How did guitarist Benjamin Vallé, of the Stockholm hardcore six-piece Viagra Boys, begin as “a punk rocker with a Mohawk” and later became a lover of Jethro Tull?
Friendly and laid-back as he is, Benjamin Vallé admits to being more than a little on the stressed side when reached in his hometown of Stockholm.
Viagra Boys—the much-hyped Swedish six-piece he plays guitar in— are about to launch a major assault on North America. The prospect of being on the road for a 30-day full-bore grind—which will include a comingout party at Sxsw—means there’s plenty of last-minute scrambling to be done.
“We leave tomorrow morning, so right now I’m like, ‘Did I get everything that I need to bring?’ ” Vallé told the Straight. “I finally decided to take just a small cabin bag. I’ve got enough for 14 days, then I’ll go to the laundromat and do it all over again instead of having a lot of shit to drag around.”
That he’s decided to go the streamlined route makes some sense when you consider the path Viagra Boys took on their debut full-length, Street Worms.
Vallé and his bandmates have quite accurately argued that the record is as indebted to pioneering Berlin-spawned dance music as it is to gloomy postpunk, grinding hardcore, and dialled-down free jazz.
That means surprises such as the squealing sax almost driving things off the rails in “Down in the Basement”, and the flat-out crazy “Best in Show”, American-born singer Sebastian Murphy’s spoken-word tribute to the weird world of dogs.
When it comes to attitude, there’s no hiding which section of the record store Vallé and his fellow Viagra Boys grew up shopping in.
“When you’re a kid you’re either a heavy-metal kid or a punker,” he offers. “I was a punk rocker with a Mohawk—a snotty little idiot kid. But nowadays I’m like, ‘I really love Jethro Tull.’ Me as a kid hearing me say that as an adult would have gone bananas. Like, ‘What are you doing, you fucking bore?’”
Veterans of the Swedish hardcore scene, Viagra Boys see themselves as part of a lineage that includes buttonpushing agitators like the Stooges, Dead Kennedys, and Butthole Surfers.
Bonding Viagra Boys to such legends is the belief that artists have one job, and that’s to fuck shit up on multiple fronts.
These days that’s normally the job of hip-hop artists like Xxxtentacion and Tekashi 6ix9ine.
That rock ’n’ roll is in one of its safe, dormant periods left an opening, Vallé suggests, for Viagra Boys. “Maybe what we’re doing is filling a hole that needed to be filled,” he offers. “Looking at Sebastian, he’s kind of dangerous like Iggy Pop was. He’s not only a dangerous person, he looks like a dangerous person. He’s a weirdo.
“And then all of us decided to think outside the box instead of just having the typical sort of guitar riffs. I mean, we have some typical rock songs, and we have songs that are all about drums, synthesizers, and saxophone as well. It’s simple but we’ve really tried to make it different, to where people might even feel appalled and challenged.”
More importantly, audiences might also find themselves thinking. Good chunks of Street Worms are twisted enough to impress Gibby Haynes during the acid-gobbling years.
That dedication to flying one’s freak flag is perhaps best embodied by “Sports”. The video for the song, in which the shirtless and heavily tattooed Murphy lurches around a busy tennis-club court with a microphone and mile-long microphone cable, has done big business on Youtube. But pay attention to the deceptively simple lyrics— basically a laundry list of popular sports interspersed with references to wieners and balls—and you get one of the most perfect commentaries on the mindless sports obsessions of the average American male since the Dead Kennedys’ “Jock-o-rama”.
Clever? Incredibly so, which explains why, after years and years of playing music in go-nowhere punk bands—sometimes with each other— Vallé and the rest of Viagra Boys have found themselves onto something that’s generating a blizzard of hype.
“Right from the early rehearsals and first live shows we were kind of feeling it,” the guitarist says. “Then we did some demos in our rehearsal room and it was like, ‘Okay, this is the way to go, because this is really fucking good.’ That’s great, because we didn’t start this band to get rich. I was in a band before and we toured—a lot—in Europe. I always came home broke.”
Now, even after going the renegade, art-over-commerce route, he’s lucky enough to be doing music full-time. He’s the first to recognize how lucky he is.
“I’ve been touring since ’97 and was barely able to survive,” Vallé marvels. “So all this is nothing but a bonus. And it’s better than working in an office.” g
We’ve really tried to make it different, to where people might even feel appalled and challenged. – Benjamin Vallé
interesting to maybe put a few Acadian traditional recipes on there, like the fricot and the meat pies—and we’ve been talking about adding more. But the others are just things we’ve picked up here and there on the road.”
That the Leblancs benefited from an atmosphere of home cooking and house parties is obvious. “We grew up very much surrounded by music,” Pastelle confirms. “My dad was a music teacher, as well, at the school, and he would invite people over all the time, so there were many parties and many musical sessions. And when we were younger we stepdanced for a long time, which is a really natural thing here too. Most people will know how to do a step or two. But then the music came in a little bit later, in our teen years.”
Leblanc points out that even the most traditional forms of Acadian music are inherently cosmopolitan, incorporating elements of French, Irish, Scottish, and Indigenous culture. Vishtèn broadens the mix further by adding Pascal Miousse, whose roots are on the Magdalen Islands; he’s a fiercely rhythmic fiddler, and on the band’s latest album, Horizons, he also gets to show that he’s a skilled electric guitarist. With Emmanuelle and Pastelle each playing several instruments, the three are easily able to duplicate the record’s full and vibrant sound on-stage.
“As you’ve heard, there’s lots going on!” Pastelle enthuses. “There’s a lot of bass; let’s say that I’m doing that on the piano with the left hand. Pascal’s set up with his fiddle and effects; the electric guitar that you hear on the album transfers pretty well to the live show. And then Emma’s got all the percussive stuff and a mandolin with an octave sound, like a bass, added on there. It was a lot of work to transfer the album sound to the live show, but we’ve been touring with it since last June, and it’s going pretty well.”
Alexander Varty