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 hisskin 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.
Wa k e M e U p, released in 2013, was even bigger —
it topped the charts in more than 20 countries and
has since exceeded a billion streams on Spotify. AviciiClockwise from above: Tim’s father, Klas, at the Tim Bergling Foundation; a family
holiday with his mum, Anki Lidén, and dad; Tim (with Klas) was an anxious child
34 • The Sunday Times Magazine