultaneously,” says The Wannadies’ Fredrik Schönfeldt, “but I never pictured myself as part of a movement from Sweden. The style of music we play was more international, singing in English. I think we had our eyes more on just doing really great pop songs, lots of guitars.
People discover one band from one area, then you try to see if there’s other bands equally as good from that area. Sweden is quite big in area, but population-wise we’re really, really small, probably smaller than London, so it wasn’t like there was a bunch of bands from Manchester.”