The brand new book about “the band that doesn’t exist” is very nice, even from an non-fan point of view. The photos in it are nothing less than spectacular! And while the book is full of photos, there are still approximately 19,850 left in Anders’ camera… Food for thought.
The original title of the book was “Gyllene Tider – bandet som inte finns” (the band that doesn’t exist…) but the publisher said that you can’t publish a book with a negative word in the title. Just like the recording business, where you apparently can’t have titles with numbers in them (2Rism anyone?), so Jan-Owe Wikström and Anders Roos changed it as Per did with Travelling. The original title was much better, period.

How is the book? Is there anything new? Well, for starters the book is too full of typos for a high profile release like this. Song titles are misspelled, there were only 2,000 people attending the Halmstad premiere gig instead of 20,000, annoying little things like that. Apart from that, the book is nicely written by Jan-Owe. He has borrowed parts from his older Gyllene Tider book, and added on more recent info as well as embroidered the facts (and fiction?) from his old book. And on page 130 a whole train of thought just ends and as far as I can tell, never comes back.

You get basically the whole story from the infamous Xmas concerts in 1978 up till the last concert in Eskilstuna 2013 with interesting factoids here and there. There’s the drug incidents for instance. One where MP wants to smoke window putty (kitt in Swedish, pronounced sh*t) “kitt som shit” he says, and also the one in Jamaica where beds apparently flew and Micke got the munchies after a spliff and killed a loaf of bread. There’s also the money sharing problems from 1996 and 2004. All the members of the band get their own chapter and even Mr. BoJo (Bosse Johansson) gets his chapter! Even I, who know most things about this little band, had a few revelations. Something that I really enjoyed is that the book is full of QR codes that actually work! For once there is a good use of QR codes. Unfortunately they only lead to Spotify, and not deep links to more background info, say on gyllenetider.com… And there is a full discography at the end, the sleeves are very small however.

For any Gyllene fan I highly recommend this book, especially for the photos. It’s heavy though, 1,400 grams (3 lbs) so shipping will once again be hefty. TDR was planning on selling the book, but the shipping cost makes it near impossible. Join the contest to get one!