Some places are too good to actually live in. Often they’re too expensive as well, so their goodness is not an option anyway. For me, two such cities come to mind: Sydney, Australia and Oslo, Norway. They are both maritime places with opera houses, at opposite ends of the Earth. Sydney is surrounded by combustible bush land; Oslo is precariously near Russia. Everywhere comes at a cost.
Despite having been largely reared by a series of kindly Norwegian au pair girls (all from the small town of Drammen, near Oslo), I’ve never married a Norwegian, or been close to marrying one - and there’s a good reason for this. I don’t think my outlook would jibe with that of a Scandinavian. I’ve tried to picture it, and I think any Norse bride and I would both have wound up shivering into the abyss, unable to console each other about the ever-dimming prospects for our world and our species. The comfort of doom has its limits.
My wife Emma Swift is Australian. Aussies are feistier and less likely to put up with the surfeit of anxious dismalia that gushes from my head every morning.
But I love to visit Norway whenever I can. To me Norwegians are about depth, not surface: there’s not much brash about their culture, once you get past the trolls in all the tourist shops (and trolls only exist so you can get past them). Another thing I like about Norwegians is that there aren’t many of them: fewer than 6 million in a land that’s over 1,000 miles long. However, vegetation abounds: when it comes to moss, ferns, ferociously green grass and streams of cold, fertile water Norway can’t be beaten. The country is long and spinal - it’s effectively one coastline from the North Sea to the Arctic Circle. The fjords form a kind of vertebrae up and down it.
I’ve mainly been down in the south, but have occasionally travelled up to Tromsø, the world’s northernmost university town. Snow is on the hills all the year round, and the summer feels autumnal. Come midsummer it never gets dark there, which is disorienting, though I’ve only once been taunted by the all-night sun. All-night rain is much more relaxing. Watching a seagull wander into a 7/11 in the 2am drizzle in broad daylight, as if to buy a newspaper, makes me feel profoundly at home.
When I visited Tromsø one late November, a month before midwinter, the sun never rose; but around midday there was a glorious four hours or so of pink, orange and gold dawn-as-dusk. To the lover of twilight, Norway provides maximum gloaming. Even down south the midsummer months give you no true darkness, just several hours of languid nightshade around midnight. I love this dusk harvest.
The Norwegian word for ghost is ‘Spøkelse’, which is where spooks enter the English language. Voices pop into my head over there: “Your soul went for a walk one afternoon and it never came back.” Quite a few of my songs have gestated in Norway. Some, like “Raining Twilight Coast” and “Goodnight Oslo” and many on the I Often Dream of Trains album, were released on records. Others like “Before I Turn To Glass” and “Feel It” are lost in cupboards somewhere. Meandering around the fjords in a yellow van on my first tour in 1982 changed me forever in ways I still don’t understand. It was as if an unearthly App had been installed in me. From the zigzag clifftop roads I would look down on the clouds far below, as they drifted above the water like shapeshifting white dragons. Spirit vertigo…
The psychic epicentre of Oslo, for me, is Frogner Park, where a horde of naked human statues, all slightly larger than life-size, are caught in frozen motion: they’re writhing, grimacing and capering in a sub-erotic way around a well laid-out park. At the centre is a monolithic column of stone people, naked and grey, rising up into the sky looking like they’ve been tipped out of a cigar tube. I recommend it to anyone who likes to use their eyes.
My favourite hang in Norway however, is much less spooky. The small fishing town of Egersund is on the south-west corner of the country, only 300 miles across the North Sea from Aberdeen. Every summer there my friend Frode Stromstad runs a small music festival at which I’m lucky enough to be a recurring act. In fact, I was there last week! The festival is based around The Grand Hotel, a place of many rooms which is gradually expanding to absorb the centre of downtown Egersund, in a benign and gentle way. Frode himself is a benign and gentle fellow, whose mission seems to be to bring legions of jangle-rockers to Egersund from around the world. Perhaps he is part of the Grand Hotel hive mind.
Frode plays guitar and sings in the sublime jangle-rock band I Was A King, along with singer/guitarist Anne Lise Frøkedal and bass player Ole Gudmestad, and every summer they play the Egersund festival. In a way they’re the Scandinavian version of the Byrds - ethereal but darker and more soulful than their California ancestors. Sitting in with them is something I always relish.
Other Byrds-adjacent acts this year included Sharp Pins from Chicago and another old friend, Norman Blake from Teenage Fan Club. Norman and I produced an I Was A King Album You Love It Here some years back. And I do love it here. Every few years I find another song entitled “Sweet Home Egersund” on my phone. Perhaps the Grand Hotel is planting them there…
I have wonderful memories of Norway. Taking the train over the mountains from Oslo to Bergen was a high point (literally and figuratively). And then there's the Edvard Grieg house/museum, Troldhaugen), where I discovered that Grieg had to say goodnight to a toy menagerie that included a pig, a frog and a troll each night. But we all have our rituals, don't we? And most of us don't approach Grieg's level of genius.
My wife and I have tickets to see you in Oslo in October, our first ever trip there. This has whetted the appetite rather!