It seems fair to ask, at this remove, why a Swedish pop group from the mid-to-late 1990s might merit a major three-part documentary. Most people would be hard pressed to name a single member of the band and you could walk past any one of the quartet in the street and be none the wiser, but 30 years after the release of their first album – the name of which, again, will probably escape you – that is the accolade now accorded Ace of Base. And the reason is not just because that album, The Sign (originally Happy Nation in Europe and, let’s be honest, that doesn’t ring any bells either), sold 25 million copies, went nine times platinum in the United States and secured a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest-selling debut album of all time.
Or that the speed of that success, from gigging in their home town of Gothenburg in 1992 to enjoying huge success around Europe with the breakthrough single All That She Wants – so insanely catchy that some kind of Pavlovian intervention has just forced your auditory cortex to reach for the words “is another baby” – to then hitting No 2 on the Billboard Hit 100 in the US in October 1993 was itself remarkable. It is not even that the following month saw the debut album hit the top of the charts with title track The Sign also obligingly making its way to No 1 for six weeks to become the bestselling single of 1994 before Don’t Turn Around became a presence in top 5s around the world to confirm the band as unrepentant and unimprovable suppliers of cod reggae/electro crack to the entire world.
These are, without doubt, all contributory factors but beyond the crazy sales figures and bizarre sliding doors moments (their first deal came after a demo tape got stuck in a car stereo and the executive heard one particular song on repeat so many times he decided to release it) and squabbles about money and musical direction turned to the max by the 75% sibling quotient in the band, the real reason this story is getting the full-on music doc treatment is because it is like no other. It takes in neo-Nazi punk bands, death threats, a serious knife attack in the home of one of the members and, OK then, All That She Wants – a song – yep, the same one that was caught up in the car stereo – that no less an authority than former Fugee Wyclef Jean considers to be a “cultural phenomenon we’re still talking about 30 years later.”
“I wanted to know, ‘Where’s my bulletproof vest?’” Jenny Berggren, one quarter of Ace of Base, remembers asking as she set forth her very reasonable objection to being moved to the front of the stage with her sister Linn to be used as a human shield. The idea was that they would effectively shield ex-boyfriend and band member Ulf Ekberg who, it should be noted at this point, was already in receipt of said protective item of clothing. “They said they were going to shoot him,” she explains via Zoom from the US. “And he was standing behind us so we were obviously in danger but they just said: ‘You don’t need one.’” This was in May 1993 and a time before social media made issuing death threats as simple as ordering pizza, and came from far right extremists with a deserved reputation in Scandinavia for brutal violence.
It was just two weeks before All That She Wants went to number one in the UK and Ekberg had been exposed by Swedish newspaper Expressen as being a teenage member of a neo-Nazi punk band called Commit Suiside that recorded tracks with titles such as Don’t Touch Our Country and White Power, Black Skull Slaughter and hate-filled lyrics such as: “Men in white hoods march down the road, we enjoy ourselves when we’re sawing off n—–s’ heads / Immigrant, we hate you! Out, out, out, out! Nordic people, wake up now! Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!” The revelations, Berggren insists, came as devastating news to her, Linn and brother Jonas, the other sibling members of the band. “Ulf had a troubled background,” says the 52-year-old. “He lived with us for a time because my mother often brought people like that into our home. They were broken-wing birds. We’d take them in and make them bolder and they’d fly off.
“He became my boyfriend when I was about 18 but I never knew that [neo-Nazi] part of his past. When the news broke it was obviously bad and they tried to tar all four of us with the same brush. I reacted strongly against it because I am the opposite [politically]… but Ulf said to us, very clearly, ‘This is not going to affect [Ace of Base] at all. I’ll take the whole thing on me, as long as you carry me’.” He issued an apology for that “deeply regretful period [of my life]”, confirmed that his band members had never shared those views and insisted that he had changed as a person and was now “opposed to all extremist opinions.” Predictably enough, having recanted their ideology, this was enough to make him and, to a lesser extent, the band targets for credible death threats from far right activists. From that point on, Ekberg wore a bulletproof vest for live performances and had bodyguards while on tour. Berggren and her sister sang at the front of the stage.
After a second album, The Bridge, and another run of successful hit singles, the keyboard player returned to address the difficult issue of his Nazi past in a 1997 documentary and explained, “I told everyone I really regret what I did. I’ve closed that book. I don’t want to even talk about it, that time does not exist in me any more. I closed it and I threw the book away in 1987. I took the experience from it, I learned from it. But that life is not me. It’s somebody else.” But the book had not been closed. A year later, a small independent Swedish label, Flashback Records, released a collection of Ekberg’s music with his former band entitled Uffe Was a Nazi! and a particularly damaging picture subsequently emerged allegedly of a teenage Ekberg doing the Nazi salute in a t-shirt featuring the Reichsadler – the combined swastika and stylized eagle emblem.
He took time out again in 2013 to apologise (and deny that the most extremist songs on the Flashback release were by Commit Suiside) but the story still lives on in the digital shadows after the online successor to satirical magazine Cracked ran a piece in 2015 titled “How A Pop Band Tricked 9 Million Americans Into Being Nazis.” Over the course of a couple of thousand words it attempted to detect coded fascist messages and symbolism in the lyrics and videos of the band and even the name which, it claimed, was “most likely” a spoonerism of the Keroman submarine base occupied by the top U-boat commanders known by the nickname “base of aces.” In an environment without nuance and irony, Ekberg’s undeniably sorry past has been in circulation for over 30 years and re-emerged again with this new fully authorised documentary.
He is the force behind the project and must have known what to expect when the time came to promote the show. He has again spelled out his opposition to extremist ideology, denied the claim that he was ever a member of the far right Sweden Democrats Party and spoken of the fear he experienced at the time a concealed bulletproof vest was a key part of his stage attire: “Once I decided to leave those [far right associates] behind, they were very angry. They thought I was a traitor and did try to kill me a few times. So it was tough, because also the whole band was threatened. It was not only me, but they went after me especially.”
Berggren concurs. “It was a scary time,” she says with a thin smile but, incredibly, the scariest chapter in the Ace of Base story was yet to come. It involved herself and the parents of three of the band members, came less than a year after the Nazi revelations (but was totally unrelated) and a month before the single The Sign joined the album of the same name at the top of the American charts in April 1994.
Success was so fresh for the band, the money following their global success had not really landed. Consequently, as the world was fighting but failing to stop the chorus “All that she wants is another baby” running through its collective brain, 23-year-old Jenny Berggren, vocalist and part-time human shield was travelling on the bus late at night back to the Gothenburg family home three of the band (and for a brief period) Ulf Ekberg had grown up in – No 1 album in the US, public transport, no security, very Sweden. “Everything had happened so quickly and we had been so busy travelling around the world that I hadn’t had time to buy myself an apartment so I was still living with my parents,” she says now. “I’d lived there since I was six.” She had felt unsettled as soon as she got off the bus but this sense of unease had increased as she got ready for bed.
“It felt like something was odd before I even went to sleep,” she recalls. “It’s hard to put into words but there was something strange about the house.” A few minutes later she was awoken by a hunting knife being held to her neck by an obsessed female fan from Germany called Manuela Behrendt. Told to remain silent, she was then taken at knifepoint through the house to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother and father were asleep but the young singer somehow summoned the courage to shout the word “knife”. Startled awake, her mother Birgitta “roared like a lion” and instantly went for her daughter’s assailant and a struggle ensued during which she received knife wounds to both hands before her father finally restrained the intruder and the police arrived.
“It all tore a big piece of me apart,” she acknowledges over 30 years later. “I felt like there was one Jenny before this happened and one Jenny after… when [the single] went to No 1 in America a few weeks later everyone wanted to party but all I could think was, ‘I almost got killed.’ I didn’t want to party, I was broken.” She began to experience depression. Berggren doesn’t name her attacker during the interview or in the documentary (“I don’t want to tell her story, it’s hers”) but still carries the trauma with her. “I pray that she’s OK every evening because she was in a devastating place and as long as she’s safe, I will be safe,” she explains. “As long as she’s sane, I will be sane.” Behrendt is banned from ever returning to Sweden.
Everything changed, not just for Jenny and the band who were now accompanied by security everywhere they went but, she believes, for celebrity in general. “Nobody had security at the Musical World Awards in Monaco when we went in 1993 but the next year Prince came with five bodyguards, I had one. It was a game changer.” Ekberg, still the subject of death threats at this time, tells the documentary, “[Being in the band] was not so innocent any more, not so much fun.” It is perhaps remarkable that they continued to record and perform at all but they did and there was still one more major single success from the first album with Don’t Turn Around. Even the rushed second album in 1995, The Bridge, delivered hits and was certified platinum in 14 countries but not on the epic scale as before and the band were, understandably, exhausted.
Life in Ace of Base was becoming subject to the law of diminishing returns. Jenny was still scarred by her experience while her sister, Linn, tired of the constant touring – particularly across Asia and Australasia in 1996 – and having to overcome her fear of flying, was also increasingly uncomfortable with the limelight. She opted for a less involved role, even being blurred out in publicity photos. There were two more albums with the original line-up, Flowers/Cruel Summer in 1998 and Da Capo in 2002, but also fewer hits as well as arguments with the boys who wrote the songs about royalties, no doubt complicated by the family ties. “[Linn and I] really didn’t get the bigger part of the money,” is how she puts it now. “And that could have been so easily just moved by the boys but it wasn’t. If they had, I think Ace of Base would still be on the road today.”
Although the band have never formally split, there have been solo projects, tours and books and lawsuits, name changes and other developments that keep lawyers wealthy and bands from getting back together but they have not been forgotten by their fans and still have 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Ekberg expresses his hope at the start of the documentary that the new film “might bring us together” but Jenny just laughs. “There is warmth there [between us all] and I’m happy to promote the show but right now I’m working my ass off with my solo career and I have really, really good times going on. I don’t need to have more to do but if the boys and my sister will call me one day and say, ‘Please, can we do a joint venture for something?’ I’d say, ‘Fine, I know how to do that.’” Perhaps that call is all that she wants. Whether Ekberg wants another round of “I’m ashamed of my Nazi past” is anybody’s guess.
Ace of Base: All That She Wants is available in the UK on Amazon Prime Video
