This is Mando Diao. The band we started in Borlänge, Sweden. In the mid 90's my dear friend, the great Björn Dixgård, formed a band called Butler. They played the kind of music loads of small towns don't have, sweet pop, raving rock'n'rolland soul music that ment more than life itself. After a couple of months I met Björn on a big party in a park. We were too young to go to bars so we pretty much lived in different parks. Björn asked me to join and so I did. Bang! We changed name to Mando Diao. (show more)

This is Mando Diao. The band we started in Borlänge, Sweden. In the mid 90's my dear friend, the great Björn Dixgård, formed a band called Butler. They played the kind of music loads of small towns don't have, sweet pop, raving rock'n'rolland soul music that ment more than life itself. After a couple of months I met Björn on a big party in a park. We were too young to go to bars so we pretty much lived in different parks. Björn asked me to join and so I did. Bang! We changed name to Mando Diao. God knows where it comes from, probably heaven. After a year of rehearsing we found Samuel on drums and C-J on bass. It was very important to become a clan, a unit, something more than just friend playing music. Corleone-style. We didn't care much about getting signed by big labels. We knew that that day was gonna come. So we started building our own studio at our former organplayer Daniel Haglunds basement. When it was done we recorded demos after demos. This was year 2000 and the music scene was very dull at the moment. But in some way we felt that there was something going on. Our strategy was to play so many gigs that eventually everyone whoud know about us. And so in 2002 we signed with Emi. We didn't care who or what we signed with, we just knew that nothing could stop us. We released our demos as an album, called it Bring 'em in and toured the world. That's the history.