Brainpool (band)

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Brainpool
Brainpool in 2004
Background information
Origin	Sweden
Genre(s)	Pop, Rock
Years active	1993 – present
Members
David Birde Christoffer Lundqvist Jens Jansson
Former members
Jan "Janne" Kask David Birde Christoffer Lundqvist Jens Jansson

Cover for Soda, Brainpool's debut album.

Brainpool is a pop music group from Lund, Sweden, cited as "Sweden's Oasis". The band has also been referred to as a Swedish NSYNC. It was most popular in the mid-1990s, mostly in Sweden, and never really made it abroad. The band was discovered by Per Gessle, mostly famous from the band Roxette, who signed them to his music publishing company Jimmy Fun Music that later merged with another publishing company and is now called Tom Bone Music.

The original members of the band were:

Jan "Janne" Kask - Vocals
David Birde - Guitar
Christoffer Lundqvist - Bass guitar
Jens Jansson - Drums

Cover for Stay Free, Brainpool's final album with Jan Kask as the lead singer.

1 A Very Different Brainpool: Starting Over Without Kask
2 Discography
- 2.1 Albums
- 2.2 Singles

[edit] A Very Different Brainpool: Starting Over Without Kask

Janne Kask left the band in 1997 to pursue a solo career. For a while the other band members were looking for a new lead singer, but soon gave up. "It didn't take long for us to realize that it would be impossible to let another person join", David Birde explained in an interview to The Daily Roxette. "It would have to be the three of us, or split up. At first we thought about changing our name, but that turned out to be difficult - Sony Music had already paid for the recording of You Are Here and they wanted us to keep the name. We had to choose between ditching the recordings and lose our record deal or go on calling ourselves Brainpool. We cowardly chose the latter."

Since then, the band's members have been:

David Birde - Vocals
Christoffer Lundqvist - Guitars
Jens Jansson - Drums

Cover for You Are Here, Brainpool's first album without lead vocalist Jan Kask

Cover for Junk - A Rock Opera

The band not only decided to stay together after Kask left, but they decided to change their style and their music. "We realized our audience was getting younger. We were 26, we were smelly and unshaven and drunk. There were 11 and 12 year old fans who wanted a hug, we just thought it was so wrong, that's when we realized we had to do something else," says David. It was time for their music to reach the level of maturity that they were at."

You Are Here was released in 1999 and was a flop. After the unsuccessful release, the band worked for 4 years on a rock opera which was finally released in 2004 with the name Junk and with the topic of anti-consumerism. The premier was in Malmö on August 19, 2004 where the band was backed up by Malmö Symphony Orchestra. The album was published by the band's own publishing company Junk Musik which releases singles only on the Internet.

In 2005, Brainpool's career was summed up with a compilation We Aimed To Please. Interestingly, it only contains songs from 1992 to 1997 when Janne Kask was still in the band. There are no songs from You Are Here or Junk.

[edit] Discography

Only Swedish releases are included.

[edit] Albums

Soda (1994)
Painkiller (1995)
Stay Free (1996)
You Are Here (1999)
Junk (2004)
We Aimed To Please - Best Of Brainpool, Vol. 1 (2005)

[edit] Singles

Cover for We Aimed To Please, Volume 1, a 'Hits' album that includes songs from the band's first three albums (the albums with lead vocalist Jan Kask.