Superstar DJ who played Bellahouston and T in the Park

Born: September 8, 1989;

Died: April 20, 2018

TIM Bergling, also known as Avicii, who has died aged 28, was a Swedish dance music producer and one of the true international superstars of the millennial generation, a pioneer who helped take the sound of club-based European dance music to the heart of the American mainstream in the current decade, where it was aggressively rebranded as EDM (Electronic Dance Music). He was influenced by Daft Punk, and a contemporary of David Guetta, Deadmau5, Skrillex, his fellow countrymen Swedish House Mafia and Scotland’s Calvin Harris.

Avicii played two major headline dates in Scotland, in Bellahouston Park in 2013 and at T in the Park in 2015, and anyone who saw them will testify that they exemplified the EDM live style; huge LCD walls of light, thunderously heavy bassline beats, a young and feverishly enthusiastic crowd, and just a baseball-capped Bergling at the controls, acting as conductor and choreographer for his audience.

Following an extensive number of tracks released in his early years (21 of them in three years under his own name and numerous aliases; Seek Bromance was a minor international hit in 2010), he made a major global breakthrough in 2011 with Levels, a song whose light, upbeat riff fused progressive house and pure pop production, as well as a vocal middle eight which sampled Etta James’s 1962 track Something’s Got a Hold of Me.

Energetic and enthusiastic, the track became a mainstay at nightclubs, festivals and sporting events, and as much as Avicii became a byword for all that’s commercial among club purists, his ability as a premiership pop songwriter was firmly evident from this point on.

Following Levels, his productivity and way with a pop hook led to an intense period of success over the next half-decade, particularly with Wake Me Up and Hey Brother (both 2013), which featured the soul singer Aloe Blacc and country vocalist Dan Tyminski, respectively.

Despite his club origins, Avicii maintained his success by incorporating other commercial genres into his sound, with Wake Me Up and Hey Brother bearing elements of expansive mainstream country, while he experimented with saccharine pop melodies on Collide (2011, with Leona Lewis), contemporary house on I Could Be the One (2012) and a very polished kind of disco on You Make Me (2013).

He also co-wrote the official 2014 FIFA World Cup anthem and covered Nina Simone’s Feeling Good with sensitive contemporaneity for a 2015 Volvo advertising campaign, and as a remixer he was in huge demand, working on tracks by artists including Madonna, Coldplay (he co-wrote the group’s definitive 2014 anthem A Sky Full of Stars with Chris Martin), Daft Punk and Enrique Iglesias. In total he had nine UK top ten singles and literally dozens of other minor releases, as well as two hit albums, 2013’s True and 2015’s Stories, on which his collaborators included Nile Rodgers, Wyclef Jean, Robbie Williams and the Killers’ Brandon Flowers.

Yet as much as Avicii worked hard and inarguably created a handful of songs which are definitive of their time, he also partied with just as much punishing intensity. In 2014 he had his appendix and gallbladder removed, and in 2016 (the year he was personally named by Inc. magazine as the fastest-growing company in Europe) he retired from touring after being diagnosed with acute pancreatitis; both were attributed to excessive alcohol use. His friends had expressed concern about his partying habits in the past, although at the time of writing the cause of his sudden death in Muscat, Oman is unknown.

Tim Bergling was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1989, one of four children of Klas Bergling and Swedish film and television actress Anki Liden. Discovered by putting his productions on online blogs, he chose his pseudonym in reference to the lowest level of Buddhist hell (which is spelled without the third ‘i’).

Despite being taken one year above the infamous ’27 Club’ of musicians who have died painfully young, the depth and emotional resonance of his work will now be amplified every bit as much as the tragic waste of potential his death represents. Were he to have written his own epitaph, it may be in the lyric of his 2014 track The Nights, which recalls the advice given to a son by his father: “he said ‘one day you’ll leave this world behind / so live a life you will remember.’”

DAVID POLLOCK