Håkan Steen this is The country’s best rock club – Aftonbladet

Is there a concert venue in Sweden that I know a little extra for it is KB in Malmö, sweden.

Now the country’s best rock club nice enough to hold a whole book.

During my 25 years as a musikskribent there are a few venues that I have felt myself unusually at home at the.

the Café Kristina and Club Submarine in Växjö in the 90′s dawn, Gino and the Studio the first years in Stockholm, Debaser a few years later.

But one of the best to start writing about music in the newspaper Aftonbladet was that I had to go to Malmö and go on Kulturbolaget.

KB was a "real" rock club,, with international flair. Just polished, warm and welcoming, a very good scene and always knowledgeable and engaged audience. "Just like in Austin, Texas", as the Emmylou Harris sa.

It felt that often, instead lifted the performers. And it went from an invisible, ideological line from the Totte Lundgren club at Bergsgatan to Lennart Perssons record store Music & Art on the Spångatan a few hundred metres away. KB booked no trendängsligt nonsense, just solid stuff. So, it still feels.

I have seen Nick Lowe and the "house band" Wilmer X of the KB. Great gig with the Pavement, Eric Gadd, Lucinda Williams and Ron Sexsmith. the The Libertines yxigt fed Sweden debut in 2003. Never Bonnie Raitt on the disc, but when she cooked up its mix of country, rock and soul on KB, it was a total knock.

In the years fill KB 34 years and today will be honoured Sweden’s oldest rock club, a whole book. "KB – artists, profiles, stories" have music journalist and KB-stammisen Per Stronger as the main author and is full of pictures and anecdotes from past and present owners, artists and the audience. As a unique The Pogues-the gig where Elvis Costello jumped in for a sick Shane to a shift in focus. Or if reggaelegendaren Lee Perry went around and "blessed" rather than by shouting "Haile Selassie" and a splash of cognac on the walls.

Above all, the stories from the 80′s on the "old" KB at Erikslust and gig with The Cramps, Clarence Clemons and Rickie Lee Jones difficult "would have been there"-feeling.

It is an entertaining book about a club that not only has meant a lot for Malmö, but for the Swedish music scene at all. As several of the artists says in the book:

"When you got to play on the KB, it was the evidence that they have come somewhere."