To his fans he was Avicii. To his parents he was shy Tim. In 2018 he took his own life. His father, Klas Bergling, opens up about the career that overwhelmed his son.
An Avicii concert was a spectacle. In August 2016 a pulsing crowd at the Ibiza superclub Ushuaïa chanted the DJ's name, erupting in delight with every beat drop. Roaring jets of flame illuminated the stage, while flares snaked through the sky overhead.
At the centre of it all stood Avicii, the stage name of a young Swedish electronic dance music (EDM) DJ and producer named Tim Bergling. One hand on the decks, the other raised above his head, he mouthed the lyrics as he played, seeming every bit as euphoric as the thousands of fans gazing up at him. But the show was a farewell: five months earlier he'd announced his decision to stop playing live, depleted by a gruelling touring schedule that left him little time for a life off stage. He didn't rule out a comeback — "One part of me can never say never," he wrote on his website — but Avicii never performed live again.
Two years later, on April 20, 2018, he took his own life while on holiday in Oman, at the age of just 28. The outpouring of grief and love from the music world was immediate. Chic's Nile Rodgers, with whom Bergling collaborated on numerous tracks, was in tears at the news, tweeting "Dear Tim, your family have my most heartfelt condolences. You were my little bro. Love always." Madonna, sharing a picture of herself behind the decks with Tim, tweeted "So Sad … So Tragic. Good Bye Dear Sweet Tim. Gone too Soon".
So Sad....... So Tragic. Good Bye Dear Sweet Tim. 💙 Gone too Soon. pic.twitter.com/l7FDKCu6K4
— Madonna (@Madonna) April 20, 2018
There was a collective feeling of shock. Wasn't he doing better now he'd stopped touring? Hadn't he promised new music was on the way? His father, Klas, still has the same questions when I speak to him today. He had always worried about Tim, who became reliant on alcohol during his years on the road and later struggled with an opioid addiction. He'd long feared he could lose his son to an overdose. But suicide? Klas had never considered the possibility. "It's obvious there were things I didn't see," he says.
Born in Stockholm in 1989, Tim was always close to his parents — Klas, who ran an office supply business, and Anki Lidén, an actress. Tim was a sweet but stubborn child. "He was very serious and very determined," Klas says. "He was a little bit different in a very nice way." Laughing, he recalls the aftermath of a trivial argument between his wife and son, which led a 12-year-old Tim to write "Remember to hate Mother" on a Post-it Note to himself. "He could lack a bit of humour, I must say," Klas smiles. Tim was their only child, but he had three older half-siblings who moved out of home when he was young.
Though naturally introverted, Tim had a small, tight group of friends that he'd keep into adulthood, taking them on tour with him at the height of his success. As teenagers they often stayed at the Berglings' apartment in the Swedish capital at weekends, gaming or watching episodes of South Park into the early hours. Klas smiles as he savours these memories. Then his gaze drifts downwards and the smile fades.
Tim's anxiety started young. He worried about cancer, asking his father to examine marks on his skin and insisting his friends check for lumps in his chest. The first time he smoked cannabis he feared he had developed psychosis. And he agonised about his place in the world. When he was about 14 Klas and Anki took him to a therapist. "When you grow up, you can have these thoughts about 'who am I?' that can be a little frightening," says Klas, who also suffered from anxiety as a young adult. "Tim met the therapist a couple of times, then I had the impression that things were better because we didn't go back."
Acne struck at 15 — the curse of countless teenagers, but it came close to debilitating Tim. He obsessed over his skin, examining his spots in the mirror and anticipating the disgust of onlookers. He visited multiple doctors and cycled through prescriptions. At times he refused to go outside.
Even on good skin days Tim would often choose to stay indoors, absorbed by his computer. He treated World of Warcraft like a vocation, immersed in the role-playing game long after the friends he played with had gone to sleep.
And then there was music. Tim taught himself to play his dad's old guitar. "He learnt much quicker than I ever did," Klas says. When he was 16 he downloaded a pirated copy of the music production software FL Studio and taught himself how to use that too. Soon producing dance tracks became all-consuming. He skipped school to spend hours tweaking his creations until each detail was perfect. "I remember he was complaining about his marks, so I called the teacher to see what they had to say," Klas says. "The teacher said, 'Well, he could start with coming to school.' "
In 2007 Tim adopted the moniker Avici, after the lowest level of hell in Buddhist belief. He added an extra "i" after discovering the username was already taken on MySpace, the social media site that, at the time, was the place to launch yourself as a young independent musician. The following year he won a Radio 1 contest hosted by the veteran DJ Pete Tong. He was still only 22 when he released Levels, the track that cemented Avicii's stardom.
It is difficult to overstate the ubiquity of Levels in the early 2010s. Avicii was among the artists at the forefront of EDM, a highly commercial, poppy form of rave music, as the genre exploded in popularity. The track dominated clubs and festivals but also crossed over to mainstream radio. It is instantly recognisable to a generation of millennials with just a few notes of its euphoric synth hook.
Wake Me Up, released in 2013, was even bigger — it topped the charts in more than 20 countries and has since exceeded a billion streams on Spotify. Avicii went on to work with megastars including Rodgers, Madonna, Chris Martin and Wyclef Jean. He was nominated for two Grammys. Not bad for a boy who was happiest making music alone in his bedroom.
There were girlfriends along the way. In 2011 he had met Emily Goldberg, a 21-year-old American student. After they broke up he met Racquel Bettencourt, a 26-year-old Canadian student and model. They lived together in California before splitting up in late 2014. After his death another girlfriend, a model named Tereza Kacerova, shared a first glimpse into their relationship, which she said they had chosen to keep private. "The last words you ever said to me were, 'I love you'," she wrote on Instagram.
Klas says this of his son's relationship status at the time of his death: "I think he had a girlfriend and I also think they went their separate ways." He doesn't believe his son was unhappy in his love life. "We had quite clear discussions about that. I thought he was very strong in that sense."
Klas first understood the scale of what his son had achieved professionally when he went to one of his sold-out shows at Stockholm's Ericsson Globe arena in 2012. "I was sitting by myself because I wanted to listen to the music. I didn't want to talk to people or share drinks — I wanted to sit and listen," he says. "I saw the audience's reception. And it was also the first time I realised that this music is really good." Earlier this year the Globe was renamed the Avicii Arena.
Tim's rapid ascent to fame surprised his parents, but didn't trouble them at first. Their cautious boy seemed unlikely to be consumed by the excesses of celebrity. They certainly didn't foresee his relentless touring schedule — after all, Tim had not long conquered his fear of flying. But the life of a superstar DJ is a rootless one and Tim began to hop from nightclub to festival to arena, following late nights with early mornings and cramming in what sleep he could in cars and private jets. By 2016 he had played more than 800 shows.
"The way I went into DJing was I'm going to give it 100 per cent no matter what happens," he explained in a 2017 documentary, Avicii: True Stories, which tracked his punishing life on the road. When he began to struggle, he blamed himself. "I also looked around and saw everyone else doing what I was doing, and they seemed fine." He coasted on the adrenaline at first, but his social anxiety soon began to overwhelm him. "He was a shy person. He wasn't the one that went into a room with lots of people and started talking or holding speeches," Klas says. Initially "it was fine, but then it became a problem".
To soothe his nerves he turned to alcohol. "In the beginning I was too afraid to drink, because I didn't want to screw up," he said in the documentary. "But then I realised how stiff I was when I wasn't drinking. So then I found the magical cure of just having a couple of drinks before going on."
Drinking soon became a dependence — one his celebrity lifestyle made difficult to kick. "You're travelling around, you live in a suitcase, you get to this place, there's free alcohol everywhere," he told GQ in 2013. "It's sort of weird if you don't drink."
Clear signs of danger came in January 2012. Tim was in the midst of a 26-day, 25-venue tour of the US when he began to complain of stomach pains. At first he expected he'd make it through that night's show in New York on painkillers. But the pain became agony, and he was hospitalised: pancreatitis, the doctors explained, most likely triggered by his drinking. He was prescribed opioids for the pain. "At that time I started worrying," Klas says.
The following year, as Tim arrived on tour in Australia, his pancreatitis returned . Doctors advised him to have his gallbladder removed, but Tim declined. Again he was prescribed opioids, among them OxyContin and Vicodin. The pattern repeated a year later: this time his appendix ruptured and he had surgery to remove it as well as his gallbladder. Before long he was hooked on opioids. Klas watched his son's personality change on the medication. "He was easily upset, easily irritated. It was hard to talk with him," he says.
In 2015 Tim's family and friends staged an intervention. Tim was renting a house in Ibiza, playing every Sunday night at the outdoor club Ushuaïa. He was consuming a staggering cocktail of drugs: painkillers, sedatives, anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants. His behaviour had become erratic: he went off at strange tangents in interviews, conducted business meetings from his bed. The once meticulous DJ performances had turned careless, playing the same track over and over. And he looked ill: strikingly thin, with deep circles under his eyes.
A group gathered in Tim's living room, among them Klas, Tim's siblings and his manager. Klas is still haunted by the moment his son walked into the room. "I saw in his eyes that he understood something was going on," he says. "It was one of the worst moments of my life because you really feel you've betrayed your son." His voice cracks a little. "But it had to be done."
The intervention began at 7pm and stretched into the early hours. Eventually, at about 2am, Tim agreed to enter a treatment facility. Klas left the house that morning elated, believing his son to be saved. "It was naive. I've heard a thousand times that the fight starts when you're sober. But I was so happy, and you have to remember the happy moments also."
Tim left rehab healthier, which made his return to performing all the more difficult. "Everything that had been denied, or handled with alcohol, now it became very clear," Klas says. The gaze of the crowd became unbearable. He asked the lighting technicians to veil him in shadow, so his fans couldn't see his face. "For him it was very clear: I cannot do this," Klas says.
In March 2016 Tim posted an open letter on his website, announcing his retirement from touring. He performed his final show and parted company with his management later that year.
Avicii: True Stories ends with a tranquil Tim playing the guitar on a Madagascan beach. "It's only been a month since I did my last show, and I feel like I did when I was 18," he says in a voiceover. The implication is clear: touring was the sickness, retirement the cure.
Klas, though, understood the complexity of the situation. He knew Tim still drank on occasion and suspected he still took drugs. But he also thought Tim was getting better. "He was producing music, he was working on his next album. We thought that he was coming back."
On April 19, 2018, Klas received a phone call from an unfamiliar number. He knew Tim was on holiday in Oman with friends; the caller was a new friend he'd made on the trip, who'd become increasingly concerned about his mental state. Terrified, Klas and Anki booked the first available flight to Oman. Before they could set off, however, Klas received another call — and learnt that his son had taken his own life.
Klas makes a point to use the word suicide. "I think you should call things what they are," he says. For Klas, the word is a rare point of certainty among a thousand unanswerable questions. He doesn't know why, exactly, Tim ended his life. "That's part of the trauma," he says.
The public wanted answers too. "It's the way we are as human beings. We want to have an explanation," Klas says. He refuses to point fingers. "Nobody is to blame. If we should blame anybody, we should start with me."
Klas does believe, however, that the music industry owes a greater duty of care to its stars. His son, after all, is one of many to suffer in the spotlight. The year before Tim died, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and SHINee's Jonghyun took their own lives. According to Avicii's official biographer, Mans Mosesson, Tim's friends used to fear he would become a member of the "27 Club", a list of musicians who died at the age of 27, among them Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Tim was ineligible by just one year.
"It's fame and fortune, and that's a very dangerous combination," Klas says. "When you have an up-and-coming artist there should be some structure." He's conscious he doesn't know what, exactly, needs to change, "but a serious discussion couldn't hurt".
What he is clear about is that Arash Pournouri — the manager who worked with Tim from the age of 18 and who helped propel him to fame — was not to blame for his son's health problems. It was Pournouri who met Klas in Ibiza in 2014 to share concerns about Tim's health. And it was Pournouri, Klas says, who cancelled every remaining show that year, despite Tim's protests. Pournouri took part in the 2015 intervention, again cancelling Tim's shows as he entered rehab.
"Tim was super-angry when we stopped him touring," Klas says. "We have to remember that he was a grown-up. He earned his own money, he lived his own life. He was not easy to work with from time to time because he had his stubborn mind."
In 2019 Klas and Anki launched a mental health charity, the Tim Bergling Foundation. It has helped Klas cope with his grief. In the aftermath of Tim's death, Klas approached his friends and collaborators, asking them to finish the final Avicii album. All profits from the album, Tim, went to the foundation.
When Klas conducts Zoom interviews, he sits in front of a wall of framed Avicii albums. But he struggles to listen to his son's music with the joy he once did. "I find it hard, still," he says. "But I will, one day." Besides, it is Tim he grieves for — his shy, sensitive son. "Tim is here," he says, resting his hand over his heart. "Tim was very proud of the Avicii name, but he didn't want to be Avicii. He wanted to be Tim."
Tim — The Official Biography of Avicii by Mans Mosesson is on sale now.
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 (available 24/7)
• Kidsline: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
• Whatsup: 0800 942 8787 (12pm to 11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202 (available 24/7)
• Anxiety helpline: 0800 269 4389 (0800 ANXIETY) (available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
Written by: Emily Dixon
© The Times of London
