A history of Teddybears,
as told by Jocke:
The history of Teddybears began when Patrik and I met at an art school in Stockholm where we decided to form a grindcore band named Skull. When Skull needed a guitar player we invited my brother Klas and changed the band’s name to Teddybears.
At the time Klas was heavily into Experimental Neo-Jazz, though, so he was forbidden by the other members to touch the strings of his guitar while playing. This led to a lot of frustration and gear smashing, which was in fact one of the key elements to the band’s musical style in the early period.
The reason we decided to call ourselves Teddybears is actually because Phil Spector had a band in the 50's called The Teddybears. They had that big hit "To Know Him Is To Love Him." He has always been a great inspiration to us as a songwriter, producer and arranger. It's an homage kind of thing. We love guns same as him too, although we're more into toy laser guns and the sounds they make.
When we started out we had pretty much the same musical influences as today; we were always listening to a lot of very different stuff - Dead Kennedys, Romanian gypsy brass bands, NWA, Bruce Haack, Bad Brains. This cocktail went through the Teddybears-blender and came out sounding like some twisted kind of hardcore-punk with a DJ making extra noise on a pair of turntables.
After a while our drummer left the band to pursue a career as a sculptor, and so we learned that cheap drum machines, electric guitars and vocoders could be a deadly combination. Nowadays, there's not a lot of punk in our music anymore I guess. We get some outlet for that kind of frustration in other areas of our lives, like painting, skateboarding and Nietzsche-reading.
Besides making music and having Teddybears together, all three band members also direct videos, short films and commercials. We got into the film business by making our own videos and eventually started getting other assignments as well.
We are also involved in other bands: Jocke is a member of the Caesars, Klas has an old school punk band called Suspiria, and Jocke and Patrik have a horror-jazz outfit called The Diamonds. We have our own little studio in Stockholm where we record most of our music, and we sometimes also have time to produce other bands.
We don’t consider Teddybears a rock band or an electronic outfit. In general we don't care much for dividing music into different genres, and we really don't feel that we belong to any particular scene. There's fantastic as well as crappy music being made in every genre today. But we like to mix it up and we don't want to feel that we have to limit ourselves to any specific style.
If we come up with a good tune or riff, we don't ask ourselves whether it's a dancehall beat or a rock song… that's something we might maybe figure out in hindsight, if then even. Obviously we get a lot of inspiration from bands like Kraftwerk, Suicide, Neu, Can, Silver Apples etc. But we hold Slayer, Yellowman and Public Enemy in equally high regard.
When people have asked us what made us collaborate with Jamaican MCs like Elephant Man or Mad Cobra, we always say it’s the same thing that attracts us to their style as to ESG, Spacemen 3 or Boogie Down Productions- it's great music! We don't discriminate; we regenerate.
