Is this too high a price to pay to be remembered?

“Is this too high a price to pay to be remembered?” That is the question Po Tidholm asks after reading Fredrik Emdén’s biography of Olle Ljungström, titled “I Let My Reputation Take My Place.” His verdict is blunt: anyone who wants to remember Ljungström at his best should not read this book.

The biography begins with the pop myth. Ljungström had been almost a teenage star with Reeperbahn in the early 1980s, then made a spectacular comeback in 1993. He quickly became one of the defining pop stars of the 1990s, not necessarily because of sales figures, Tidholm writes, but because he had the songs, the lyrics, the stage presence and the best band.

The early chapters, covering his childhood on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, his relationships with siblings and his first small gigs, are described as orderly and almost dull. The story becomes more compelling when Emdén traces Ljungström through the many people who knew him. They initially appear captivated, even in love with a strange figure who seemed to embody opposite qualities at once: strong and fragile, caring and cruel, wise and reckless, creative and disorganised, a good friend and deeply unreliable.

Tidholm writes that Ljungström could move and hurt people with equal force. The portrait that emerges is of a highly intelligent alcoholic. He began drinking as a teenager and was fully dependent on alcohol by the age of 18.

Ljungström died on May 4, 2016, after an almost lifelong struggle with alcohol. Tidholm also recalls moving in the same circles as the musician in the 1990s, when Ljungström was constantly out at bars and impossible to miss. The review suggests that Emdén’s relentless account of intoxication, betrayal and death threatens to replace the music with the damage surrounding it.