“It’s so strange because suddenly people are into rock ‘n’ roll bands in Sweden, it’s like a big hype that’s been going on for five years or so, and I think it’s mostly record companies trying to find the new Roxette!”

In one fell swoop Ebbot Lundberg, singer with Gothenburg’s The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, dismisses any notions about the Swedes saving rock ‘n’ roll from itself.

And fair enough, he’s hardly a Johnny-come-lately, having fronted Union Carbide Productions – noisenik darlings of the grunge and No Wave scenes in Seattle and New York – from 1986 to 1993. However, TSOOL are a different story. Going by their third album Behind The Music, this lot have a far wider musical policy, drawing on everything from garage psychedelia to hard rock to Zeppelin style pastoral folk. It’s retro, sure, but the lack of musical snobbery is disarming – here’s a band that can mix and match Hüsker Dü with Simon & Garfunkel without thinking it incongruous.

“What can I say?” says Ebbot. “You just try to pick out the best stuff, the feel of it. It’s so simple – we do it because we have to listen to it, that’s why it has to be like the imaginary best music we know. They don’t really make good music anymore, something happened, I don’t know what. We even play Hoagy Carmichael songs, we did ‘Hong Kong Blues’ a couple of times.”

I don’t agree with Ebbot’s ideas about some bygone golden age of music, but that doesn’t diminish songs like ‘Broken Imaginary Time’ or ‘In Someone Else’s Mind’, classic bad trip tunes in the Syd ‘n’ Roky tradition. Did Ebbot have a bad chemical experience at some stage? Or even a good one?

“Well, ‘Someone Else’s Mind’ is, to be honest, from when I had some really bad whiskey. But we’ve been on a lot of bad trips in this band. When we started in ’95 we were followed by people who went back and forth to the hospital. Some people were totally obsessed with Union Carbide Productions, and then when I started Soundtrack it was kind of a really scary environment where we recorded a demo with people hanging around, some had shotguns even. It’s some magnetic thing; I don’t know what it is! But you get a lot of inspiration. In a way I guess it’s like some old psychedelic movie from Sweden.”

Or an unsavoury Charlie Manson scenario.

“Charlie Svenson, more like!”

Okay, here’s the obligatory question for any Scandinavian rocker: where does Ebbot stand on the subject of the late lamented Hanoi Rocks?

“Well, (Hanoi Rocks founder) Andy McCoy actually joined us on stage when we played in Finland last year,” he recalls. “It was kind of a sad thing to look at. He was trying to grasp one of the guitars; he wanted to play with the band. I didn’t really know who he was, but Mattias (Barjed, TSOOL guitarist) just went, ‘Oi! It’s Andy McCoy – he’s trying to steal my

guitar!’.”