During winter and spring of 1967, The Hep Stars went to Africa in an attempt to film something to compete with the Beatles "A Hard Day's Night" - the self-produced but never finished "Habari-Safari". It had been hoped that a trip to Nairobi and a couple of weeks in a film studio would provide sufficient suitable material to make the film. However, due to serious financial difficulties, technical problems and a non-existent story, the film was never completed.
Photographer Åke Borglund had started filming in February 1967 and yet the script wasn't even written until five months later. The group ended up with 5,000m of unusable film and debts of 280,000 Swedish Kronor owed to their sponsor - record company chief, Åke Gerhard.
The loose plot of the film was something like this: The Hep Stars are in Africa to find the original 'glook' (a toy, a kind of Gonk). They land in Nairobi with the airplane and start looking for it. They end up in some sort of small tribe, where they are kindly greeted as big guests. The guide (called Ernie) who accompanies them on the trip tries to steal the glook, which they have in their property. And he flees when he sees the tribe's anger. He ends up in a savannah (not really - instead some place just outside Uppsala!), and all of a sudden Hep Stars turns up again. In the end they get to have the glook in some strange way and they return home to Sweden."
Click here to see what Benny said about "Habari-Safari"
One Hep Stars song emerged from the project, the African folk-tinged single, Malaika released with at least two different covers.
In 2004 as part of a TV series called Musikbyrån (Music Bureau), the programme Hep Stars in Afrika! featured interviews with members of The Hep Stars (Svenne Hedlund and Christer Petterson [no Benny]), and others (editor Ulf Neidemar, Gunnar Ernblad, Thomas Nordlund and Gunilla Gersten [who was to write a book/articles about the trip]) who talked about the making of the movie. Incredible archive footage was shown which we frankly never thought we'd see. A lot of the footage is without sound or with bad sound and clearly filmed on hand-held super 8 cine film.
Thanks to Malin Westerberg, Jan Bach, Robin Andersson, Grant
Whittingham and Gustav Sandberg c/o ABBAMAIL
Extra
information from ABBA Report, Issue 18 (Autumn 2000). Special thanks to
Jozsef.