Love Story in Gothenburg

Ryanair - spawn of the devil or saviour of the western world? Discuss.

Thus it was that Lizzy and I arrived at a hugely busy Stansted Airport at 5am on Saturday morning, after a 2 hour drive from Nottingham - that 2.30 am alarm, dontcha just love it. It seemed like that half of Europe was on the move, doubtless inspired like us by promises of 1p flights to exotic destinations. Everything moved along smoothly and at 6.55 we were off on our way to Gothenburg.

Skies were clear so a good view out of the porthole. Lots of sea, then over Holland and Denmark with seemingly thousands of wind farms. Across the sea again to Sweden, coming down we could see all of the offshore islands, very popular with summer visitors according to the Swedish lady sitting next to us. We landed at Gothenburg City Airport, seemingly a shed in a field, but service was pretty slick, and soon we were on the airport bus to Gothenburg. Pine and birch trees, wooden houses, road signs to places with wonderful guttural sounding names.

After a short ride we were off the island of Hissingen and over the bridge into the city of Gothenburg - Europe's fourth largest port after Rotterdam, Hamburg and London as the bus driver told us. Impressive looking place. Big ships. Smart bus station. We walked around a bit and found our hotel near the station and main post office, dumped our things and found a tram which would take us to the cinema - very efficient. Past the huge Ullevi Stadium and then off the tram at the Scandinavium (ice hockey stadium I think) and into the cinema, clutching the piece of paper in Swedish which hopefully meant we had tickets booked for Love Story. We did, the guy behind the counter spoke perfect English, and we had our tickets and Film Festival membership cards.

Into the cinema and we're pleased to see its pretty full, not far off sold out. A Swedish lady introduces the film and Mike Kerry, who's due to give a Q&A session at the end - she says that Love is her favourite band.

Other folks, particularly Gill and John E, have given their views about the film on the message board after the London screening. I found it riveting, it pulled a lot of strands together for me. High spots: - Snoopy was a scream, a real off the wall character - Johnny was very articulate and and contextualised the stuff going on in the 60s in the rest of the world with what was happening with the band- Jac Holtzman's comments about Aloneagainor being the door provided by Bryan for the world to access Forever Changes - tremendous.

It was heart stopping to see the interviews with Bryan - Mike Kerry revealed in the Q&A session that the footage had come from the rushes from the documentary"Hey Hey we're not the Monkees" - really well edited into the later interview footage.

And Arthur?

Arthur was Arthur - and he was so cool.......... Walking round the Castle like he owned the place - he made a comment about how he could have bought it for $50,000 in 1967 and now it was worth $6 million or so. And I loved his advice about drinking two glasses of water for each glass of wine - oh yeah? Raised a laugh around the cinema. No sub-titles - seems like everyone in Sweden can understand colloquial US English - Swedes, I take off my (woolly) hat to you! (It was cold!)

Mike Kerry gave a Q&A session at the end, the man is obviously a great fan. Lizzy and I had a quick chat with him and Zena, long enough to exchange mobile numbers, before he was whisked off to talk to a journalist.

We had the rest of Saturday and Sunday morning in Gothenburg - we felt quite at home there, it was like England would be if things worked. Great public transport, clean streets, interesting shops, tall attractive people and lots of lovely looking kids. Fantastic fish to eat, beer not as expensive as we had been led to believe it would be. Who could wish for more.

Lizzy and I spent some time discussing why Love is so popular in the UK and in Scandinavia, places with cold winters and dark nights. My theory is this - California is a place where the sun shines all the time and most of the music that came out of there in the 60s was sunny, happy, chocolate covered marshmallow music. Love's stuff wasn't like that, it sounds like music from a place where some of the nights are dark and long, and cold winds sometimes blow, and we understand that in Northern Europe. Which may or may not be a complete load of bollocks.

We saw Mike and Zena again at the airport on the way back and had a chat. Nice people.

Anyway, the film is a great tribute to Arthur. And Gothenburg is a great town. We'll be back - such a shame Arthur won't be.