Concert review: Caroline af Ugglas - Cookin’ at Orangeriet, Borås - 11 April, 2026
Caroline af Ugglas has spent nearly three decades defying easy categorisation: Swedish rock and soul singer, professional painter, choir director, and now published author. A friend gave her a Janis Joplin album when she was about 15, and it inspired her to pursue a career in music. That obsession eventually produced Joplin på svenska (2007), where she rendered an entire album of Joplin classics in Swedish.
Her breakthrough came via Melodifestivalen, where “Snälla, snälla” reached the final in 2009, missing victory by just eleven points. The accompanying album Så gör jag det igen topped the Swedish chart, and she has released music steadily ever since, most recently through her own label Siloton AB.
Similar to artists like Miss Li and Miriam Bryant, she made the transition from English to Swedish, and that earlier material, including the short-lived mid-2000s rock band Twiggs formed with members of The Nomads, is now largely absent from her live sets.
A spontaneous intimacy at Cookin’
Cookin’ at Orangeriet is not a dedicated concert venue but first and foremost a restaurant. On the evening of 11 April 2026, the room reflected that: dining guests occupied tables with rather limited sightlines, while a crowd pressed in standing around the small stage. The club’s booking manager Ewa Rolling opened proceedings just after 20:30 with a warm welcome and news of forthcoming bookings, before the band took the stage at around 20:40.
On stage: Caroline af Ugglas on vocals, Staffan Astner on electric guitar, Sven Lindvall on bass, and Heinz Liljedahl, her husband and long-time collaborator, alternating between drums and acoustic guitar. And Ester, the couple’s dog, who patrolled the stage entirely on her own terms.
The set felt spontaneous from the first song. A pile of papers lay scattered across the stage floor by the microphone stand, presumably lyric sheets, though af Ugglas rarely even glanced at them. Whether there was a proper setlist or whether the evening was largely improvised was genuinely unclear for much of the night, as she frequently turned to the audience for requests.
Energy, humour and an odd twenty-minute break
For anyone unfamiliar with af Ugglas live, the key thing to know is this: she is extraordinarily physical. She stamped the floor in heavy white boots, dropped to her knees, battered the tambourine with considerable fury, wandered through the crowd, climbed up onto the bar counter across from the stage to fetch a fresh jug of water, and at one point stood on a table pointing into the audience while simultaneously singing and chatting. The energy is less a performance choice than a natural state.
She has plenty of self-awareness about it, too. At one point she asked the room openly whether she might have ADHD, adding with good timing: “If I don’t have it, what the hell do I have?” Given the youthful chaos of the performance, the one thing that gave away that this was not a group of 20-somethings was the interval: a full twenty-minute break midway through, around 21:25. On a pop or rock bill, the pause before encores is usually a brief formality; this was an actual rest. When the band returned, af Ugglas settled herself into an armchair on stage for a few moments before, inevitably, she was back on her feet at full tilt.
The songs
The two most-requested songs of the evening were undoubtedly “Snälla, snälla” and “Jag har katten”, both asked for early and often. Af Ugglas acknowledged the requests each time with a half-ironic “banal”, clearly not the first time she had heard these particular calls, always followed by a reassuring “don’t worry, it’s coming” or a cheerful deflection. It was hard not to sense a flicker of mild frustration beneath the good humour, as though a significant portion of a rich catalogue has somehow slipped past the wider public.
“Jag har katten” was eventually confirmed as the closer to the main set when she checked her papers and concluded, with some amusement: “Actually, yes, we’re there now. That’s the last one”, indicating that at least some of the evening had been planned in advance. “Snälla, snälla”, as the entire room had anticipated, arrived in the encore. A short pause before the extra numbers, a couple more songs, and then the big finish at almost exactly 22:30, two hours to the minute after Ewa Rolling had first picked up the microphone.
In between, af Ugglas covered familiar Joplin ground: “En del av mitt hjärta” (“Piece of My Heart”) and “Bobby McGee” (“Me and Bobby McGee”) both landed warmly, rooted firmly in the Joplin-on-Swedish tradition she has made her own. “Konsten att finnas till” offered a more personal, reflective moment.
The sharpest contrast of the evening came with “Du sa det, du var det”, a burst of pure silliness amid otherwise emotionally weighted material, during which af Ugglas and the entire band took to pointing at each other on the hook, as a sort of running gag over each chorus.
The dog, and a trampled paw
The most unambiguously charming presence on stage was the dog Ester, who ambled on and off at will throughout the evening. At one point, af Ugglas – mid-stomp – accidentally trod on the dog’s paw. Ester retreated with evident offence. Moments later she appeared entirely unbothered.
Audience members had apparently expressed concern for the dog’s safety and for her exposure to the volume on stage; af Ugglas batted this away with the observation that the sound engineer had already stepped on Ester too, so the damage, as she put it, had already been done. She also mentioned, with evident fondness, that Ester has been known to choose to sleep inside the bass drum of her own accord, so the noise is clearly not the problem.
A mixed crowd and a book signing
It has been nearly twenty years since “Snälla, snälla” made af Ugglas a household name, and one might expect a crowd skewing older. The audience was more mixed than that, though younger faces tended to concentrate nearest the stage while older guests were rather more comfortable seated at their tables. Everyone, regardless of age, knew both the closing songs before they were played.
After the show, af Ugglas set up to sign in a side booth, which turned out to be precisely where this reviewer had stashed a rucksack, requiring a somewhat undignified lean over the artist, with husband Liljedahl watching from nearby, to retrieve it. She had no records with her, but copies of Tavlor och tankar (“Paintings and thoughts”), her 2024 art and poetry book, were available at 450 kronor per copy, a fitting memento from an artist who has never really bothered to confine herself to just one thing.
This show was shot with
Camera bodies
- Sony a7 IIIMidrange/telephoto shots
- Sony a7R IIWideangle shots
Camera lenses
- Samyang 35-150mm f2–2.8Midrange/Telephoto Zoom
- Tamron 16-30mm f2.8Wideangle Zoom
Concert photo gallery
