The Flower Kings

Formation

In early 1993, guitarist and singer Roine Stolt had written material for his third solo album The Flower King and sought for musicians to perform it.^[1] He had wanted to release a progressive rock-style album for a while and felt the time was right to pursue the project.^[2] The album features Stolt on vocals, guitar, bass and keyboards, Jaime Salazar on drums, and Hasse Fröberg on vocals, and was recorded in Sweden between May 1993 and January 1994.^[3]

In preparation for Stolt's concert tour to support the album's release, Stolt, Salazar, and Fröberg were joined by Stolt's brother Michael on bass and Tomas Bodin on keyboards.^[2] The five performed their first gig on 20 August 1994 at an outdoor festival in Uppsala, Stolt's hometown and the city where The Flower King was recorded.^[2][3][4] After they decided to become a full time band, they officially adopted the name The Flower Kings, named after Stolt's album. Stolt had produced a list of potential titles for the record, one of which was "The Flower King", and chose it because of its positive meaning and its reference to the hippie era of the 1960s.^[2]

Activity

After performing a series of concerts through 1994, the band entered the studio in December 1994 to record their debut album, Back in the World of Adventures. The recording process was gradual, finishing in September 1995.

In 2000, Michael Stolt was replaced by Jonas Reingold.^[1] Two years later, Salazar was replaced by Zoltan Csörsz. Daniel Gildenlöw of Pain of Salvation joined the band the same year as a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist.

Other contributors have included Hasse Bruniusson (percussion) and Ulf Wallander (saxophone).

Stolt has written the vast majority of the material the band has recorded, with Bodin contributing most of the rest. The music is best described as symphonic progressive rock, bearing a strong resemblance to the music of Yes, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, and early Genesis, with jazz fusion and blues influences. The band's lyrics are almost uniformly positive and uplifting, affirming such values as love, peace, and spirituality, and furthering their association with Yes.^[1]

Their 1999 album Flower Power contains the eighteen-section, almost 60-minute "Garden of Dreams".

In June 2007 they released The Road Back Home, a compilation of remixed songs from 1994 to 2006, plus "Little Deceiver" (a previously unreleased track) and the full version of their cover of "The Cinema Show" by Genesis.^[5]

Zoltan Csörsz was replaced by new drummer Marcus Liliequist for one album, but returned for the 2007 album, The Sum of No Evil. He was subsequently replaced by Erik Hammarström in 2008.^[6]

In 2008, Ola Heden, previously of Reingold's side project Karmakanic, joined on guitar, vocals and keyboards.^[6]

In November 2008 the band were the opening act of the Ecco Prog Fest in Moscow.

After touring in 2008, The Flower Kings were inactive for four years. Stolt felt the band had varied levels of focus in their direction and had started to feel lost. They reunited in 2011 to work on new material after Stolt felt it was the right time and sensed eagerness from the other members to work together.^[7][8] This marked the arrival of 27-year-old German drummer Felix Lehrmann.^[7] Banks of Eden, the group's eleventh album, was released in June 2012 and was recorded with analogue recording techniques and styles during the height of vinyl records.^[7] This was followed by Desolation Rose in October 2013.

In December 2017, the first part of a career-spanning box set titled A Kingdom of Colours was released. This first box, with 10 discs, covers the period from 1995-2002 and includes the studio albums from Back in the World of Adventures to Unfold the Future. The second box set, titled A Kingdom of Colours 2 and covering the albums Adam and Eve through to Desolation Rose was released in June 2018.

Timeline