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Concert Report
April 18, 2002
GINO, Stockholm, Sweden
by Lars Samuelsson and Ulrika Johansson

Here's a story about two people, a group called DriveSHAFT and a place called GINO. All of these elements happened to coincide on the 18th of April in what turned out to be a magnificent concert.

It all began one September day when we, two young students from Sweden, heard a song called "Let Me Ride" on MTV. Unfortunately we didn't catch the name of the group that time, but after a long time of unintellectual staring at the TV, it finally gave us the name DriveSHAFT. As we practically live in the bush, though it's kind of a civilized bush here in Sweden, we or nobody else, had ever heard of them before. Determined to find the latest album, we headed off towards the big city of Borlange, Well, at least they've got three record stores, McDonald's and a steel production facility. To our surprise we found what we were looking for in one of the record stores, their first album DriveSHAFT.

Somewhat later, around Christmas, we were lying in the sofa in front of the TV. When zapping through the channels, we suddenly saw DriveSHAFT performing. Feeling quite a bit more excited we watched the show. They gave the information for the DriveSHAFT website.

Since then the homepage has been a great source of information, and it was there we found the tour dates. We knew we had to be at the concert, one way or another. There was only one problem, the place where they would be playing, a club called GINO, has an age limit and won't allow people under the age of 20 to enter, and Ulrika is 18. Not knowing exactly what to do about this, we wrote a letter to the DriveSHAFT website. This resulted in a couple of answers, one of which was from Jilly and the most interesting.  She offered us to become the Swedish correspondents for the website and we thought that was a great idea. Now we had an angle for getting in at GINO.

To be absolutely sure to get inside, we phoned Rhythm Records and told them that we represent a website and would like to do a concert review. This way our names ended up on a special list, which was to be kept at the entrance.

We traveled our 400 km long journey to the capital of Sweden. GINO is a modern style club, not only for young people, as they are trying to make the older audience feel at home too. The club has got a good reputation and is known throughout entire Europe and many popular, hot and cool musicians are playing there.

A beer and some crowding later, the enormous Venetian blind went to the ceiling and four masters of music entered the stage. Talk about immediate euphoria, the crowd went wild and so did we! The audience went haywire, people singing along and flying all over the place. Charlie said something but he couldn't be heard from where we were standing, the crowd was just too loud. They finished their performance and then disappeared, but the crowd did not. We went on cheering and shouting until they reappeared. Charlie said something about the coolness of the crowd. They couldn't possibly leave without playing "(You All) Everybody" we said to ourselves, and we were right. The crowd screamed for more but realized that was it, and many headed elsewhere.

We, however, stayed outside of GINO for a while, hoping to get a glimpse of the band. To our delight we saw the members of the band coming in and out of a back door. When standing there thinking about whether we should disturb them or not, Patrick suddenly walks up to us and asks, "How's it going?" Here we almost fell to the Tarmac, but managed to squeeze out how great the show had been. We introduced ourselves and told him that we were correspondents for this website. He had just read the updates and thought it was cool to meet us, and then Charlie walked by, Patrick told him to come over and meet us and explained who we were. They asked us to send their greetings to Jilly and Marie; Hi!

After that, I, Lars, took a picture of Pat, Charlie and Ulrika standing right next to each other. Too caught up in the moment, we didn't take more than one picture; stupid! They seemed to be in a rush, so we told them they had to come to Sweden again, and they promised to do so. As we saw them walk away, we thought that this was the perfect ending of a perfect evening. Slowly, we walked a way in the night, one pleasant experience richer.