Freddie Wadling has been called ”The best rock voice in Sweden” so many times that it could be regarded as a standing epithet, and in that case a well-deserved one. No one else has his ability to express velvety softness one moment, only to explode into ragged bursts of steel wool growling the next, or to contrast heartfelt vulnerability with bleeding chunks of underground darkness. A few notes from this peculiar, bizarrely beautiful voice convinces the listener that Freddie’s life has not been one of ease and happiness, and that the pain he conveys is the real deal.

He was born in Gothenburg in 1951, and was an introverted but very imaginative child. According to himself, the school years were a traumatic experience, not least because he lost his hair at an early age, which was a cause for ostracism by his school mates.

In the 1970’s, Freddie came into contact with the fledgling Gothenburg punk movement, and he joined one band after another, often as a bass player. At the end of the 70’s, he made several records with bands like The Leather Nun, Perverts and Liket lever (“The Corpse Lives” or more idiomatically, “The Living Corpse”). With Liket lever he sung the minor punk classic “Levande begravd” (“Buried Alive”).

During the early 80’s, Freddie sang in the cult band Cortex, who released two studio albums, out of which Spinal Injuries 1983 contained a song that would become one of his signatures, “The Freaks”. From the mid-eighties onwards, he was also one half of Blue for Two (with Henryk Lipp), whose very dark but highly melodic style gave Freddie an almost ideal forum of expression, particularly on the album Songs from a Pale and Bitter Moon, whose baleful desperation could stand as a symbol for Freddie’s and Henryk’s persistent obsession with madness, horror and anxiety. During the same period Freddie was also a recurring guest singer (to all intents and purposes a band member) with The Flesh Quartet, where the mood was often lighter, but nevertheless carried an edge. This is the source of Freddie’s popular rendition of “Over the Rainbow”.

From the end of the 80’s, Freddie made the occasional solo record, something which has increased in frequency in later years, ever since he had an unexpected popular success with En skiva till kaffet (“A disc/slice with the coffee” – untranslateable word play), an album of Swedish evergreens. This album is, ironically, one of the least personal he has made in the sense that he does not feel any connection to the songs and troubadours he sings there (in fact he hates Evert Taube, one of Sweden’s national poets). However, his fame from this album has to some extent lived on and given his career something of a boost, giving him larger audiences at his concerts and making him the recipient of the Cornelis Vreeswijk Stipend in 2005 (Vreeswijk being another Swedish national poet).

/Nilsson