Golden Age of Aland Music

The Aland Postal Service has issued three nice cards named "Golden Age of Aland Music" on the 25th of August 2014. These cards featured three of the most popular Aland bands during the 1960s. They were the Anacondas, the Hitch Hikers and the Stockdoves. 

During some groovy years in the middle of the 1960s, dances were arranged in the Åland

community centres on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and, sometimes, even on Sundays.

The bands Anacondas, Hitch Hikers and Stockdoves took pop music of the world to Åland and Finland. 

The 1960s was the decade when pop music took Åland by storm. The range of music in the early 1960s had more or less consisted of music performed on accordion, upright bass and guitar for the traditional dances hambo, schottische and foxtrot. But the winds changed and, inspired by bands such as The Shadows, The Spotnicks and The Violents, the Åland barbed-wire band The Anacondas was formed in 1962.
“We played in community centres up to four times a week,” Karl-Erik “Kille” Williams, clarinet and guitar player in Anacondas, accounts.

The Åland music was even exported, performing on Finnish as well as on Swedish television. Perhaps the Hitch Hikers was the band that ventured most and the band members succeeded in earning their living as band members for a few years. “At least, we made a serious attempt.  If we succeeded is another question,” organ player Håkan Rikberg laughs.
They toured in Turku and Helsinki, making detours to Ostrobothnia. Once, they performed on the same television program as Sonny & Cher. Håkan Rikberg remembers the Hitch Hikers’ tour bus, a rickety minibus, which the police did not like. It had messages and expressions of affections from loyal fans from around the country scribbled all over it. The turnover of band members was considerable. Håkan Rikberg and Kille Williams both appeared in various line-upps with the majority of Åland bands. And they did become well known.  “In an Åland perspective, we were rather popular, I do believe. Where we played, everybody wanted to be,” Kille Williams says.

Thank you Ella.