Help with header background

Hi, I'm helping a friend out with their website, I'm a pretty good programmer but I have no eye for colors at all and I suck at design and photoshop.

Anyway, the website they had before was very dark so I tried to brighten it a bit, you can see a preliminary result at

www.las-jarn (dot) se

Obviously there are still some touches to be done but that's the general look of it now. They were pretty happy with it but they wanted the header background to be brighter since they don't want their red logo displayed on a blackish background.

The problem is I can't figure out what color and look goes with the site. Making the header background grey makes the site almost all grey and I can't make it look good anyway.

I'd greatly appreciate any help or tips you could provide me with in regards to the header background and what to do with it. The header is 960px wide and 77px high (though the current image is actually larger but overflow is hidden). It can't be black. The logo needs to stay red but I can play around with pretty much any other color on the site to balance things out, if that helps.

Thanks!