The Hives Just Wanna Have Fun

"Welcome to this place — boy are you in for a treat," bellowed The Hives' leader Howlin' Pelle Almqvist with slurred sarcasm and a jolly cockiness, his wide, brown eyes gazing at the small, mostly standing, mostly uninterested crowd at Portland, Ore.'s all-ages Meow Meow music venue, where the band was opening for their friends and labelmates the (International) Noise Conspiracy.

"We're your favorite new band from Sweden," he continued, his mouth forming a crooked smirk, giving the impression that some strange rock 'n' roll jester was addressing us. "We just played two songs and they were really good — pretty phenomenal is the word. Feel free to clap between songs."

The Hives are the new new thing over in England, where The Guardian newspaper recently wrote: "Forget the Strokes and the White Stripes — the hottest new band in town is Sweden's the Hives. Their album Your New Favourite Band has got the critics all excited and they'll be touring the UK soon."

Your New Favourite Band is actually a UK compilation (released by former Creation Records founder Alan McGee on his Poptones label) that draws from the group's two albums, Barely Legal and Veni Vidi Vicious (both released in the U.S. by Burning Heart Records/Epitaph), as well as the "A-K-A Idiot" EP.

At Meow Meow, the audience could care less about the group's UK buzz. Most of their hands remained dangling at their sides or folded over their chests. A dazed, dampened spirit hung like a rain cloud over an audience that likely hadn't seen dry concrete or wiper-free windshields in nearly a month — unfortunately, a common mood at Portland gigs.

Despite the playful punchlines and what-should-be contagious onstage energy of the garage-rock quintet's 40-minute-long set, the crowd never caught the spirit of careless fun the band — all clad in sleek black suits, white ties and white loafers — was having. To their credit, The Hives seemed unaffected by the audience's blasé reaction; their attitude seemed to be, we're gonna have fun with or without you.

"Does anybody out there like The Hives?" Almqvist asked, as if he expected a big response but at the same time thought that expectation absurd. "Does anybody in the band like The Hives? No! There's no band like The Hives!"

Ha, er, ha. No matter, though, because the band carried on with their fun, full of jerky energy, as they blasted through a screeching yet jangly set of Kinks-meet-The-Pixies songs drawn mostly from Veni Vidi Vicious.

"We always enjoy playing live, 'cause we do pretty much just what we think is fun," guitarist Nicholaus Arson told me backstage after the show. "We think it's fun to be like the band we'd most wanna see live ourselves. We enjoy that."

And with nothing to prove live, it's as simple as that: The Hives seem to be having a great time making a living playing rock 'n' roll. The best part of being in The Hives, Arson said, is "the fun of it — getting to do something that you really think is fun. We get to live off of this, and we haven't had a dull moment since 1999. I don't think you can get better than that."— Jenny Tatone [Tuesday, January 22, 2002]