Four albums in 26 years and so far, not a single live gig has been forthcoming from A Padded Room. But things are about to change. We’ve been asked to play at the annual Drömfesten in Sandviken in August and the plan is to play the whole of the latest album. If they let us. But time is always an issue at festivals and they usually restrict the number of minutes onstage, so the risk is that we’ll be thrown off after 30 minutes. But we’ll see how it goes.
I don’t really know why we’ve never thought of playing live, but right from the start in 1993 this was a studio project. Also, we’ve not had a band – just Herbie and myself. What’s changed this time is that Björn (drums) has been involved in the whole recording process and the songs are all playable without the need of a symphony orchestra or a bank of keyboards. On the other hand, there’s a piano or organ on most tracks on the album and Bertil Fält has agreed to play piano with us. He might also be persuaded to add a little sax here and there. Niclas Carron is guesting on guitar and backing vocals, so we won’t need to skip anything at all. We’re already working individually on the songs and I’m seriously looking forward to both the band rehearsals and the gig.
Time is Tight is an instrumental from Booker T. and MGs, released in 1969. That summer of ’69 I went on a camping holiday with three schoolfriends, Paul, Tony and Keith, to Great Yarmouth, where we lived in a rented caravan for two weeks. We were 16 (Paul 17), but as always, we managed to get away with visiting local pubs for a pint. But none of us drank much during those two weeks. We had quite a mature attitude to alcohol even at that early age. If we drank too much, we would anyway have been quickly thrown out.
For me, two songs stood out in a big way in Great Yarmouth: Tight is Tight with Booker T. and Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amour. During the first week I also met Joy, a nice girl from Barnsley in Yorkshire, who was also on holiday there with friends. And I spent most of my holiday money on her and was broke the second week. The others had similar experiences, and our second week in the caravan was spent playing cards at night and sleeping during the day to save money. Towards the end of the second week, food also became a problem. We ended up on a cheap diet of baked beans, bread, butter and tea. We were all very thin back then.