Scafell pike : an English-Swedish musical odyssey

This is the story of a folk rock band called Scafell Pike, The Stockholmbased group, which formed in 1972, originally consisted of three young Englishmen and one Swede. The story begins with the arrival of keyboard player David Hynes at Stockholm Central in the bitter cold of a February evening in 1964, armed with nothing but a suitcase and an oboe. He relates the band’s trajectory from rehearsals in a pub cellar, to cramped stages in bars and clubs, through recording studios to bigger venues and concert tours and to Poland to play and win at the Eastern Bloc’s equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest. But this was not always a smooth ride. From dizzy heights the band also experienced dismal depths, not least a catastrophic appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1976. Four young men with music, ambition and no clear plan. What follows is not the familiar story of instant success, but something slower, stranger and more real. From the pubs of Stockholm’s Old Town to the folk parks and festival stages, Scafell Pike built their reputation the hard way: one venue and audience at a time. Their sound, an unlikely blend of English folkmusic and Swedish classics, found an audience where none previously existed. For a few years in the 1970s, they were one of the most distinctive live acts in Sweden. But bands are fragile things. Behind the success lies a world of late-night drives, cash-in-hand deals, shifting management, conflicting ambitions and the slow erosion of certainty. As the music industry changes and new opportunities appear, the band begins to lose its sense of direction. What once held them together, chemistry, instinct and a shared purpose, gradually gives way to doubt, compromise and drift. Told through the voices of those who were there with previously unpublished photographs, this is not a conventional rock biography. It is a portrait of the life of a band as it was actually lived: messy, episodic, often funny, sometimes tragic, and always human. Blending sharp British humour with Scandinavian melancholy, this is more than a rock biography. It is an evocative portrait of a vanished world, of the Scandinavian light, and the enduring power of songs that, for whatever reason, made perfect sense at the time.