The story

120 Days - Biography

Written by Mark Beaumont

So what turns a nice, clean living pop band from an island in Norway into a bunch of scuzzy, city crawling electronic rock deviants hooked on dark nights of depravity, Krautrock and literary pornography? Drugs? Depression? An avalanche of Neu! records burying their primary school?
“Man,” says singer Ådne Meisfjord darkly dodging all enquires on the subjects of drugs, suicide or why their electro maestro Kjetil Ovesen had to leave the band for ‘personal reasons’ for half of 2006, “I don’t want to go down that road right now…”

There’s clearly some deep scars to be opened in the past of 120 Days, but those are for more scalpel-probing interrogations. For now we will impart what secrets they’re letting on. Teenage schoolfriends in their island hometown of Kristiansund, Jonas Dahl, Arne Kvalvik, Kjetil Ovesen, and Ådne Meisfjord began rock life as an unashamedly pop act called The Beautiful People in 2001, playing tourist hotel bars and the town’s one rock club Muddy Water. With a population of 18,000 and most of those being fishermen hooked on the town’s one main entertainment option – getting hideously pissed on a Friday night and chucking things at covers bands – Kristiansund could not hold The Beautiful People for long.

Oslo called to them, but Oslo was an expensive siren. They yearned for the excitement of buildings but couldn’t afford their shelter. So there was only one thing they could do – in 2002 they clubbed together and bought a motor home, drove it to Oslo, parked it on a bridge in the darkest, scariest part of the city and lived in it for six months. With an unofficial sub-let to Oslo’s junkie contingent.

“We couldn’t stay there for any longer,” Ådne Meisfjord says, “junkies kept breaking in to shoot up.”
It was a Krautrock kind of place so they made Krautrock kind of music there. The turning point in their shape-shift from plain pop to electro-sex-rock came when they had the equivalent of £1000 to buy themselves either a kick drum or a drum machine, and plumped for the drum machine. That and all the Kraftwerk albums they came to adore and relate to in their darkest winter months, of course.

“Kraftwerk was a big ticket into electronic music,” … admits. “It’s one of those bands you always hear about but when you’re a rock kid you think ‘they play synthesizers, they’re techno, that’s so gay‘. But then you get into it and you realise it’s some of the most brilliant and perfect music ever done.”

So, finding proper flats and overdosing on Kraftwerk, Neu! and who knows what else (“Is there a narcotic influence? Maybe slightly. We had trouble getting into America…”), they became 120 Days and “just made noise for a year. Oslo is so much bigger, so much uglier that we just started making noise.” And what a noise. A wired, filthy, urban nightscape rock’n’roll mash-up of Kraftwerk, ‘Exterminator’-era Primal Scream, Spiritualized, Pink Floyd and Orbital began to emanate from these once pop souls, and Oslo’s underground swiftly took notice. Having toured Norway extensively and becoming downbeat darlings of the Oslo club scene, the local Public Demand label snapped them up for two singles in 2004 - the small town alienation groove of ‘Sedated Times’ and ‘The Beautiful People EP’ which featured ‘So This Is Suicide’ (“I don’t really want to go into that”) and ‘Justine’; a reference, like their moniker, to the works of the Marquis De Sade.

“I was reading a lot of classic pornography like De Sade and silly stuff like Fanny Hill and that shit. You can say a lot about life in general by describing the things that happen between men and women. You can hear it in Stooges lyrics like ‘Can I Come Over’, some might say it’s very simple but I think it says a lot.”

By ‘The Beautiful People EP’, though, 120 Days could no longer keep the pop inside. Tracks like ‘Come Out, Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone’ - a sordid crawl through Oslo nightlife and its self-hating aftermath (see also, ‘Sleepwalking’, ’I’ve Lost My Vision’ - were pinned at the electronic core with Cure-style pop tunes, as thick and viscous as putrescent molasses. And while they keyboard player … took an unexpected (and as yet unexplained) sabbatical, heads were turning abroad: the band were invited to play the Sonar festival in Spain and to open the Carling Weekend in the UK in 2005.

Such international attention echoed home: the band signed to their dream label, Norway’s Smalltown Supersound (And to Vice Records in America), talked their keyboard player back into the band and set about recording their eponymous debut album, a record both widescreen and claustrophobic, but metallic and deeply human, both electro and rock. In tunes like ‘Just Keep Smiling and ’Sleepwalking’ the desolation of ‘Disintegration’ is welded to the drone drive of Suicide with a dollop of Doves melodicism smeared across the join, while ’Lazy Eyes’ finds ‘Automatic’-era Mary Chain and ‘Swastika Eyes’ having a love-in with The Dandy Warhols and Death In Vegas.

This is pop degraded, rock electrified, dance deregulated. Part electronic bliss, part drone rock terror, part shimmery pop hooks '120 Days' - already on the loose in the US, infiltrating these shores in March and April (on tour with Ratatat) - is nightmare music for when you’re widest awake. Head down this road, nightcrawlers, and there’s no turning back.