Final Third: My Place
Socialism and Spam At home with Viagra Boys singer Sebastian Murphy, by Liam Konemann. Photography by Dan Kendall
It’s early January, and that means release week for Viagra Boys’ second album Welfare Jazz. The record is an exercise in postpunk, continuing the musical satire that carried their debut Street Worms, once again leaning into Viagra Boys’ tendency to make the mundane strange. It’s snidely political and lovingly absurd, and singer Sebastian Murphy is ready to be done with it. “I’m looking forward to it coming out,” he says. “We recorded it over a year ago, so I’m over it. I want to move on to the next one.” At the moment, the whole ‘moving on’ thing is complicated. Naturally, there’ll be no touring this record internationally in the foreseeable future. With most of Europe still closed down, Welfare Jazz is largely an at-home experience. Home, for Sebastian, is the Södermalm area of Stockholm. Having lived in the States until he was seventeen, with a Swedish mother and an American father, Sebastian’s stuck around Sweden ever since. (When asked why he simply says “socialism”, to which I have to say: fair enough). Stockholm is a cluster of islands at the south-western end of Sweden, peppering the Baltic Sea as if the country has simply started to disintegrate into the water. Södermalm, which literally means ‘Southern Island’, is where the hipsters live. It was once the working class area, Sebastian says, but gentrification has crept in here just like everywhere else. These days Södermalm regularly crops up in lists of Europe’s coolest neighbourhoods, praised for its cafes, its fashion, its unflinching good taste and underground Shuffleboard clubs. By all accounts, there are worse places to ride out a pandemic. That being said, there’s not much ‘riding out’ being done in Södermalm. In fact it’s business as usual in Stockholm, more or less. Unlike many other places, and despite daily case numbers over the 30,000 mark in the first weeks of 2021, Sweden hasn’t gone into lockdown. It’s still a Scandinavian winter out there though. The end result is more or less the same. Sebastian gestures to the square outside his bedroom window, blanketed in snow. “It’s so fucking cold here,” he says. “No one really wants to go out.”
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He’s been spending most days with his girlfriend, just hanging out. Otherwise, he stays at home in his self-described “gaming cave”. “That’s all I really do, is play video games,” he says. It’s a laid back time, and he’s happy to keep things local. Why wouldn’t you be, if your house was in the epicentre of Stockholm’s creative hub? You might as well hang around. “I don’t think I ever really leave this island,” Sebastian says. “It’s where I feel at home and where all of my friends live. It’s a nice place to be.” For the rest of us, confined to our houses, Södermalm sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to leave your house and wander around Stockholm’s southern island. Winter or no winter. For anyone not already in Sweden, that seems like a dream of a bygone era. Thankfully, we can still snoop around a little bit at a safe distance. Sebastian let us comb through his apartment, one piece of Viagra Boys ephemera at a time.
