2: Hell, Trondheim, Oslo, Gothenburg

On our way to Trondheim we stopped in Hell, a small Norwegian town just across the Swedish border. It was incredible how drastically the landscaped changed once we got to Norway with beautiful mountain landscapes and trickling waterfalls. And then there was Hell. A small town with a grocery store, a train station and a little building bearing the sign “GODS EXPEDITION” which I guess is a typical sign to see at train stations because it translates to “expedition goods,” but in Hell it was quite harrowing. I felt a strange sensation come over me standing at the grocery store in Hell, and felt I had to do something criminal, so I stole some postcards and then feared that we would be cursed for the rest of the trip, but we weren’t.

We played a really cool show in an apartment and walked around Trondheim, where they too have a squatted neighborhood. Unlike Kristania, the squats in Trondheim are political and they have a collectively run bar, cafe, record store, infoshop and a couple housing projects. In Oslo, we played at a DJ night for a local all women run radio station at a cool DIY venue. The radio station is run out of a space called Blitz which is a permitted squat with a cafe, show space and infoshop, that the city recently renovated for free. It was funny to compare pictures of the building before the renovation when it had been painted all black and covered in graffiti to the sterilized white paint over the city had done. Still you can’t complain when the city pours millions of kronos into your anarchist social center, and they took the fresh canvas as an opportunity to invite artists from the Palestinian liberation movement, Zapatistas, the Kenyan queer movement, and Italian anti-fascists to come and paint murals!

In Gothenburg, I finally played a street punk show! It went better than I expected, and after the show a skinhead with an “oi!” tattoo gave me a hug. In Gothenburg the punks apparently buy full bottles of some liquor that’s meant to be drank in small portions before dinner as an appetite stimulator, and chug them giving their inevitable puke a bright red color. We’re told it’s what the Gothenburg punk scene is famous for, and indeed we witnessed red vomit left and right. One of these hurlers enlightened me to the truth about how Bush orchestrated 9/11 before he spilled his guts on the sidewalk. Notably, this show was the second that I’ve played that took place in a former office building, and the hallways still had a strange sterile feel to them.

Gothenburg was our last show with Lycka Till who we’d come to love for their understated Swedish humor and raucus musical spunk. One funny story about them is that one of their songs is about a anti-labor, pro Palestinian occupation parliament member named Frederick Federley who retains some sort of credibility for being a hip young person of some shit. The song was a nightly favorite for anyone who understood Swedish, and the lyrics to the chorus were roughly translated as “You’d be better off dead, I curse the day you were born. Out of some twist of justice Frederick Federley found out about the song and whined about it on his blog, which only served to introduce a score of new people to the band! Any press is good press, right?