Back
in 1990 when I was writing Noise For Heroes as a print fanzine, I used to get piles of
promo records to review…way more than one person could ever reasonably try to absorb.
When something came in that didn’t look too interesting I would put it onto a
mountainous stack of records to get around to on a really slow day. When that day came,
I’d pull records off the stack one after the other, drop the needle somewhere in the
middle of the thing, listen for 30 seconds, and usually consign the record to a box to go
to the used record shop.
One day I was going
through the pile and out comes a record by a band called the Cosmic Dropouts. They were
from Norway, and aside from the fact that I knew that the great Hollywood Brats lp had
been released there before anywhere else, the only Norwegian rock band I’d ever heard
was A-Ha, and that was certainly not going to make me feel like this band would have a
good chance. But I’m half Norwegian myself and have been to the country a few times,
so I was a little curious.
Imagine my surprise
when the needle dropped into the groove and this blast of garage punk roared out. I
figured it had to be a mistake…this must be the Nomads recording under alias or
something. Except the Dropouts played with a turbocharged style that’s faster and
more energetic. Fabulous! And so their Groovy Things lp entered hot rotation in my
house, and when it subsequently was released on CD, I snapped that up, too.
I tried to get an
interview with the band back then, but no luck. So for a long time, Groovy Things
was all I had to go on. But then in the mid 90s other signs began to surface, and lead
guitarist/songwriter Morten Henriksen showed up on records by the Vikings with ex-Devil
Dog Steve Baise. In 1996 I went to Norway and found that there were two more Cosmic
Dropouts lps that had only been released there: Hoolabaloo and Sonic Circus.
I snapped them up, and say, hey! they’re every bit as good as Groovy Things.
Maybe even better, especially Sonic Circus, which totally smokes. And then more
signs…Arne Thelin, who was the lead singer of the Dropouts for the Groovy Things
lp, came out with CDs featuring himself fronting two different groups…the brilliant
punk/pop Bittersweets, and the garage influenced Kwyet Kings. And then on 1+2 Records in
Japan came a full length CD by Morten Henriksen’s brilliant new power pop band, the
Yum Yums. Now I knew there was a story there that had to be told, and searching
around the web, I found Morten’s e-mail address. So here we go.
Morten’s roots
start with the sixties…no surprise there if you’ve heard anything he’s
played on. "I've been into music as long as I can remember", he says. "My
mom bought me "Stepping Stone" by the Monkees when I was three years old, and
I've been hooked on this thing called pop ever since." In the early 70s he got into
glam rock bands like Sweet, Slade, Suzy Quatro and Gary Glitter. "The stupid part of
glamrock", he calls it. At 15 he got hold of a guitar and tried to figure out how to
play the riffs of all his favorite songs. By this time punk had started and Morten’s
heroes had changed. Now it was Johnny Ramone, Brian James, Steve Jones, Bob Andrews and
Johnny Thunders. He tried to learn all their songs…no lessons, just hours of fucking
up, starting over, fucking up again, and finally…getting it right. He developed a
tough, gutty style that matched his heroes but added his own sense of panache.
"My first band
was a '77-style punkband (with Norwegian lyrics) called Stroyers", says Morten.
"We released a cassette with around twenty songs. It sold over 200 copies! I played
guitar and Pal Andreassen - later to become the organ player of The Cosmic Dropouts -
sang. He has now also joined The Yum Yums as the fifth member. My second band was a
hardcore band called Siste Dagers Helvete. Despite the lyrics - still Norwegian - the band
got a lot of attention and good reviews from all around the world. We released an album
called The Hell, on a German hardcore label called Rock-o-Rama. Rock-o-Rama later
turned into a neo-nazi label and got us in a lot of trouble. The drummer of Siste Dagers
Helvete was Rune Johnsen - later of The Cosmic Dropouts. Oskari, the singer on the album,
quit the band after it was released, so I had to do the singing the last year the band
existed. After we broke up, I became a father and took some time off from showbiz. In the
meantime the other guys had teamed up with a local maniac named Arne Thelin who was
anxious to get into playing music. The band was a rather gloomy post punk band called The
Joyful Tears. I joined the band a couple of years later in time for the ep that became the
first release on Arne's That's Entertainment Records. The Joyful Tears were as mentioned a
"dark" band, but we always fooled around with a lot of Kinks and Monkees stuff
during rehearsals. This, combined with discovering all these Australian and Swedish bands,
resulted in the idea for a garage-band. Me and Arne Thelin quit the band to form The
Cosmic Dropouts. Rune Johnsen and Pal Andreassen joined in later."
The Cosmic Dropouts
were based in the town of Moss. It’s a little town on the east side of the Oslofjord,
about 35 miles south from Oslo. It seems impossible to imagine that enough good musicians
with the same sense of direction – this sense of direction – could be
found in such a place. But maybe the smallness helped in some way. In a town of this size,
everyone who plays in bands knows everyone else, and even though there wasn’t much
broad interest in what Morten and Arne wanted to do at the start, those few people who
were on the scene regarded them as new and fresh, and even though they didn’t sell a
lot of records, they got a lot of attention and played a lot of shows.
The Groovy
Things lp released in the US actually was a collection of eps and singles. The title
and cover art came from a Norwegian mini-lp of the same name that had only 7 songs on it.
On the front cover, there’s a picture of the band standing behind three very sixties
looking girls playing 45s on their portable record player. Very apt for a record that
contained songs like "Let’s Go To The Beach" or "How To Stuff A Wild
Bikini". And aside from the surf themes, there’s a heavy garage element with
classic covers like the Seeds’ "Pushin’ Too Hard" or the great
"Unchain My Heart" to go with a pile of great Thelin/Henriksen penned originals
– Arne writing lyrics, Morten writing tunes. There are 21 songs on the CD, and
it’s a non-stop blast of blazing guitar, rave up keyboards, and tuneful vocals.
"We never got any numbers from Skyclad", says Morten, "But we know it sold
well. We got lots of good reviews from all around the world."
After Groovy
Things Arne Thelin left the band. From the outsider’s perspective the split is a
strange thing, since Arne quickly showed up in another band, yet he still released the
next Cosmic Dropouts lp on his own label. Morten tries to explain, but seems reluctant to
dig into the details. "There was some tension and disagreement between Arne and the
rest of us", he says, "And it was Arne who left the band. Arne is a big mystery
to most people, so I won't even try to explain why he left. One fact is that he had
already started The Lust-O-Rama and wanted to concentrate on that band instead."
Arne was replaced
by Morten Karlsen, another longtime friend of Henriksen’s from Moss. Karlsen’s
singing style is richer and more full-on than Arne’s and gave the band a tougher,
more powerful feel. Thelin is a very good singer on his own ground, but for a rave up
garage band, Karlsen was simply born with a better voice. I asked Morten (Henriksen, in
case you are getting confused) if he didn’t think of singing himself, since he had
done it in other bands and was to do it again with the Yum Yums.
"No, I didn't,
and there's two reasons for that", he replied. "The biggest reason was that I
thought a band like The Cosmic Dropouts needed a frontman to take care of both singing and
playing tambourine and marracas. It looks cool! The other reason is that it's SO cool
being just the guitar hero!"
Hoolabaloo
was their next album, and the first with Karlsen singing. It came out on vinyl in 1991 and
is now also available as a CD. Whereas Morten thinks that Groovy Things was a great
album, he has some reservations about Hoolabaloo. "It was the first time we
went into a studio to make a whole album", he says, "So it was a complete
different way of working for us. It took us by surprise and I think we made a lot of
mistakes. I wish we could have rerecorded it sometime, because there are some really good
songs on it."
Well, he’s
right on that last part…there are some terrific tracks on it. A bunch of them,
I’d say. The guitar is tougher and the organ sound stronger, and Karlsen’s
vocals work great. The highlight of the set might be a killer cover of "Leavin’
Here" that really rips, but they show a lot of range in their own right, with
haunting songs like Morten’s "Into The Blue" or rockers like
"Stampin’ On My Feet" .
The lp was
engineered by Kai Andersen at Athletic Sound Studios – a place that has churned out a
number of other pretty good sounding Norwegian records. "Kai runs his Athletic Sound
studio in a town called Halden. He has worked with almost every band in Norway the last
ten years. From the really big selling bands to small garage/punk bands. I don't really
know much about his background apart from the studio, though he's always bragging about
seeing "Middle Of The Road live in '72". He's a really nice guy!"
The final Cosmic
Dropouts lp was 1993’s Sonic Circus, the best sounding of the three releases.
It looks like an album that should have gotten the band a much wider audience. Kicksville,
the label on which it appeared, had a distribution deal with Sony, and the CD had a great
packaging job on the outside, with great songs and sound on the inside. The thing is
loaded with raving energy, featuring all the tricks in the book…great stop-start
songs, well placed "wow!" screams, a rich, fat mix, and everything you could
want. But it vanished without a trace. Says Morten: "Sonic Circus, which I
consider our best album, sold the amazing amount of 475 copies one year after its release.
It was only released in Norway. The band split up not long after the release so there was
never made any effort to market it outside of Norway. A damn shame!" Eventually Sony
sold most of the original run of 2,000 copies, but it took a few years.
That the three lps
they left behind haven’t been lionized as among the best examples of 80s garage-punk
is a crime of the first degree. These records don’t have to concede an inch to the
classic early Nomads records or any other band of that style you can think of. They should
be available everywhere, and they should be the subject of rave conversations by
underground music fans everywhere. Instead, they are buried in obscurity, and two of the
three are pretty much impossible to find unless you take a plane to Norway and scour the
used bins from one end of the country to the other. Me, I found my copy of Hoolabaloo
in Trondheim and didn’t find Sonic Circus until I got to Tromso, north of the
Arctic Circle. I feel pretty lucky to have found them at all.
But bands are about
more than just records, and in addition to making three fine albums, the Cosmic Dropouts
also played their share of gigs. As a tourist, it’s hard to see where these would
have been…there doesn’t seem to be any sort of coordinated way to find out about
gigs, and I never saw a venue that looked like it would have live bands while I was there.
Says Morten: "We played clubs and student places all around the country. Usually
places that held 200 to 500 people. We never went on any real tours. Just weekends in
Norway. We went to New York to play at the New Music Seminar and a show at the Khyber Pass
in Philadelphia. We got booked in a club called Jammin’ on 42nd Street, with five bad
80's heavy metal bands. The crowd didn't like us at all, except for the Headless Horsemen
who came to see us. We were handing out free t-shirts that they threw away in the streets
after the gig. The Khyber Pass was cool, though."
I told Morten that
my idea of a great double bill would be the Cosmic Dropouts with the Nomads. "Yeah,
I've always wanted to do that", he replied. "The Cosmic Dropouts would never
have existed without The Nomads. We have never played with them, but they're still going
strong, so maybe one day?" Of course, that would be with the Yum Yums, unless there
is a Cosmic Dropouts reunion, since the Dropouts’ day is now done.
Sometime after the
demise of the Dropouts, there were announcements in US indie mags that Steve Baise of the
Devil Dogs had hooked up with some crazy Norsemen that he’d met on a tour to
Scandinavia and had made some singles and an lp under the name The Vikings. And lo and
behold, when the records were out, whose name should be on them but our own Morten
Henriksen’s? "I'm really proud of the fact that it was me who brought The Devil
Dogs to Norway", he says. "They are one of my all times favourites. I hope to
god they stop fooling around, and get back together again - sometime soon! They did two
shows in Norway that were among the best shows I've ever seen. The only bad part about it
was that hardly anyone else did see them. Only a 100 people. But they made a strong
impact."
Apparently so.
Singer Ole Olsen from the brilliant Norwegian band the Basement Brats recalled that show
as the moment where the Brats suddenly realized what they wanted to do and where they
ought to be going. Morten remembers it, too. "I remember the Basement Brats standing
outside the club in Halden for six hours, trying to get in. They were only 16 or 17 years
old at the time, and it was an 18 and over show. They finally got in and went completely
crazy. Steve met his future Norwegian wife here and visited Norway frequently. Being a
huge Devil Dogs fan, I thought it was a good idea to round up a few friends to do a Devil
Dogs cover band - featuring Steve Baise. We called ourselves The Devil Frogs and there was
absolutely no plan of doing anything serious. The next time Steve came to Norway we did a
few more shows and booked a studio for one night. We recorded four songs live in the
studio. One original and three covers that were released as two separate singles on
Screaming Apple and Sympathy. They got a lot of good reviews and the next time Steve was
in town we did a whole album. It took two days of rehearsal and two days of recording.
Steve and I took the tapes to Coyote in New York and mixed it there. I got to sing back-up
vocals with Billy and Miriam and their dog Speedo, and met the guys from The Fleshtones. A
big thing to a guy from Norway! Steve knew Kunio from 1+2 Records and he wanted to put it
out. The Vikings were never a real band - just a fun, vacation thing. And the album is
more like a postcard from funville for us, rather than an actual album. The other guys
were Tomas "Happy Tom" Seltzer of Turbonegro on drums, and Knut
"Euroboy" Schreiner of The Euroboys and Turbonegro on guitar. The material was
part leftovers from our other bands and songs written especially for the album."
The Vikings record
is a fun one, but as you might guess from how it was put together, it’s really a bit
of a thowaway compared to Morten’s other projects. And that’s a shame, because
outside of Norway probably more people have heard that Vikings CD than all the other
things Morten has been involved with put together. But Morten was moving on. Next style to
assault was power pop, and Morten took it in both hands and throttled it with his new
band, the Yum Yums.
"For me it
wasn't really a change", he says. "I've always been into this kind of punk
flavored bubblegum. It was like coming home."
In the Yum Yums, he
sings as well as playing guitar. And does a bang up job of both. He’s got a slightly
nasally delivery but a great sense of timing, and you just have to hear this guy on songs
like "Back To Rosie" or "It’s Hard". These are instinctive, gut
level boy/girl power pop songs with a monstrous level of power. No lush wimpiness
here…this is full throttle hot rod pop.
The other guys in
the band were recruited from all over southern Norway. "John Matinsen is from Halden,
Stig Amundsen is from Moss and Tomas is from a really small place one hour north of Oslo,
called Grua", says Morten. And as for the Yum Yums Sweet As Candy, he has this
to say: "I'm very happy with the album. It has got the most amazing reviews and sells
pretty good too. It's out in three different versions. Vinyl on Screaming Apple, CD on 1+2
and a Norwegian version on Universal Music. The Universal version is all remixed with some
new songs and some songs re-recorded. This one is my favorite. Universal also released two
CDEPs, "Crazy Over You" and "Be With Me" with three extra unreleased
cover songs on each."
The original
drummer for the Yum Yums was Per Madsen, but after a small tour of Europe with The
Basement Brats and the Kwyet Kings, Per left the band to play professionally with one of
Norway's bigger bands called Tre Små Kinesere. For a short while he was replaced by
Anders Johansen - a guy who at the time also played in the nasty Anal Babes and also in
the more progressive sounding O-Men. He stayed with the band about a year until he left to
join Kåre & The Cavemen (who would use the name The Euroboys outside of Norway and
who made a very intriguing surf instrumental CD for Sympathy).
Anders eventually
got replaced by Tomas Dahl, who despite being only 20 years of age has also played in The
Abusers and in The Bittersweets and is now also in the Wonderfools in his spare time. When
added to his Yum Yums schtick, this yields a fairly startling portfolio, since the Abusers
are comparable to the Angry Samoans and the Dwarves, while the Bittersweets are Ramones
styled good time pop punk, and the Wonderfools are the Norwegian equivalent of
Australia’s Hard-Ons (Tomas even sings in the Wonderfools, as drummer Keish did for
the Hard-Ons). At any rate, it is Tomas who plays drums on the Sweet As Candy CD.
There’s no
excuse to not have the Yum Yums CD, since 1+2 releases are pretty readily available in the
US. You won’t be disappointed…few power pop records can boast the sort of
non-stop energy level of this one. Morten describes them as equal parts Beach Boys,
Ronettes, Paul Collins Beat, Barracudas, Real Kids and Ramones, and they’ve played
covers by bands like the Pointed Sticks, Flirts, and Baby Demons. They pretty much hit the
ground running. According to Morten, "We have been touring Norway heavily. We did
most of the good places, plus we even played some alpine/snowboard slopes around Easter.
Yep, outside, in the middle of the slopes, with all the kids injuring themselves in front
of us. Broken bones everywhere. We also did a two week tour in Spain and the Canary
Islands. It was my first real tour ever and it was a lot of fun. We hope to go back as
soon as possible. The people of Spain were really friendly and they seemed to be into the
band too. Heaven is a place on earth!"
I asked Morten
about the rest of the Norwegian scene, which seems incredibly healthy right now. "At
the moment Turbonegro are kings", he said. "Other good bands would be The
Euroboys who have a CD out on Sympathy. Gluecifer have a CD out on the Swedish White Jazz
label and a new one coming out in a couple of weeks. The Kwyet Kings (one of Arne
Thelin’s current bands) have a new album out. The Poppets are a really good power pop
band from Halden that also have a new album soon. The Tranceplants are a psychedelic
rockabilly band from Bergen that are one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They should
have been superstars. The Barbarellas are a girl band from Oslo that will release
something on Sympathy pretty soon."
"Swedish bands
have always been a big influence here in Norway, but the Swedes have always pretty much
ignored Norwegian bands - until now. Turbonegro and Gluecifer have gotten a lot of
attention in Sweden lately."
I asked him about
some of his favorites from elsewhere in the world. "When it come to international
bands, they're almost too many to mention", he replied, "but if we're talking
pop: DM3, Fountains Of Wayne, Redd Kross, Teenage Fanclub, The Model Rockets, Brainpool
(Sweden). I'm also a huge fan of Per Gessle from Roxette. It may not always show with
Roxette, but the guy is a pop genius. He has a lot of other projects."
"If we're
talking pop/punk, bands like The Muffs and The Queers are GODS. Somebody please make them
come to Norway soon. If we're talking punk/rock'n'roll: The Nomads, The Devil Dogs
(always!), The Hellacopters, The New Bomb Turks and so on."
In the spring of
'97 The Yum Yums did some shows with a young Norwegian girl rock-star - Vibeke Saugestad.
According to the bio info on the Yum Yums website: "The idea for "Vibeke
Saugestad and The Yum Yums" was to play a lot of girl pop/punk songs and the band did
every song in the book. Blondie, The Primitives, Scandal, The Photos, Holly Beth Vincent,
The Go Go's, The Darling Buds, The Bangles and even Nena. You name them... The shows were
great and I'm pretty sure we will do more together."
Another side
project was a small Scandinavian tour with the power pop-legend Paul Collins of The Paul
Collins' Beat. He had had heard the Yum Yums cover of his "Walking Out On Love"
on a tribute album and called them up to do some shows. The Yum Yums were all thrilled by
this, since they regard Collins as the king of power pop. They did five shows with him
that were musically great, but the June timing was bad. In Norway when it’s summer,
everyone is outside enjoying the sun while it lasts, since the long days of winter will
give plenty of chances to be indoors. So nobody goes to see bands, and the Paul
Collin’s Yum Yums were no exception. Still, the band got to do all of their favorite
Beat songs - "Rock'n'Roll Girl", "Walking Out On Love", "The Kids
Are The Same", "Let Me Into Your Life" and "USA". There has been
talk of the Yum Yums doing some more touring with Collins in Europe and they may even
record some new material with him, but nothing’s firm yet.
The Yum Yums future
at home is looking up. They’ve got a professional manager (used to be the drummer for
Norwegian garage rock band Lust-O-Rama, another Arne Thelin project), and they managed to
get a record deal in their own country…quite some time after having many overseas
releases. The song "Crazy Over You" from the CD was licensed as the backing
music for a commercial for the Norwegian national lottery, and that in turn helped the
band get some TV and radio spots. Meanwhile, the band have a single coming out in Spain
with "Back To Rosie" on the A side, and on the flip they plan to cover the
Barracudas’ chestnut "I Can’t Pretend". So life is a bowl of cherries
for the Yum Yums lately, and hopefully there will be plenty more Morten Henriksen music to
make life good for us in the next few years.
