Ronny Tegner

Ronny Tegner — Swedish bassist — is a co-founder of Pretty Maids, the band formed in Denmark in the early 1980s. Pretty Maids is one of European hard rock's most long-lived cases. It emerged in Horsens in 1981, at a moment when Scandinavia had no significant presence in the genre, and developed a sound combining British heavy metal with wide melodic choruses — a formula that in the following years would be adopted by dozens of Scandinavian bands. The band never reached the commercial standing of the big American bands of the same period, but built a settled audience in Europe and Japan and kept up continuous output for more than four decades, with an extensive discography and a relatively stable line-up. That kind of longevity has a value of its own. Bands that survive rock's full cycle of fashions — from 1980s hard rock to grunge, nu metal and the return of melodic metal — do so by keeping an audience of their own, independent of whatever dominates the market in each decade.