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Album Details
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· Produced By: Tommy Denander
· Running Time: 48.20
· Release Date: January 13
· Released: 
· Genre: Melodic Metal
· LabelLink: AOR Heaven
· ArtistLink:
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Artist Bio
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Vocals: Thomas Vikström
Bass: Marcel Jacob
Guitars: Tommy Denander
Drums: Daniel Flores
SPEEDY GONZALES was born in 1990 when Thomas Vikström's band TALK OF THE TOWN broke up and Tommy Denander had just returned from living 3 years in Los Angeles. They had known each other and had worked together for many years but now felt the time was right to start a new band together.
The idea was to do something heavier than they'd done before but keep the melodies.... mix Judas Priest with Kiss sort of. The guys quickly hired ex TREAT member Mats "Dalton" Dahlberg to play drums, Thomas old friend Staffan Linder on bass and after a lot of discussions over having another guitar player or a keyboard player they decided on Thomas Ahlstrand on keyboards.
For some reason the guys decided on the rather silly name SPEEDY GONZALES and also signed on famous swedish journalist/manager Anders Tengner as their manager. Tommy and Thomas delivered new song ideas several times a week and soon the band had more than 10 great new songs, 7 of them plus a new version of the TALK OF THE TOWN hit "Free like an eagle" were recorded as a demo to shop for a deal.
In the end of 1990 the band made their first live performance at the huge "December rock festival" at Gavlerinken, a big icehall in Sweden. Only billed as one of the first opening acts before bands like CANDLEMASS and PRETTY MAIDS SPEEDY GONZALES truly blew all other bands off the stage!! Every newspaper and rock magazine hailed the band as the next big thing to come, Tommy won the "best guitarist" award in Sweden's biggest news paper Aftonbladet and every magazine had big pictures of the band plus interviews. Things were looking really good as Anders brought the demo to a few major labels in USA and two of them showed serious interest in signing the band... But during a few months some bad feelings had started to grow within the band and in early 1991 Tommy left the group.
Since Tommy had written most of the music and wasn't willing to just give it away the band was forced to find a replacement plus write new songs and a few talented guys were auditioned but fell short and soon after the band broke up for good. The demo has been kept a fairly good secret over the years and only a couple of bootleg CD's has surfaced but the rumour of the band has lived on. So strong in fact that in 2004 Tommy and Thomas were offered a deal from AOR Heaven to re record the songs for a proper album...something they both really wanted to do.
"We absolutely wanted to keep the true vibe of how we sounded then but with better musicians today so we asked our dear friend and bass genious Marcel Jacob (Talisman, Yngwie) to play bass and the great Daniel Flores (Mind's Eye, Xsaviour) to play drums and i would handle guitars and keyboards and Thomas of course would once again sing his ass off haha" - says Tommy.
"This is an album that was a lot of fun to do. We wrote these songs many years ago and we kept it the way it was written. Maybe you think the lyrics are a little bit childish and naive?....well, you're right cause we were too back then!. When me and Tommy work together there is always magic around us, and when we are not fooling around with each other and in fact do work we don't have to say so much, we simply just know what to do!" - Thomas adds.
With 4 new songs and the original demo re-recorded we present - SPEEDY GONZALES "Electric Stalker".
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