Stonecake is a Swedish pop band at its best. A band that is outstanding live, the three band members complement each other and the energy of the live performances gives the audience a flashback to the golden time of pop. The name Stonecake is a perfect description of the band; "stone" for the tough and cool audience and "cake" for the soft and romantic ones.
HISTORY
The success of the band is built on their passion for pop & rock music from the sixties and years of in numerable gigs in different bands. Stonecake was formed in the late eighties. The band members were all experienced musicians from various fields of music styles. So on the D-day the guideline for the music identity was to only play music they all liked.
Under the biketree
The debut album "Under the bike tree", released 1991, was a joyful mix of XTC - Beatles - Doors - Queen and Hendrix and shows that the roots of Stonecake is to be found in the pop and rock from the sixties.
Tuesday Afternoon
The first single "Tuesday Afternoon" was the number one song played that year. At the Swedish "Grammy Awards" Stonecake won prize for best newcomer. The motivation was; "for using known pop sounds in a respectful but free way and turning them to "Stonecake", a contemporary sound of cream and granite."
Thereafter the band began club touring Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Germany
Stonecakes record company got into financial problems and the band did not get the backing and support they needed. The contract though, said that the record company MVG should promote Stonecake internationally, so the band begun to work on their second record.
Acoustic Toilets
When the second album "Acoustic Toilets" was released late 1993 Stonecake was recognised as Sweden's most famous underground band, the band with the "Happy psycho rock". This record gave a representative picture of what Stonecake sounded like live. With no compromise they combined their music with sounds from the early seventies, sounding like if Paul McCartney should sing with Cream or MC 5. First 7" release: Sunnier had some radio rotation and are included in the Martin Beck movie: "The man on the balcony".
Being a "smaller independent" the record company MVG did not have the capacity or financials to grow by themselves or support the group, so they were bought by a Swedish record company that had other ideas for Stonecake. The Band also toured Sweden Finland and Denmark in -94.
Middle of Nowhere
1995 they released their third album "In the Middle of Nowhere", a more straight pop record with eleven songs that all had potential to climb on the charts lists. It generated good response and reviews in Japan and the American west coast.
The first promo single: "building castles" was released and occurred on the radio a couple of times, but was never released by the label.
Tommy was struck by a high voltage accident in August and his both hands got quite seriously injured, and 3 complicated operations had to be done. He had to spend month and a half in Uppsala Academy Hospital.
And from there the elevator stopped and wasn't about to move for awhile.
Tommy got better and Stonecake supported Oasis in Stockholm in October -96.
The band begged the record company to release one more single from the record, but no response.
Stonecake was also asked to become a "defender of the oppressed breed" and recorded an old surf metal song
called "Surfers of a new generation" that was included on an double CD on the theme "save the animals" with various artists of Sweden.
In -97 Stonecake takes a break.
Tommy works with Warner bros. in Sweden as the producer of another Borlaenge combo: Space Age Baby Jane. Marcus toured different bands around, and Per worked with his own band Spanish Mary.
Tommy and Marcus had plans for the death of Stonecake but Per thought that the band got lots of great materials unreleased, so…… No funeral!
Some People
Though the band had an eight track analog studio they began to work with new material and recorded 17 songs during the time of one year and a half. And then, one early spring day in -99 the album "Some people" was completed.
Stonecake was now an independent band with no label deal.
They found Morgan Mazarine to support the band as a manager to help the band back in business.
They made a deal with hypermusic, a brand new IT-label that updated "Some People" on their homepage for Internet downloading and service.
Hereby Stonecake got in touch with an American Powerpop freak in L.A. and was invited to play the IPO during the summer of 2000. But the band couldn't finance the trip and was invited again to the IPO of 2001 but with the same result. Then the band was invited to play New York in December 2001, but same old story appeared again.
The rest is future....