Swede Dreams

Before Britney and X-Tina there was Robyn Carlsson, an elfin Swede with asymmetrical hair and a voice like a Valkyrie gargling helium. In 1997, Carlsson – who uses ‘Robyn’ as a stage name – scored a US top ten hit with ‘Show Me Love,’ a plastic pop heat-seeker penned by a backroom unknown, Max Martin. For Martin this was the start of something huge – he would go on to spearhead the Lolita-pop renaissance, writing ‘Baby One More Time’ for Spears and ‘I Want It That Way’ for Backstreet Boys.

For Robyn, though, disillusionment had already set in. Carlsson was nobody’s baby doll and if she was to have a music career, it would, she resolved, be on her own terms.
“Max is a control freak and I think he actively searched for collaborations where he could be in control of the music because that’s what he wanted to do,” says the singer, nibbling Pringles in the inky blackness of The Village bar in Dublin. “Record companies like [Spears’ label] Jive provided him with those type of artists, who didn’t have their own ambitions to write, or were more like performers. So they created this concept where, you know, it was kind of ‘super pop’. For me, that was very foreign. I didn’t understand it. I was raised in a theatre family. I came from a creative place where I was already used to having my own opinions and writing my own songs.”
Returning to Sweden, Robyn set about re-booting her career. She cut professional ties with Martin (although they are still close she says – sometimes she will ring him for advice) and, in order to guarantee creative freedom, started her own record label, Konichiwa . People in the industry told her she was throwing her future away.
“My record company thought that I was a little crazy,” she laughs. “But I was tired of always being in a situation where I needed to compromise to get on good terms with the label.”
Recorded in Stockholm in 2005 with Teddybears songwriter Klas Åhlund, Robyn’s eponymous ‘comeback’ album has become a huge sleeper sensation since hitting record stores across Europe and the US this summer. The genesis of her rebirth was the single ‘With Every Heartbeat’, a UK Number One last August (in Ireland it peaked at 15). Its success prompted a major label rush for Robyn’s signature. In the end she plumped for Universal, on the understanding that Konichiwa would be permitted to operate as an independent entity.
“‘With Every Heartbeat’ wasn’t really going to be a single but Annie Mac and Pete Tong started playing it on Radio One in Britain and people really started to respond to the record and we found ourself in a situation where we had to release it. Then more and more labels started to get interested so in the end we were in this crazy bidding war. And we got exactly what we wanted, which was total creative freedom.”
As a young singer, did Robyn (she is now 29) feel she was being manipulated by the industry?
“I don’t think it’s as simple as that. They never tell you what to wear or think. It’s a lot more complicated a process. As an artist you’re dealing with a very big machine. I might be one person and I might have a couple of people I work with. But then at the record company you're dealing with 20 or 50 people and they’re all pushing towards selling this product. They have the money and so you always have to kind of make sure they're happy with what you’re doing. I think that affected me without me even realising that it did and I needed to break away from that, to be disconnected from that environment and start over from another platform. And that was what Konichiwa has done for me.”
Considering how influential producer-led pop has become, is there a danger that we may look back upon Robyn as the last chart starlet with a mind of her own?
“American pop music definitely is very producer controlled,” she agrees. “However, there’s a lot of pop music in Europe and especially in Sweden that's not following those rules. Usually it is independent music. It’s not music that makes it out to the commercial world. It doesn’t get played on MTV but it has a lot of attention on YouTube or MySpace. So there are people that really consume a lot of pop music that isn’t your normal typical or mainstream kind of thing. It’s just that it’s very hard for these artists to get to a point where there’s a major that’s willing to invest in them on their terms. Usually when they invest in these kind of artists it all kind of goes wrong.”
Lately Sweden has emerged as a hot-bed of pop innovation. The country has a rich lineage, of course: from Abba to The Cardigans, Swedish songwriters have always demonstrated an instinctive grasp of the fundaments of great pop. In the past five years, however, the trickle of great Swedish acts has turned into a deluge, with artists as diverse as The Knife, Jens Lekman and Peter Bjorn and John winning international recognition.
“Our social system has always been very supportive of culture, art and music,” muses Robyn. “It’s an environment where people can have good lives and do what they want to do. We also have something called the Communal Music School, which means that all eight-year-olds can play an instrument for free and there’s a strong tradition of melody. This has been the case with our folk music and even back to Abba, of course, and Roxette and leading up to Max Martin. I really think he's part of that tradition. He’s changed the music industry. Thanks to him pop music is largely about the song now, rather than the performer.”

Robyn is out now