by Drew Hinshaw

What’s the grittiest part about being the keyboardist in a broke and perhaps dysfunctional electropop trio? When the cash-strapped singer is looking to pawn off some equipment—say, a Roland Juno-6 that’ll fetch a few hundred bucks—it’s your cases he’ll likely come rummaging through. “Our singer was kind of f***ed up at the time,” Thieves Like Us keyboardist Björn Berglund explains. “We used to have a lot of keyboards. He sold them off.”

Even on the barest, most portable equipment that no money can buy, the international trio of expats drifting across Europe has created a haunting sound on four records acclaimed for their paradoxical melancholy cheer. Tone generators, samples, and an ancient polysynth—all from the Reagan years—are how Berglund does it. “It’s a bit sad,” he adds. “We’re looking for new synths, but we’re on a really small budget here.”

If you had the money, what would be your next buy?

We’re always looking for vintage keyboards from the ’70s and ’80s. Like a Crumar Orchestrator—that’s more like a string synthesizer with a ’70s sound. It’s pretty cheap because people haven’t really discovered it yet.

• All of Thieves Like Us’ videos
  
• Our original Vintage Gear column on the Korg Polysix

If you had to sell it all except one thing, what would you keep?

The Korg Polysix. It’s very all-around. You can get a lot of sounds from it. It’s quite good for playing live and stands up well on the road. We’ve had this keyboard for eight years now and we’ve been touring with it all over the world, and it’s still working. It’s very well built. It’s got at least 40 patches and with the older synths, sometimes you don’t even have patches.

Any other non-keyboard gear?

We often use a tone generator, the RY30 from Yamaha. It’s kind of limited, like a drum machine-slash-sequencer that’s more digital sounding— more ’90s. It’s on a lot of the records, but it’s not something you play. You sequence with it.

Where do you pull samples from?

Mostly from old music. We usually take from artists we like. If you listen to “Drugs in My Body,” that was a sample from the Durutti Column. [The song was 1980’s “Sketch for Summer.”] It’s quite a different kind of music, but we try to fit it into ours.

Any advice for bands in similar situations—just trying to get by, not being able to afford all the gear you want?

Buy good effects instead of getting an expensive keyboard. You can always get great sounds out of cheap gear. The most important thing, though, is to write good songs.