It is the third installment of the Danish artist brilliant, Martha Hviid, about the history of the rock of her country:
MARTHA: so now I'm going to tell you about a band called kliché.
a lot of danish music is regarded kitsch or bad taste by danes that care a lot about music. kliché somehow avoided that. people still go nuts when "Militskvinder" gets played at parties. I guess they have a lot of talking heads, bowie and devo in them, but they are still looked upon as highly original and they have inspired a lot of new bands in denmark.
I'm sending you four songs. two from each album they made. notice that they only sang in danish, but on "Bravo Charlie" they sing in NATO's phonetic alphabet.
so, what's next? danish late 80s/ early 90s pop, right? and then eurovision. just so you're not waiting your heart out for it; I'm not going to tell you about aqua, laidback, whigfield or any of that stuff.
It is the second installment, in the form of letter with the quartz of George, of the Danish history of rock from the artist Martha Hviid:
MARTHA: ok, so here is the danish 70s, or part of it. the first song is by a rather unknown psych band called Freed. fred in danish (the d is soft, almost like a th-sound in english) means peace, so freed must be something like peeaace, which I find kind of funny. the song is called 'natten solen dagen' which means 'the night, the sun, the day'.
the next two songs are by my dad's old band - Jomfru Ane Band. they started out as a political theater troupe located in jomfru ane gade, which is a street in a city called aalborg.
I chose the first song because it always was my favourite when I grew up. 'Leilas kærlighed' means 'Leila's love', and it's basically just a plain love popsong about longing and lust.
The second song is about a public playground in my new neighbourhood (remember, Nørrebro?). it was build for the children to have something to do, but people didn't treat it well, and vandalism and insanitary surroundings made it fall apart, and the politicians didn't want to do anything about it. I know it sounds like a lame cause, but it was really a big deal because it raised some bigger issues about what the city was turning into.
it was the politicians that didn't want the playground to start out with. they had cleared the area, and this adventure playground (as I think you call it in english) was build, but then the politicians wanted to tear it down and build housing estates instead. the locals wanted to keep it and it ended with the playground being torn down under the protection of 700 policemen(!). apparently a danish achitect came up with the idea about adventure playgrounds which we call byggelegeplads.
these songs aren't the most famous one's they've done. the top most famous one is about nuclear power and the second one about the political history of the united states and how denmark relates to it. I don't want to send you the last one, because your people get quite the verbal beating there.
so, this was a look into that era.
next I imagine going more into one certain synthy-new wavy-art band that I think you would really like.
furthermore I have a vague idea about giving you a taste of late eighties/ early nineties popsongs which is like plain food without much taste, but when you've had it in your mouth for a while you start to notice all the flavours of the raw produce and find out that what you've thought was flavour so far was really just bulks of spices covering everything up. you'll never want to go back to the spices.
You were already told of Martha Hviid, the brilliant and good artist friendly of Denmark. Martha is very quite informed about the music rock'n'roll and has to say much to us sonic history of her native soil. The following dialogue was taken of a Martha message sent to the quartz of George. It is the first part of a continuous series.
MARTHA: it's the first danish punk band. I think the song is from 77 or something like that. the singer only has one arm. there's always been a lot of arguing over which band was the the first punk band in denmark, SODS or No Knox. my friends hang out with peter peter who was the guitarist in SODS. I recently saw his new band, they play sort of epic surf mixed with kraut country, if you can imagine that. one of the guys from No Knox is now a soundguy, who I get along with very well. he did the sound when we put up the boredoms and stuff like that.
you should see this, very good glimpse of the danish punk scene:
I'll translate what they're saying.
>>yes, ABBA is and will always be a clean natural product that makes life worth smelling again. isn't that right?
>>there's lots of ways to draw attention to oneself.
>>ah. we're going to get some punk now.
>>yesyesyes, take it easy, you're giving me a crisis. but it's true, we're going to get some punk here in pop 79'. punk music, the simple, raw, clean rock music that brings us back to the 60s, where The Kinks and The Who let go. the genre is british, but we're going to present you to something of a speciality here; a danish punkband. let us introduce, in punk-cosmorama, Århus' answer to something like everything : LOST KIDS!
-first song
>>that was "coca cola freaks", now we'll play "rådden dig" (rotten you)
-second song
>>punk on danish tv, maybe for the first and the last time. that was real århusian raw cosiness punk from skolegade or somewhere around that place in Århus. that was Lost Kids and two of their numbers "cola freaks" and "rådden dig", Lost Kids under conduction by Jan Jet. I've often been asked what raw cosiness really means. raw cosiness in the the punk version means flogging (that's actually how to translate the word he uses) down lager in the sewer; us punks, right. now for the counterpart of punk, the new british pop knights Racy and their breakthrough song "lay your love on me".
this film was made in the nineties, but is a classic because it's about danish punk. if you can find it anywhere with subtitles I think you would really enjoy it.
for our next class I'm going to tell you about the seventies in denmark. I'll find some danish hippie music and some psych, and I'll tell you about the band my dad was in. they were very famous, and are now part of danish music history because of their political lyrics.
The known distant artist under the name of Martha Hviid, who, in Danish, wants to say 'To travel of million dreams strange and coloured' again sends the psychic messages by the visual metaphors built with forms of the light and noise, not with the difference in the dreams, which become images of other distant schoolboys who speak in the song and the noise which transform poèts to burst in flames and walk of very right animals as them in the past made before the comets and the cars leap them with servility during all the hour. Here the message dreamer of the image of Martha:
Some friends live in other places and you never see them - perhaps never to have never seen you then. It could be because they live in other places or because they are phantoms or imaginary or simply invisible. These friends are special because it falls on you to employ your imagination to colour in the details absent about their aspect. But with these kinds of friends you should not know behind so that they resemble or with the EC what them voice resembles. You can say by other things which they are the beautiful ones and good creatures. They astonish you with the messages which return you to it happy feeling or send gifts of their strange grounds to you.
Martha Hviid is of the Village of the Tatoos of Neck, in a magic place called Denmark. According to the chart of the world, Denmark is a true place and the people there speak Danish and fight the Bär in the forest. The men raise the moustache which is longer than the roads and the women never wear clothing because they do not know any shame. They only like to eat rich delicious chocolates and the extremely salted pieces of monster of sea hide. They like to play of the jokes on foreigners in their saying that the skin leathery is a clothes industry! Denmark is a marvellous place through the vast ones and deep oceans.
Martha is a being having odd of In particular which comprises her closing her eyes and falls in a fright. Only her hand moves with a pirn expenses-encrée of feather through the rice paper woven on trades with hand of Beijing. Exquisite descriptions in a fantastic way of the phantasmagoria of fever-dream are produced while young Martha trembles of the jolts in a state excited of zombification. The pig iron and cast iron of pieces of furniture around its and the volcanos bursts under the green sea. The men turn to wolves and sirens of women while the odd hiéroglyphes of Martha take their form.
Then, after has coma-like the sleep and a hot bath, this skilled girl-witch gives her creations in the world liberally. Three acclamations for Martha. She is really a magic friend.
