For Happiness, Try Music

Yesterday, Marthe directed me to a shop that I could purchase brake pads from and then as a sort of bonus took me to what is possibly Bergen's only charity shop. It was an immense Salvation Army joint, that I estimated was roughly big enough to park seventy Ford Escorts. In the music section (which, I probably don't have to explain, was larger than usual) I picked up a copy of Skee-lo's "I Wish" (including a cappella track)and two early Petra albums for next to nothing! Petra were a band that never failed to amuse Tim and I when we used to come across them in the early nineties Christian soft rock scene (primarily due to the frontman's swivelling power-punch dance) but this was an album from 1981! I got to hear a side of them I'd never heard before, most notably in the song "Killing My Old Man", an apparent anthem to patricide.

It's fair to say it's been a time of unexpected musical comedy treats. Tonight, to my surprise and marginal delight, I found out that Kurt Nielsen, winner of World Idol for 2003/2004, is from my very doorstep. Not that he's fallen on hard times and curls up to sleep by the bins, but that he is from Arna, a town with a population of just twelve thousand! On the night of the final, the man described as "a marketing challenge" was addressed by the Australian judge thusly: "You have the voice of an angel and the face of a hobbit. If we were looking for a Middle Earth Idol I think you’d be a hands-down winner." Kurt, a plumber by trade and father of two, is the possessor of the biggest selling Norwegian single of all time, a cover of Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High", which went platinum eleven times over. His album, "I", went platinum the day it was released.

So, naturally, when I sat down to get my first taste of the Norwegian version of Pop Idol I had high expectations of the kind of quality I'd be hearing, especially as I was joining the competition mid-stage; I expected a series of polished performances from the remaining hopefuls. Instead I got an hour of stunning comedy as the potential idols (who were, on the whole, slightly rubbish singers anyway) split my sides. Everyone that I heard opted to sing in English and although they very nearly nailed the pronunciation, the slight Scandinavian accent underpinning the songs made the performers sound like they were slowly slipping under the effects of a tranquilizer intended for a large farm animal. I broke three ribs, they were so tickled.