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LOVE IS ALL ! ! ! THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN. ENOCH POWELL IS TURNING IN HIS GRAVE. A TRACK-SUITED WAVE OF EUROPEANS ARE SWAMPING GOOD OLD ALBION. Dan Tyte with a special report As the Daily Mail paints the average Pole as a catfood eating, child raping, donkey fucking miscreant (didn’t Hitler start with the Polish?), a wave of suspicion slowly creeps across Middle England. Speaking in tongues in the Tesco queue, wearing bizarre facial hair, being good at football, it’s just not … well, you know … terribly British is it? Suddenly the solution becomes clear. Why don’t we simply recreate colonisation on our own little island? Just think of the benefits…I mean for a start we won’t have to live on a horribly cramped smelly ship for months getting to the damn savages in the first place. What an admirable idea! We’ll
have the little darkies (um…whities) Anglicised and taking cream teas at high noon before you can say ‘Who’s your tennis coach?’. Fresh off the boat are Swedish types, Love is All. Debut long player Nine Times That Same Song treads the well-worn guitar-drums-keyboard route but adds saxophone (think Fun House by The Stooges) and a yelping frontgal to the soup to make for one jolly good time. Teeny Josephine Olausson angelically screeches through thirty odd minutes of entrancing, experimental post-punk joy. ‘Come on kids, click your fingertips’ she sings on stand-out track Felt Tip and it’s hard to resist. There’s a chugging repetitiveness (knowingly winked at by the title) to the album bordering on the sexual, that would have Mr and Mrs Range Rover of the Home Counties hot under their tweed collars. Or at least changing the soundtrack at their next swinging party.
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CAMPAIGN Q1. People under nineteen represent what proportion of the British population? a)1/2, b)1/3, Love is All answer correctly- c) 1/4 c)¼ or d)1/10
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Childhood in Britain. Ah … smell the nostalgia. Cider in the park, marker pens behind the bike sheds … umm … the Duke of Edinburgh award. So what’s the difference in Sweden then? “It’s boring most of the time,” Markus, of drum beat infamy laments. “There are a few good things that maybe you don’t have, like skiing is easier, or you can go out and pick mushrooms easier than in Britain.” Skiing on mushrooms? Finally a Winter Olympic sport we may have a chance of a medal in.
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How dare Love is All come over here and make our bands look rubbish, leaving our lads to busk on wet street corners for buttons, struggling to cobble enough small change together for an Englishman’s birthright - a hot brew and some rolling tobacco? Kruger decides there’s only one thing for it … we’ll have to claim them as our own. Staring through the barbed wire fence to freedom, Love is All take the British Citizenship Test to see if they’re up to the burden of becoming card-carrying members of America’s best friend.
Although Josephine bounds and bawls across the stage like a crazed toddler intent on her next E number fix this lovely little Schwedin is in fact, a fully grown adult. Looking back to being a kid she tells, “ya’know you really had to struggle a bit to listen to a certain type of music and become the alternative kid in your school. I remember I saw Tim Burgess wearing a striped shirt and I searched for so long to find one, but it just wasn’t around when we were kids. Now, it’s like, hey, go down to Topshop and you can buy a whole outfit.” Bassist Johan, Markus’ partner in beatcrime, agrees. “I guess it was a good thing, a good time to not have everything
Love is All - Photographed by Mei Lewis