AIn the evening the rabbits came out of the bushes. Gray and disheveled, as if they’d fought a battle among the pine trees. It wasn’t long before a kestrel hovered motionless in the sky above them, spreading its wings against the wind and waiting for the right moment to descend on its prey.
He saw so much from up here.
The scent of garlic and rosemary rose to him – the cook must have started preparing dinner – and mingled with a whiff of the lemon trees down in the grove.
The sprinkler showering the palm lilies by the pool gave a peaceful rustle.
Three weeks had passed and Tim Bergling had begun to perceive his surroundings again. He was sitting on the roof of the clinic building, the nursing staff had helped him push a deck chair up onto the red tile panels. In the haze out over the Mediterranean Sea, he sensed the island in the distance, to which the people took the ferry to snorkel and forget their hangover before they dropped in the first pills of the evening and started all over again.
But now it was autumn. The party tourists had flown home, the Privilege, the Space and the Pacha had ended the season and were closed, even the crickets had fallen silent.
The summer of 2015 had passed in a single dark mist, he now realized that. He’d sat in the white mansion on the southern tip of Ibiza and had stress because the pieces weren’t mixed hard enough and because the record company wanted him to fly to London to give interviews.
“Stories” was intended as a follow-up album to the first that Tim Bergling had turned from a DJ celebrated in clubs into a global pop phenomenon two years ago. The record was a year late and Tim had trouble focusing.
It had been a long time since his body had worked as it should. And last year, after the surgery in the hospital, he had felt something grow inside his stomach again. Tim had been obsessed with this lump. The more he thought about it, the more clearly he felt it. Like a tumor that was doing well. And while this unknown had grown in there, he had played festivals all over Europe that summer and filled Ushuaia, Ibiza’s most ostentatious house club, every Sunday.
They cried
When he woke up the afternoon of the last gig of the season, he’d been convinced he was going home, to Los Angeles.
Instead, they were all gathered on the first floor of the villa. His father Klas was there, his manager Arash had come by plane from Stockholm, as was his older brother David. The tour manager, the bodyguard. And of course the buddies, the friends since childhood, who had accompanied him for a few years wherever he went.
They had explained to him what worries they were. That they were fed up with lying every day when asked what it was like to work for Avicii. They had cried, they had been devastated.
Eventually Tim had agreed to go to the clinic, mainly to get rid of her constant whining that he had become unreliable and sloppy.
For the first few days, during the preliminary weaning, he had mostly slept. But then Paul Tanner, who was in charge of the treatment, advised him to write.
My first memory is when I take a bath with my mom, or when she sings me a lullaby, or my dad comes in and turns the old tapes of fairy tales from the A-side to the B-side while I try to fall asleep .
The words came with sharp edges. He had lived in the numbness of soft self-deception for so long that at first he hated it. But he saw the point – putting the experiences into words made it easier to talk about them, helped him get a glimpse of the life that had brought him here, to this place in September 2015.
Once the sentences came it was hard to come to an end. Instead of sleeping, he sat at the computer and wrote through the nights. He talked about his childhood and youth, about his siblings, how he discovered music and how his career took off. He wrote about the complicated relationship with his manager Arash and the time with his friends Emily and Racquel.
Long discussions with the attending physician took place in the afternoons. They discussed terms like survival strategy and displacement. Tim systematically analyzed the new information, as he always had.
He realized now how much he had pushed aside. He had forced himself forward for so long that it had become commonplace.
Suddenly he saw things radically differently. Also the stressful feelings that he actually didn’t want, that he had grappled with since childhood – the nervousness, the restlessness, the fear – maybe they had their good too? He began to think of her like a compass, an instrument that could help him take a new direction.
The feeling as such can have a positive or negative energy, but no feeling is intentionally negative.
He had crossed boundaries for so long, lived in pain. The physical in his stomach, but also the psychological. Not only had he run into the wall, he crashed through it several times. He had moved in the borderland of death, that’s what it really felt like.
He wished he’d listened sooner.
The above text comes from the official biography “Tim” by Måns Mosesson published by Droemer Verlag (416 pages, 25 €). The author has conducted hundreds of interviews with relatives, friends and fellow artists; he had access to personal notes, emails, and chats from Avicii.
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