Happy Nation: Ace of Base Concert Review

Vancouver is a town notorious for having some of the least animated concert crowds. A friend went to Beck’s December 2002 performance and even he was disgusted by our collective behaviour, intoning sarcastically, “uh, this is the last song of the night, you can get up and dance, if you want to.”

Thankfully, there was no such sign at the Ace of Base-headlined Outgames Closing Party this past Saturday. There was only The Sign.

The show took place at the Plaza of Nations, located at 750 Pacific Boulevard in downtown Vancouver, across the street from BC Place Stadium, which non-locals will recognize from the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Plaza is an open-air square and concert space, the sort of piazza that one expects for outdoor performances in Europe and the American East Coast but is curiously missing from the West Coast, despite the fact that there’s a lot more land to build. The Plaza is also home to Gossip Nightclub, a fun straight bar that occasionally attracts a good cross-sectional demographic. It’s also the site of the Edgewater Casino and is located directly from the visually stunning Olympic Village housing development across False Creek. The mixture of fiberglass-and-steel structures, offset by the iconic stadium and pleasure cruises and yachts swanning along False Creek, made for a perfect outdoor concert.

The crowd at the Ace of Base show was surprisingly more hetero-friendly than one would expect. Since it’s well-known that nostalgic pop music concerts cater to a predominantly gay audience, it’s always a bit surprising to find throngs of straight girls and a few of their boyfriends at an event like this. Nevertheless, the beautiful thing about Vancouver is that increasingly, people look beyond the “labels” attached to gay-dominant events and bring out locals from different social groups, all in the name of partying. I worked the ticket booth at the event and saw first-hand the crowd heading into the venue. Everyone was in for a good time and the band did not disappoint.

Beautiful Life: Ace of Base at 2011 North America Outgames

There’s a line in Almost Famous, when Zooey Deschanel’s character says to her un-hip but sweet brother, “don’t worry: one day, you’ll be cool”. Some have claimed 1990s dance band Ace of Base were anything but cool, even if they were the most successful musical act of the planet and sold 20 million records in a single year. It’s rather appropriate then that the group gets to headline the forthcoming North America Outgames Closing Party during Vancouver Pride Week, arguably the single coolest event on the social calendar in Lotusland this summer.

Ace of Base is the brainchild of Swedish singer-songwriter Ulf Ekberg and initially composed of five members, including sisters Jenny and Linn Berggren. Eventually, other members of the band left and the Berggrens' brother Jonas stepped in, forming the most familiar line-up of the group in 1990. Ace of Base first attempted to bring techno-dance sound to the airwaves, but were prevented from major breakout success even in their native Sweden due to the prominence of heavy metal in the early 1990s. Eventually, they broke through with “All That She Wants”, a dub-reggae single that came to represent their signature sound and conquered European pop charts in the fall and spring of 1992-1993.

Ace of Base, the "classic" line-up

The band first emerged on the international music scene in the summer of 1993, when “All That She Wants” appeared in North American clubs after conquering the European charts over the previous three seasons. In a rare feat, and in an era when grunge, New Jack Swing R&B and gangsta rap ruled the airwaves, the dub-reggae-infused dance club single gained significant airplay in the United States and crossed over on the pop, adult contemporary, dance and R&B charts, ultimately peaked at Number Two and selling well over a million copies domestically. Follow-up single “The Sign” gave the band their only US #1 in 1994, but it proved so popular and enduring that Billboard magazine named it the #1 single of the entire year. Parent album The Sign topped the charts as well, and became the year’s best-selling disc.

The band, however, was unable to repeat the same success. Their 1995 follow-up disc The Bridge was a failure on the American charts, peaking at #37 just a year after having the most successful disc in the country. The band quietly reined in their North American efforts, although their cover of Bananarama’s immortal “Cruel Summer” made the Top Ten in 1998 and “Beautiful Life” remains an enduring hit on recurrent radio. Elsewhere in Europe, the band’s success continued through the rest of the decade, even if the Berggren sisters both receded to the background voluntarily before eventually leaving the band. Eventually, they were replaced by Clara Hagman and Julia Williamson, forming the current lineup.