Hi, my name is Timmy, I play bass in the Swedish indie pop/rock band The Happy Hippo Family.
First of all, that’s a pretty distasteful name. To our defense – everyone seem to remember it when they’ve pronounced it correctly for a few times… so that’s why we still stick to it… and it has actually become a big part of this band, just like everyone who’s playing.
… and that’s me, my best friend since I was a child – Martin (lead vocals), the guy who I ran my first corporation with as a teenager – Björn (drums), the guy that I once drank Absinth with on a Polish sailing boat – Rickard (guitar) and the guy that nobody used to notice on stage but that now is the most good looking guy ever, he’s our golden boy – Carl (Guitar/synthesizers).
We started out back in 2008, when we spent 3 summer months together with a bunch of other people. We wrote some music and got a show booked in our hometown Örebro (Sweden) – the place got really crowded and that rumor reached other promoters… The initial plan was to do one show only and then get on with our lives but this really awakened our appetite for playing music so we officially decided to be a band.
Now, 7 years later, we’ve released one album in Europe, two in Japan along with a bunch of singles worldwide and we’ve got another album (titled Speed Up, Sweetheart) coming this summer. That’s also why I am writing this and why we want all of you to read this – we just released the first single from the album – Two Blocks Down, and we’re quite proud of how good the song turned out.
So, why should you even bother to listen? Well, if the disastrous band name ain’t enough to get you interested, the following three things might persuade you:
– We’re from the same cold country as Abba, the country where polar bears are running loose on the streets. That should interest some of you…
– We’ve actually won a music prize, but that was first after we instituted our own music prize ”Happy Hippo Music Awards”. We didn’t win that one but this is a quite interesting story… as well as our own beer label that became so criticized by sobriety organisations that we were labeled as bad role models.
– Our lead singe Martin was crowned as ’The Swedish Samuraj’ when we did a promotional tour in Japan. He’s probably the only Swedish Samuraj in the world. That’s quite a thing.
Love from your family.
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