EVERYONE GETS OUT ALIVE

Growing up in the toughest town in Sweden, Gustaf Norén and Björn Dixgård knew they were destined for higher things. Their band, Mando Diao, are now planning their assault on the UK and Ireland, says Brian Boyd

Borlange, a town right in the centre of Sweden, has the country's highest rates of murder and drug abuse. But its tourist office might soon have something a tad more salubrious to advertise - Borlange is also the hometown of Mando Diao.

Already being labelled the "Swedish Libertines", the four-piece have been kicking up a melodic racket all over northern Europe and Japan over the past few years. They are now priming themselves for an assault on Britain and Ireland on the back of their acclaimed second album, Hurricane Bar.

There is an immediate Liam 'n' Noel sound to the songs of twin vocalists Gustaf Norén and Björn Dixgård. But deeper inspection reveals a band with more in their "Influenced By" box than Britpop.

"When you come from a dangerous place like we do," says Norén, "you spend a lot of time indoors. It didn't help that the only music ever heard in our town was Metallica and Guns N' Roses. The only songwriters who meant anything to me at the time were Holland/Dozier/Holland and Lennon/McCartney, so I was pretty much out of step with everything that was going on there. Being a fan of soul music was not such a clever thing in a place full of Guns N' Roses fans."

At the advanced age of 16, Norén and the rest of the band dedicated their lives to the dream of a rock'n'roll escape from Borlange. "We took it really seriously. We gave up school, gave up everything and locked ourselves away in a summer house for six months working and working on the material," he says. When they re-emerged onto the stage of a Borlange club, in a frenetic state, the local press declared that they would be bigger than Oasis.

"I think we did make a bit of a splash" says Norén. "Sweden is a small country, in musical terms, and word spread to Stockholm about this group of teenagers making an impression and we got invited to the capital to do a TV show. It all started then - all the record company attention. And the only reason we went for a label in the end was because they allowed us to put out our demo tapes as our first album. We had recorded, engineered, produced and mixed the songs ourselves and didn't want to be put into some big studio with some big name producer we didn't know. So listening back to the first album, Bring 'Em In, is still a thrill for us."

Scraggly rock guitars with hooks galore characterise the Mando Diao sound. It's only a Libertines sound insofar as both bands shared a youthful energy and a certain ramshackle appeal. There is more of a soul aspect to Mando Diao's sound, however buried in the mix.

One thing you don't want to call them is the new Hives. "The Hives can't write melodies," says Norén. "They're worse than Depeche Mode."

The group are as earnestly confident as their music sounds. Their first major tour saw them play bottom of the bill to three bigger Swedish bands: The Hellacopters, Kent and Thastrom. "We felt like that woman golfer who now plays on the male tour," he says. "These other bands had been playing for years and years and we had just turned 20. We were playing real rock'n'roll, only doing it better."

Cult status in Japan duly happened, with the fans there taking the time to translate lyrics from English to Swedish. "It was so mad. We don't even know our songs in Swedish, so to be presented with these lyrics was surreal. Some of the fans would hold signs up at our shows there, which were in Swedish. One of them read 'I'm really excited for you' in Swedish, which was nice, but the person holding it up was a 13-year-old girl."

With the second album, Hurricane Bar, on release, Mando Diao are now officially a buzz band. But they project a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the vagaries of the music press.

"It just seems you have to be approved through official channels like the NME or something, and that's not something that's ever worried us. We were outsiders from the start and intend to keep it that way.

"Even if you look at our name - it couldn't be less indie sounding. It sounds Portuguese or something. I can't even remember how we got it - a lot of my memories from those early days are blurred. People say it sounds like we are a world music band. As you can probably tell, we're more into songs than style."

The engineer on Hurricane Bar was a Dubliner, Richard Rainey. "He has worked with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois on U2 records, so he had good teachers," says Norén. "It means we would like to play in Dublin soon, but at the moment it looks like we're booked out until November. But hopefully something will crop up. A festival or something."

Like all bands whose first language isn't English, there's a lot of bending and breaking of the English language in Mando Diao's lyrics, which gives their music a strange, idiosyncratic appeal.

"The most important thing is the sound of the word, not the meaning of the word," he says. "Even if I don't fully understand what the word means, it still gets used if it gives the song the right flow. I suppose we could work harder on it, but it's all to do with what sounds fit the music.

"And anyway, we're far too busy wondering if our record is as good as anything by The Who, The Kinks or The Small Faces. On good days, we think it's better than anything by The Stones or The Beatles."

Hurricane Bar is on the Mute label