There are people who change space. People whose very presence seems to determine everything. You have most certainly met them, – at some point in or lives, we all have. They are the kind of people who turn up at a party, or in a bar or a nightclub and just make everything happen. People who carry an invisible energy and seem to possess near-magical capabilities. They are the people who constitute that unknown ingredient in what we call a party. Those who make us dance more, drink more and disappear into the night. Once upon a time they were called shaman – we call them party-starters.

Since the dawn of time, people have congregated in the ritual we today call a party. It’s built upon a few simple basic elements; belonging, rhythm and music, drugs and intoxication. Through these elements, a journey has gained momentum toward the transcendence that makes up the very core of the party – to transfer oneself from one state into another. Since time immemorial, this has been one of humanity’s most important rites – and at the same time one of our most reviled mysteries.

The party has been borrowed to serve several objectives – as a way of glorifying the gods, to be elevated into the afterlife or to consort with our ancestors. But the sense of belonging and of being in the moment has always been the same.

Today, for the civilised human being, the party fulfills a different purpose. In his great work The Civilizing Process, the philosopher Norbert Elias described how, since the Middle Ages, humans in Western society have oppressed the expression of their feelings. This development started in the royal courts, with their stringent rules regarding etiquette, and then spread downward through the layers of society.

People were fostered to suppress all things physical and anything that could reveal our brutish side. We became thinking beings instead of bodily creatures. But there was one space where these stifled feelings could find an outlet, where the oppression of the process of civilization was eased.

The party became an emotional ritual that has perhaps never been more important than today. In our increasingly controlled society the party has become a ventilator, a parallel universe where, for a few brief moments, we have the chance to rise above the demands and responsibilities of our society.

In the transcendence of the party, the modern human has, more than anything else, had an escape from the obsession to control time that is so common today. It has taken us to another space. The party has always been about enhancing the complete experience of here and now. Neither yesterday nor tomorrow exist. In that way, the party has always fulfilled its own purpose– not anyone else’s. It would be simplistic to see the powerful experience of now created by the party as just an escape – it could in fact be quite the opposite. Sometimes it is through this experience that we reach the sense of true consciousness. When we begin to see the world, our friends and ourselves without the emotional barriers we carry round with us in our day-to-day lives. A brief moment of total consciousness – a feeling that it is only in that moment that we have been truly awakened.

For that same reason, the party has often been greeted with scepticism from the official society. Like something both menacing and destructive. Like something that threatens to knock the civilised order of society off its axis. A place where orderly citizens are transformed into unpredictable creatures of lust. But above all it has been a state of unproductivity, a place where the myth of society’s progress has had its day.

And it’s also because of this that the main characters of the party have often been looked down upon. The party has always needed them; the leaders, the magicians, those who have led the voyage, the party train, towards the unknown. They have been here all through time; the shamans, the libertines, the club kids. They have appeared in many disguises, but their talent has always remained the same – as pathfinders to the here and now. Their art has left few traces, their lives have left few remnants. Their work has been evanescence. That’s also where you find the beauty in their art; not to preserve or to remember, but to be there. – Anders Rydell

Crime

– ”She enacts her revenge in a more shocking way and with far more refined cruelty than a man would. The idea to strangle the victim with a snare point towards a woman having a hand in this.”
In September 1875 the prostitute Johanna Sofia Dahlberg is found in her room at Södra Teatern. She had been strangled and suffered a blow to the head with an axe. The killer was never found but the police were of the opinion that a woman was behind it.

-Early one Sunday morning in 1994 four people, a bouncer and three night clubbers, are killed at Stureplan when 25-year old Tommy Zethreus fires an automatic weapon towards the entrance of nightclub Sturecompagniet. Why? He and his friends weren’t let in.

-Café Stockholm by Norrtull was shut down in 1999 but will remain in Swedish criminal history. In that spring alone, the following incidents occurred:

22 search warrants
139 cases of drugs possession
53 people arrested for possession of firearms
35 cars are seized or imposed with a driving ban
One man shot in the head

Drugs

-Three waves of cocaine have swept through Stockholm (and indeed the whole developed world) – in 1880, 1930 and 1980. The biggest of those waves that hit Stockholm came in the late 80s.

-In the 1890s politicians tried to stifle the immorality at the entertainment establishments by changing the alcohol laws so you couldn’t drink while watching a show, their philosophy being that if you weren’t allowed to get drunk you would never stand the immoral entertainment.

-In the spring of 1996, police break up a rave party at Docklands in Nacka. Present is Gudrun Schyman, leader for the Left Party (formerly known as the communist party) clubbing together with her daughter.
A police source mention in the media: ”People were lying like seals on top of each other on couches – high as kites”.

Sex

-In 1952 the sale of condoms began at pharmacies, barber shops and other shops with a special license. The birth control pill became legal in 1964 which helped to grease the wheels of sexual liberation, which reached its peak in the 1970s.

-Sexual activity inside a night club or a restaurant is not unlawful in Sweden but you could be made to pay a fine for offensive behaviour or sexual harassment.

-38 percent of guys and 35 percent of girls admit in a survey in 2004 that they have had sex at bars or night clubs. 70 percent of guys and 50 percent of girls would want to.

Partystarters of yesteryear

Sigge Wulff
(1869-1892)

On January 7th 1892 Sigge Wulff passed away. The popular entertainer might have become an alcoholic through all the champagne, but in the end it was tuberculosis, rather than cirrhosis, that killed him.

At that time, TB was something of an occupational hazard for variety and music hall artists. They lived like every day could be their last, and performed on stage late at night in smoke-filled clubs.

Sigge Wulff had his breakthrough at Berns, and was a worshiped charmer, performing in a chequered shirt with wide silk lapels, wide trousers complimented by a cane, a grey top hat and peaked shoes.

Wulff, symbolising the frail fin de siècle culture, performed for the last time at Berns early January 1892.  After several encores Sigge became tired and, with a laurel wreath around his neck, he received adulation from the crowd who carried him shoulder high to his room at Hamburger Börs. When he woke up the next day, a doctor established that he had a punctured lung, which Wulff tried to cure with champagne. Friends hurried to be by his side, told stories, sang songs, drank champagne and had a good time. At 3 o’clock Wulff asked them to arrange his pillow. He said he was comfortable, and stopped breathing.

Zarah Leander
(1907-1981)

After her breakthrough in the late 20s Zarah Leander became Karl-Gerhards favourite leading lady in his shows up until 1936, whereupon she had a career in Nazi Germany. After returning to Sweden in 1943 she was ostracised, despite being deemed non-political, and it would take until 1949 before she got to make a comeback. Even Karl-Gerhard, himself an outspoken anti-Nazi, took her back. Leander spoke about their relationship as an “outer bodily marriage” hinting at his homosexuality.

Because of her past, Leander could never attain any high position in Swedish culture, but wherever she went she took up a great deal of room with that voice and her queer demeanour. She was cheeky, shameless and sexually explicit and her status as a star varied from diva, independent woman, martyr, mistress to mother.

As a tall woman with a dark voice and flaming red hair, some perceived her as a vicarious channel for the feelings and desires they could not reveal. All she used to create her stage persona was the voice and her arms and hands. Although it sounds simple, at the time it was deemed that no-one else could achieve the ‘Leander-effect’.

Zarah mentioned that one of her favourite hobbies was lovemaking (the other being the card game canasta). “That I have been raised by and with men hasn’t dampened my female erotic appetite – quite the opposite! But I do understand that it must be hell to be married to someone like me.”

Johnny Bode
(1912-1983)

One of the most controversial figures in Stockholm nightlife during the 1900s was named Johnny Bode. This enfant terrible was a compulsive liar whose dubious morals made him socially unacceptable, but somehow he still managed to mingle with high society over decades.

Originally a singer in the 1920s and 30s, Johnny lived far above his means and was generally loved for his generosity at Stockholm’s finest establishments – despite being a master of the art of sneaking out the back door and making someone else pick up the bill.

Bode’s way of life soon landed him in criminal activity such as fraud. He was hospitalized in a mental institution during the 30s where he also was sterilized. He had no interest in politics but was drawn to Nazism because of the “uniforms, marches and the pompous culture”. He enlisted in the German army in Finland but was sent home after being deemed not fit to serve. Instead, he went to Norway where he put on shows for the Quisling regime, although the Germans eventually had enough of him after “provocative behaviour towards high-standing officers”. He was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Grini concentration camp but was later deported back to Sweden where he was banned from entertaining. Dressed in fur and a skirt and calling himself Miss Florence Stephens, he eventually fell back into criminality

People who knew him called him completely insane and he lived an extremely eventful life. He lived to party and spent all his money (and that of others) towards that objective. Among countless stories is one where he invites a waste collector in on the way home from a party. He convinces him to bring his horse along up into the apartment where Johnny, spurred on by his merry band of partying friends, climbs up for a ride around the dinner table.

Photos by Johan Lindskog