Dance music luminary and worldwide superstar DJ, Steve Angello, has recently released an interview for a Swedish news source, Sydsvenskan; the interview is fully in Swedish but we have translated the majority of the part. You can find the full interview here.
Steve Angello talks about his project “För vårt Malmö” and “För vårt Sverige” in an interview for Sydsvenskan.
The first lines tell about Steve and the Swedish House Mafia while touring India in 2016. Steve explained that he saw a child in the middle of the street, almost dead. He stopped the convoy to help her but the escort that accompanies the Swedish trio stopped him to help her saying it wasn’t his businesses.
“Then I realized that my problems in Sweden were nothing compared to that,” says Steve Angello today.
When Steven Angello Josefsson Fragogiannis grew up in Solna in the late ’80s and early’ 90s, no one at school believed in him. “We had no space to be creative, we did not have sports, music, photos.” So he started committing crimes. Thefts. Car theft. Because? Because he was bored. His father was shot dead in Athens when Steve was 14 years old. But there was one thing that Steve loved (and still love). The music. His dream was to play in Stockholm. At the age of 30, he sold out the Friends Arena in Solna three times with Swedish House Mafia.
“If I had not discovered the music, I would probably have been in prison today, if I had lived until now. At the same time, if I had not gone to school, I would not have discovered the music.”
As it turns this into a message for young people? You can’t. Steve Angello does not want a single boy to believe that his path is the right one to choose.
“What I regret most in my life is that I did not get educated. When I was twenty and had problems with my ears, I realized that I had no one to count on, I could not do anything but music. And I’ve seen the power of education, all those I work with are highly educated. I know the chances you can take my way or that of Zlatan (Ibrahimovic) is one in ten million, but if you have a good education and you want to do something, you can take yourself to the top of the world” says Steve Angello.
Steve is now in a music hall at the Lindäng School in Malmö.
The recorded voices of Filippa Ljung and Natasha Shahid play above the rhythm in the music hall. The two boys of the ninth grade blush easily. What is usually a normal school situation becomes strange. A star of the musical world listens to the song they wrote together with the music teacher Kristian Florea. Steve Angello is here to tell us that his recently launched charity project “För vårt Malmö” wants to highlight the successes at school and use them as a positive example in the Malmö scholastic system. He has also planned to donate money to the school to let them build a real musical study.
Outside the corridor is the image of the “Future Dreams” students who represent the future dream of each student. Noor in 5B wants to become a biomedical. Yasmin in 7th class is dreaming of working with Emirates. Others want to find a cure for cancer, become a scientist, work in the music field, become an astronaut. The images will be part of an exhibition at his concert at the Malmö Festival and published on Angello’s social media. Some images will be printed on T-shirts and used in the “För vårt Malmö” campaign.
[…]The future of children. Everything that happens now with “För vårt Malmö” and “För vårt Sverige” took off when Steve Angello became a dad, eight years ago.
“[…] I started wondering what my daughter’s future would be like.” I wanted to do everything in my power to make her live well,” says Steve Angello, who is now the father of two little girls.
What then is “För vårt Sverige”? The project has three objectives: to help single mothers, raise money for the fight against diabetes and work with young people who are excluded from society. For those who do not know it, Steve Angello was a young man like that, with a single mother and a good friend who was dying from diabetes. It might seem like he’s trying to save a copy of himself.
“I have made a difficult journey and now I know all the risks I do not want anyone to follow my own path” […]
The aim of the whole “För vårt Sverige” is to raise between 35 and 70 million crowns this year to enter the social activities. We will donate 5 million crowns to various organizations in Malmö. “För vårt Malmö” we have organized a Christmas collection, where the goal is to bring 5,000-10,000 Christmas gifts to be distributed in Malmö. “För vårt Sverige” also develops an app which will lead people to exercise to fight diabetes.
An important partner in the project is Steve Angello’s friend, Christina Stenbeck and her entire group. The brother of Christina, Max, was Steve’s friend who died of diabetes. The group is also involved in the big closing concert at the Malmö Festival on 17 August. The concert will be broadcast by Viaplay and Rix FM. Angello invites all visitors to bring the flag of their country to the concert to show all the about 180 nationalities living in Malmö.
“It will be an exciting concert, I like those concerts in which there is more than just a concert, I will invite CNN and the BBC to the concert to show what Malmö is.”
The next step for “För vårt Sverige” is to challenge others. He wants to see other artists and cities do the same.
“What the city of Malmö did for the project is unbeatable, but I want other cities to try, we are talking about: Stockholm, Göteborg, Norrköping, Nyköping, Linköping, Örebro, Uppsala… After Malmö, we will also reach them and we will see how we will go forward.”
Why start in Malmö?
“I saw the problems here. But I also saw a fantastic city. We have a house outside Malmö and we have spent a total of six months a year here in the last five years. I have seen that Malmö is described as a black sheep by the national media. We, who live in Malmö and work in Malmö, know that it is not. I see a different Malmö from what I read when I’m in Stockholm.[…]”
Last Sunday, your colleagues, Axwell & Ingrosso were on stage in Brooklyn, New York. Ax shocked the music world by saying “Do you want us to organize the Swedish House Mafia Tour 2019?“. It made headlines in the world press that the Swedish House Mafia would be back together with a new world tour, but no concrete answers were provided by the trio. Before now.
“It will happen. Obviously. All the details have not been defined, but in 2019 we are back”, laughs Steve Angello.
The entire article has been translated from Sydsvenskan.se You can check the link for the integral version of the interview.
