Return to Alcazar

The golden years, the silver tears, you wore a tie like Richard Gere -¦ These are the words of Swedish sensation Alcazar’s latest single Crying At The Discotheque, an ode to those moments when you’re so happy at a club that you just want to cry. So grab your hankies or flick on your shades -¦ because Alcazar are coming to play at Mardi Gras.

In the long tradition of Swedish pop music, Alcazar are a fun fluffy pop group with no apologies, just weird lyrics that you might finally understand after your fifth or sixth beer, if you’re lucky. Launching in 1999, their first single Shine On went to number 2 in Sweden, and it’s been cuddly fun and serious disco for tots ‘n’ twinks ever since. Their second single Crying At The Disco-theque was born on the disco isles of Europe, explains singer Tess.

It started in the party islands, because it’s such a happy song, she says. It actually started in Ibiza and Cyprus, and all those Mediterranean parts of Europe -“ Italy, Spain and Greece. So when the tourists went back to Germany or England or wherever, they took it with them, and it went from there.

Tess and frontman Andreas were friends for 10 years, and met the third member Annikafiore at an audition five years ago. The three clicked and, as Tess says: We had the constellation, we had each other, and we had the good songs that Alexander Bard wrote for us. And the rest is popstar history!

They certainly had a good start. Producer Alexander Bard was in fact a member of fellow Swedish pop group Army of Lovers, who had a huge gay hit in 1991 with Crucified. Also from the Lovers, Camilla Henemark made the costumes for Alcazar’s Shine On video, while it was directed by Frederik Boklund, who was responsible for most of the Lovers’ film clips.

But, says Tess, it wasn’t all easy. We had to have quite a lot of patience because we wrote Discotheque and the album three years ago, and so it’s quite recently that the boom came. There were lots of times where you sit back and think [puts on sobbing voice], -˜Let’s just forget about this, nothing is going to happen, we might as well do dishes somewhere,’ but during hard times we just pick each other up!

While the forthcoming album Casino is full of disco harking back to the 70s and 80s with a bit of 21st century electronica influence, the bio notes reveal that Tess has a soft spot for hard rockers Metallica. I ask her whether Alcazar ever argue over which direction to take.

Never! she laughs evasively. We have one thing in common -“ we love Abba, we love disco, and that’s what we wanna do. What I love to do is when I get home put something totally different on, like the Metallica Black album, which just happens to be my favourite [laughs]. But nooooo, never!

With the Mardi Gras appearance out of the bag, Tess says she’s fully aware of what to expect -¦ in fact it turned out that most of the Army of Lovers were gay.

Everybody says, -˜Ooh, you can’t even imagine what you’re going to,’ it’s so cool.

We’ve played at a big one here in Sweden, but it’s not even close to what you guys have. We just want to live life, and meet as many people as we can, do shows, and see what your country’s like. We’re so excited, we’ve been talking about this for so long.

It’s a dream come true.

Alcazar’s Crying At The Discotheque is out now through BMG. Their album Casino is released next Monday.