Swedophiles: The foreigners who move to Sweden for a musical obsession

Whether it's a childhood fixation with ABBA or a teenage fascination with Swedish melodic thrash metal, thousands of foreigners living in Sweden arrived after developing an obsession with the country through music. 

The ABBA obsessives  

Glen Bryan's ABBA fixation started when the 60-year-old watched the group win Eurovision as a 12-year-old boy back in 1974. It was an experience, he says, that "sparked a life-long love affair with both Eurovision and ABBA".

For Australian Grace McCallum, the ABBA craze started when she won a walkman, aged three. For the next six years she had just one cassette: ABBA Gold. She ended up learning the songs so well that when she was eight, she won first prize in a talent contest with a rendition of the ABBA favourite, Mamma Mia. "This was the beginning of a life-long love affair with Sweden," she says. 

In his teens, Bryan's ABBA obsession grew and grew. He taught himself Swedish so he could understand the early solo work of Agneta Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the group's two female singers. When he had his first foreign holiday, it was to go to Sweden, where he stalked the members for autographs. At school, he did a project on Sweden's "No-Smoking Generation" initiative. He called himself Glen Michael, because, he says, "I thought it sounded Swedish". He even tried to change his appearance. "When I went to uni, I dyed my hair blond thinking with my blue eyes I could pass for Swedish."

McCallum's obsession perhaps didn't extend to these extremes. But in 2013, she was scrolling through Facebook and saw that ABBA The Museum was running a contest to choose the international member for a new ABBA choir that would perform at the 40th anniversary of ABBA winning Eurovision. She auditioned, won, and was flown to Sweden. 

READ ALSO: Aussie choir member wows Abba in Sweden

She then started a new life in Stockholm working in the creative industries as a freelance journalist for ABC, BBC, The Local, and TimeOut, as well as as a presenter, event organiser, and entrepreneur. 

For Bryan, things have worked out better.

He's been a regular visitor to Gothenburg throughout his adult life, visiting every year for the city's carnival, and to stay with his Swedish friends Anders and Tomas.

But it wasn't until he turned 50 in 2012 that he decided to take the plunge. "It seemed the perfect time to make the big leap and move here. I had somehow missed the joke that 'Everyone is called Glen in Gothenburg', but I've certainly heard it since I've moved here!" 

For the love of metal

Swedish metal bands such as Bathory, Opeth, Meshuggah, At The Gates, Entombed, and Watain might be obscure to most people, but they may have brought almost as many new citizens to the country as Sweden's own fab four. 

Muayyad Muhammed, an IT consultant based in Västerås, estimates that 80 percent of the reason he decided to move to Sweden was his love for Bathory, a Swedish folk metal and black metal band. 

Muhammed is originally from Syria, but grew up in Yemen, and then studied IT at the private Al-Zaytoonah University in Jordan.

He got the metal bug in his final year of high school, when he was introduced to the US rock bands Linkin Park & Slipknot. That led him back to British 1980s metal, and at university, he progressed onto the Swedish metal scene. 

"We were the only metalhead group in uni, and from there I got into Death and Black Metal, where most of the Swedish bands I listened to are," he remembers. 

He listened to Swedish bands such as Opeth, Amon Amarth, and Arch Enemy.

But the one that finally pushed him to move to Sweden was Bathory. "That got me down into the nature, history, and folklore of Sweden and made me fall in love with the country." 

He says that the Bathory album, Hammerheart turned him on to Nordic Mythology, the album Blood on Ice and Fire sparked an interest in Nordic nature, and the albums Nordland 1 & 2 taught him about Swedish nature, history, and culture. 

The move has largely worked out well, although he is not so sure about the weather. "The reality is that nature is very beautiful here. It's even stunning in summer. But winters can get quite harsh sometimes, which came as an unpleasant surprise." 

Strangely enough, he says, he hardly even listens to metal anymore. 

It's a similar story for Jessa Blavatsky, from Brooklyn in New York.

Here she is at the grave of Thomas Börje Forsberg, or Quorthon, Bathory's singer and songwriter, who died aged 38 from a congenital heart defect.

Blavatsky got into the metal scene when she was eleven, growing up in Brooklyn, and by age 15, she was helping organise gigs for metal bands, which got her eventually into the Scandinavian scene. 

"We didn't have things like YouTube and Spotify and all that stuff," she remembers. "The European music scene was something you really had to look for. You really had to know people that liked good stuff."

She soon discovered that Scandinavian bands were more interesting than any of those playing in the US, and developed a fascination with Swedish legends such as Katatonia, Edge of Sanity, Diabolical Masquerade, Therion, Tiamat, and Meshuggah.

She also names the bands At the Gates, Dismember, Soilwork, Dissection, General Surgery, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, Runemagick, Nasum, Opeth, Vintersorg, and Amaran. 

"It just seemed, from the American perspective, that the European culture overall had a much better music scene for heavy metal compared to ours. So I think for a lot of us, in the heavy metal culture, it's always been like some kind of dream or fantasy to go to festivals here."

Through the gigs she helped organise, she met members of some of the Scandinavian black metal bands as they came over on tour, and meeting these musicians, she says, "definitely" influenced her later decision to move to Sweden.

"I thought they were really nice and shy and very introverted, and that's how I was back then and maybe still am a bit now. That was kind of appealing to me." 

The dark, black music and her image of Sweden also started to come together in her mind. 

"A lot of the music is pretty dark and heavy, and it kind of reminds you of the dark and heavy kind of winters that they have here. And I love the cold. I love the darkness that comes with the cold, and the emotions. And I know, I might sound crazy for that. But that's okay." 

Jessa Blavatsky by the cross in Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm, which is known among metalheads as "the Entombed Cross" because it featured on an album by the band Entombed. Photo: Private

Her love of Sweden only turned into an intention to move, however, after she got divorced aged 23 and was left alone with her baby daughter Angelina. 

"When I was growing up in New York, there were all kinds of fights happening, people bringing guns and knives to school. My friends were involved in a murder. And I got death threats, so I stopped going to school," she remembers. 

"When I had my daughter, my biggest fear was having her go through any of that, so I thought that if I could move her to a more peaceful place, she'd have a much better upbringing." 

So she began planning her move to Sweden, trained as a pastry chef, and eventually got hired by the man who had been head chef at the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC to come to Sweden and make American-style pastry. He arranged the work permit and in 2016 she and her daughter arrived in Stockholm. 

The move came surprisingly easily, perhaps because of her contacts from the international metal scene. 

"I always had a large network here, so moving here didn't feel strange. I already had friends here. I already had people to hang out with," she says.  "So I didn't have to wait to find out even more about Swedish culture because I mean, you can only find out so much before you actually move there." 

"Sometimes," she says. "I can't even believe that I did it by myself, learned a new language and I brought my kids to learn a new language. It's pretty insane." 

For her, Stockholm is the perfect compromise between the "tree house in the woods" of her fantasy, and the convenience of city life. And, for her daughter's sake, at least, it seems to have worked. "It was probably a good choice. Because women have rights and I've gotten great jobs." 

Swedish rock and indie 

The story of how the post-punk rock of The Hives brought Alma Paz, a Mexican student, to Sweden has been made into a documentary. After getting into the band, she began to study Swedish at the Centro de Enseñanza de Lenguas Extranjeras in Mexico City.

She then travelled to Fagersta, the small town where the Hives come from, and ended up getting a scholarship to study in Sweden for a year, during which time she met a Swedish boyfriend and decided to stay.