Forget rave, grunge and garage – if you were a teenager growing up in the 1990s, the real revolution in music happened in pop. It was an era when the very definition of ‘pop’ went from being a mere abbreviation of the word ‘popular’ to a precise musical theory.

Ever since Elvis Presley first shook his hips, pop has been the sound of teenage bedrooms, school discos and Saturday morning television. But by the turn of the millennium, the pop that dominated our charts hailed from a cold, dark corner of northern Europe called Sweden. This mysterious sound was a rigid formula of melodic minimalism, epic hooks and drops, melancholy, euphoria and mathematical algorithms.

You might also like:

- Eight ideas that changed the history of Western music

- Inside Beijing’s underground rock scene

- Why are Abba so popular?

Our modern understanding of pop was the brainchild of one man – a blonde mulleted DJ from Stockholm called Dagge Volle. Dagge loved pop music so much he even changed his name – to Denniz Pop. His legacy was to turn Sweden in to a global musical superpower, an unstoppable melodic machine churning out the most successful songwriters of his – and almost every other – generation.

“He just put together a bunch of people who really had nothing to do with each other, and he created this band of brothers,” says songwriter Andreas Carlsson, one of Pop’s disciples. “He was just a music producer, but he had some sort of effect on people. There was something magical, almost religious.”

Perfect pop song

Denniz Pop didn’t fall into music the traditional way. He couldn’t sing, play an instrument, or write a song. What he could do, though, was craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats.

Emerging from the underground club scene in 1986, Pop wasn’t interested in catering for the club crowd alone. Instead, he looked for ways to connect the divide between music that was popular in clubs and music that was popular on the radio. His methods were seen as wildly controversial at the time, according to fellow DJ Stonebridge, who first met Pop at the Ritz nightclub, situated in Stockholm’s Örebro subway station.