Today Mikael and I have spent most of the day at Statens arkiv för ljud och bild (The National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images) where we’ve been looking at newsfootage from the swedish Bruceconcerts from 1981 to 2003.

Most of the footage included interviews with fans in line up for the shows, brief excerpts from songs like Rosalita, BITUSA, Better Days, Boom Boom, My Love Will Not Let You Down and WOASD, to name a few and some short interviews with Mr Springsteen himself.

The best part was a feature in Aktuellt, a newsbroadcast from May 4th 1981. It showed a portrait of Bruce Springsteen and described him as a singer that pictured the troubled youth. Then the feature slowly moved into a discussion about destructive individualism among young people, a developement that seriously worried the political parties in Sweden. The connection with Springsteens music was by this time very obscure and by this time we were laughing hard. But the thing that really had us in stitches was a hilarious translation of Thunder Road.

The wellknown lines that reads:

Show a little faith there’s magic in the night
You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright
Oh and that’s alright with me

were transformed into:

Våga tro på nattens magi
vacker är du inte men okej
och det är okej för mig

When we heard this we had to rewind the tape and listen again, because we were roaring with laughter. The discussion about the future of the troubled swedish youngsters was really bizarre but very very funny… 😀

We have some more programs to watch, so there’ll be more work in the archives. But tomorrow we’ll start filming, it’s time for the first interview with one of the fans. Hopefully the technique will run smoothly, we’ll keep you posted of our progress.