Nul Points Read online

  ‘This really is lovely,’ I drawl, when Finn returns. There’s a pause, during which he clicks open his beer and nods blankly at the distant islands.

  ‘I don’t dig small talk,’ he says at last. Given the intimacy of our semi-naked beach-bound encounter, these words and their scowling tone are an unnerving jolt. ‘People in Norway talk about the weather a lot, and I can’t do that. I’m not a bull-shitter, and that’s why I have a lot of true friends. Most of my friends are people that are also very visible in the mass media in Norway, and I don’t spend my time with small talkers.’ I nod, wondering how big my future talk needs to be. Is it OK to ask where he got that beer? ‘I’ve got a lot to give,’ Finn says, sharply, ‘so I like to spend my time with creative people who also have a lot to give.’ That’s a no, then.

  The lilo-bearers walk up: I’m introduced to Bjørn and his wife Sissel, recently retired NRK news stalwarts of many years standing, her behind the camera and him in front of it. Hearing this, and keen to burst the small but swelling bubble of tension, I retrieve my camera and ask if she could photograph us together on the beach here, Mr Tim and Mr Finn. It works: as Sissel squints into the viewfinder, Finn suddenly becomes a star, cracking a brilliant smile and holding it as she snaps away. And, to my substantial relief, after she stops.

  Our fraternity restored, we talk for another hour or so in the palm-filtered sun, watching two squat ferries lazily converge from the ends of that magnificent horizon. Finn tells me how he’s rarely able to enjoy quiet holiday moments like this in Norway, and not just because of the obvious environmental differences: ‘You understand,’ he says, regretfully circling that big, coppery face with a manicured finger to signify the burden of celebrity. In haunted tones Finn describes the fan-disrupted Nordic camping trip that was his last. Padding back to chalet P11 through the chirruping, tropical dusk to change for dinner, it’s not easy to mourn the loss.

  Walking back down the beach between three Norwegians three hours later, replete with chargrilled sea bass and cold Heineken, my enthusiasm for Finn Kalvik’s bachelor idyll has swollen into fearsome envy. ‘You know,’ says Bjørn, staring up at a black sky scatter-gunned with stars, ‘even after paying for the air tickets and accommodation it’s still possible to stay two months here and spend less than if you’d been in Oslo.’ That’s something to bear in mind, and I do so after returning to P11 to do jet-lagged battle with a temperamental satellite receiver and, rather more loudly, the three geckoes resident behind my water heater.

  Still, I got to lead Finn’s life for seventy-two hours, and how I still treasure the sensuous, indulgent perfection of almost all of them. The sun would wake me at a forgiving hour, working through a small gap in the curtains, and after a breakfast that like almost everything in this part of the world blended the comfortingly familiar (bacon, eggs) with the lusciously exotic (jackfruit, sugar apple), I’d amble shirtless and barefoot past groups of underemployed straw-hatted gardeners to a palm-shaded sun lounger. After an hour or so of slack-limbed, book-over-face slumber I would be joined by Finn, and we’d talk through his life and pop Chang beers until the fat sun gilded his noble, Roman-nosed visage and was slowly swallowed by a sea of orange glass. If I’d gone home a day early there would be nothing but memories of uncomplicated good times.

  The Finn Kalvik story, as I heard it from him and what subsequent sources I was able to muster, begins in 1947 in Fåvang, just north of Lillehammer, in the verdant heart of the famously panoramic Gudbrandsdalen. A realm of bracing valley vistas and medieval stave churches, it’s a pastoral backdrop ill-suited to the rock ’n’ roll soundtrack that ran through Jahn’s young head as he sauntered past Tønsberg’s oil refineries and shipyards. Finn’s teenage influences were correspondingly acoustic rather than electric, British folk stars Roy Harper, John Renbourne and Ralph ‘Streets of London’ McTell. He first picked up a guitar at sixteen, and was soon sitting on hillsides plucking out his own compositions.

  It sounds idyllic, though suggestions of a darker side emerged during an online chat session Finn held recently with his fans: asked by Tanja from Bergen whether his upbringing had spawned any psychological problems, he replied enigmatically, ‘Yes, you could say that.’ Certainly he brusquely deflects attempts on my part to delve into his family life at this time, or at any other; all I really find out is that his father was a telegraph operator. In late adolescence Finn and his family moved to one of Oslo’s dreariest suburbs, an upheaval he has described as ‘traumatic’; in 1983 he paid rather a lot of money for what he still describes as his favourite picture – a vibrant, muscular landscape that encapsulated his early childhood.

  At the age of nineteen Finn was up on the stage of Oslo’s newly opened Dolphin folk club, a baby-faced, beardless blond conspicuous amongst the tousled beatniks. It was through the Dolphin that in 1968, Finn met and befriended Ralph McTell, the latter selling him a 1936 Martin acoustic that he still owns. A year later Finn recorded a song he’d knocked together in twenty-five minutes in his parents’ kitchen, and which was to define his early career.

  Finne Meg Sjæl (To Find Myself), an almost painfully personal outpouring of folksy teen angst, brought Finn national recognition and an enduring reputation for frail earnestness. ‘This song will be on my gravestone,’ he laughs as we start on our first beer of a long day. ‘“Mr Kalvik – he’s finally found himself.” I wrote it when I was seventeen, I was just thinking about school, why did I have to go there every day, what am I going to do with my life …? I was so young, but this song was the biggest thing for me ever.’ He talks with great pride of the day his daughter told him her class had just been asked to discuss Finne Meg Sjœl as part of their literature syllabus: ‘Just think, it’s in every schoolbook in Norway … “Finn Kalvik – To Find Myself”. I haven’t had an interview for the past thirty-seven years when I wasn’t asked, “So have you found yourself now, Finn?’”

  Within a couple of years Finn was on the road, touring southern Norway in an old Volvo with a pair of fellow Dolphin regulars. In his songwriting he had now honed a lyrical line in big-picture philosophising, advising listeners not to measure time in inches and metres, and concluding that life was a glimpse between two eternities. Yet his first album, released in 1971, was a collaboration with lyrics by venerable poetess Inger Hagerup, then sixty-six, and a woman I warmed to on discovering her responsibility for this quote: ‘The honest pessimist has always done more for humanity than any prophet of glad tidings.’ Tusenfryd og grå hverdag (Daisy And the Daily Grind) went top-five and stayed in the charts for the best part of a year; only now did Finn cast aside his inbuilt Scandinavian caution and consider that performing music might constitute a proper career. But even then, every Norwegian musician knew that making real money meant looking beyond their country’s famously lengthy borders.

  ‘I watched Eurovision as a kid,’ he tells me, ‘oh yes, in black and white. My first memory was Nora Brockstedt, singing Voi Voi’ – he breaks off to trill the chorus, which in copybook Song Contest fashion involves endless repetitions of the title – ‘and I think that was doing quite well.’ (Later I unpack my pared-down Eurovision travel library in P11, and find he’s spot-on: Voi Voi, Norway’s Eurovision debut, came fourth in 1960.)

  Perhaps, I wonder to myself, Finn might have done better to recall the more representative performances that followed Nora, which in four years included three second-lasts and the nation’s nul-points debut. Particularly when he takes off his shades, scrunches his eyes at a distant ferry and murmurs, ‘You know, that was my dream, to actually represent Norway, that was a big dream.’

  It was in 1972 that Finn first went to stay in Sweden, a country with more folk singers, and more people to spend more money listening to them. A particular attraction was the annual Västervik festival, the fjord fiesta where Finn established himself as a regular, and where, in 1977, he was to meet the man who would change his life for ever. Going east had given him larger live audiences to entertain, but by 1977 Finn’s record
sales were going south. The three albums he’d released since the first had all sold fewer; the most recent had peaked at thirteen in Norway, troubling the chart compilers for only five weeks. He needed to change tack, to try something different, and in Benny Andersson he met a former folk singer who had done just that to Eurovision-winning, globe-conquering effect.

  It isn’t hard to imagine what Finn saw in Benny, who arrived at the festival by Maserati and later that year would celebrate ABBA’S fifteen millionth album sale. Rather more diverting is to speculate upon what Benny saw in Finn.

  By 1977 the great man had steered ABBA masterfully through almost every variation on the pop theme; most enthusiasts, myself included, wouldn’t find space for anything recorded after that date in their ABBA top ten (excepting the epic collision of soul-squeezing musical pathos and movingly stilted lyrical bathos that is The Winner Takes It All). Perhaps he just needed a fresh challenge. Perhaps in Finn – just a few months younger than him – Benny saw what he might have been in a Eurovision-free world. Perhaps it was an opportunity to give something back to the Scandinavian folk scene, to seek solace from the pressures of global celebrity in the comforting, home-spun world of fishing-jumpered guitar-pluckers.

  Either way, despite having persistently turned down the music world’s greatest names begging for his Midas touch in the studio, and despite a hectic and draining touring schedule (this was the year of the Australian tour that formed the basis of ABBA: The Movie), Benny Andersson somehow found time to invite Finn to ABBA’S Polar recording headquarters. He stayed there for four years.

  Finn was at Benny’s studio when a journalist phoned to tell them that Elvis had died; he was with Benny in a cab when the news of John Lennon’s murder came on the radio. He had his own key for Benny’s house, and his own room there; sometimes Frida (Mrs Benny, otherwise known as the dark-haired one out of ABBA) would come and pick him up from Stockholm central station in the Maserati. ‘Me and Benny were close,’ says Finn, ‘really close.’

  In the studio Benny sprinkled his fairy-dust on Finn’s gently impassioned croonings, sticking a keyboard hookline here, a solo there, bringing Agnetha and Frida in to sweeten and colour the backing harmonies, mixing together a pop-folk recipe that the Scandinavian public lapped up. The first of Finn’s Benny-produced albums, ‘Kom ut, Kom Fram’ (‘Comc Out, Come Forward’) was released in September 1979, and stayed in the Norwegian charts until the following July. The second, ‘Natt og Dag’ (‘Night and Day’), hit the shops in March 1981. It had already toppled John Lennon’s ‘Double Fantasy’ from the top spot by the time Finn triumphed later that month in the Melodi Grand Prix. He did so with a song taken from ‘Night and Day’, one that bore Benny’s imprint less deeply than some, but unmistakably showcased the vocal talents of his wife and her blonde companion. Aldri i Livet, you may be astonished to learn, is the closest that a post-Waterloo audience has ever come to seeing ABBA back on a Eurovision stage.

  ‘I don’t have a bad word about Benny,’ says Finn, before offloading a great many good ones. ‘He is one of the few musical geniuses I have worked with, a really brilliant man, but he never speaks about his gift and I love that.’ Smiling at the horizon, Finn tells me how the bearded maestro once anonymously composed a short jingle for an ice-hockey final, and how when it came over the Tannoy the stadium spontaneously rose to its feet as one, ‘like it was the national song’.

  With his album at number one and ABBA’S gilded fingerprints all over it, Finn wasn’t surprised to be asked to enter the Melodi Grand Prix, and barely more so to win it. He even had the foresight to record an English version, anticipating international chart success in the event of a triumph in Dublin. Here in My Heart was graced once more with ABBA’S backing vocals, but Finn was never happy with the lyrics, provided by Ralph McTell in another unsuccessful attempt to escape from those Streets of London. ‘Ralph’s a really good friend and a great songwriter, but he told me the translation had been really difficult,’ he explains. Nonetheless, as Finn will tell me more than once, just after the Eurovision final Here in My Heart won European Pop Jury, a pan-continental radio show in which teenagers from cities across Europe voted for their favourite single of the week.

  So what were Finn’s lyrics about? ‘It started as an instrumental,’ begins Finn, stroking a thumb across his thin, sun-blistered lower lip. ‘And, well, I was married at that time.’ A rare reference to the partner he had set up home with in the early seventies, his first and only wife and a woman whose identity I am not alone in failing to unearth. ‘In the words, I’m saying I will never leave you in my life, and …’ He snorts, and the snort becomes a chortle, and I watch with interest, and then some alarm, as Finn hurls back his head at the palm trees above and laughs and laughs and laughs. He hasn’t laughed like this before, and in the two days ahead he won’t again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, his voice still unsteady with merriment, ‘but it’s because for the whole of Europe I swore that I’m never going to leave you, baby, and here I am, having such a good time alone, and I haven’t spoken to her for twenty-two years! That’s really funny, you know! You swear to one billion people you’re never going to leave your wife, and … I’m going to get another beer!’

  While he’s away I check the cans of Chang beer we’ve both just finished – 6.4 per cent, I note with a gawp, and pledge not to refresh myself further until the sun has settled into that big flat sea.

  Finn returns, wiping his forehead with Chang-can condensation. ‘Yeah, expectations in Norway were really huge for this song because of the ABBA connection, but …’ A diffident wrinkle of that long nose. Surely, I say, winning the Melodi is a highlight of any Norwegian musician’s career. ‘Not mine!’ he barks with feeling. ‘No, no, no! I wasn’t even sure I wanted to enter. I had a long discussion with Benny, and he said, well, it’s up to you. He’s a really great guy.’ Having sold the thick end of 100,000 albums in Sweden, perhaps Finn wasn’t possessed by the desperate urge to pursue Eurovision success as a means of breaking out of the Norwegian market. Or perhaps he’s just forgotten that a couple of hours ago he was telling me how singing for Norway at the Eurovision was his greatest childhood dream.

  ‘You know, I never really thought about what winning the Melodi meant. Then Ralph McTell said to me, “This is such a huge honour for you, representing your country like this.”’ His apparent reluctance melted further on the Monday after his Melodi triumph: on that day alone, 25,000 copies of Aldri i Livet were sold. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, ‘to think that this song was my biggest hit in Norway.’ (It peaked at number three, defeated by the mighty axis of Imagine and Shaddap You Face.)

  I’m beginning to suspect that Finn’s reminiscences of his Eurovision experience are likely to be rather less fondly relayed than Jahn’s. ‘So,’ I prompt, in a rather nervous whisper, ‘you’re, um, you’re in Dublin, and, ah …’ It’s a profound relief to hear Finn’s tone lighten. ‘Yeah! It was funny – I was with my friend who was singing for Sweden [ah: Björn Skifs, the tail-coated rocker] and his band, and we had a police escort to our hotel. And then all this Irish coffee! It was eleven thirty in the morning, and people were drunk!’

  The days up to the final were occupied with rehearsals and publicity commitments. ‘All these big parties,’ recalls Finn, ‘with a lot of smoking around me.’ Every other Eurovision artist I am to meet will inhale burning tobacco fumes with almost desperate efficiency; Finn, as he tells me proudly, has never once put a cigarette to his lips. ‘I had some trouble with my larynx because of these parties, and there was a big panic in the newspapers at home: “Finn has lost his voice”!’ He gathers himself with a throat-bobbing slug of Chang. ‘But you know, it was in the air that we could do well, because I was working with ABBA and all that. Yes, it was in the air.’ The tiny, rueful smile that now gently creases his big brown face is the last I’ll see for some time.

  I’d long been intrigued by Finn’s stage outfit, in its way as controversial as that which had inspired the NRK’s direct
or to splutter threats in Jahn’s face three years earlier. Braces aside, I know which one I’d rather have worn. But despite the conspicuously ‘street’ dimpled-rubber sandally-plimsoll things he wears to our evening beach dinners, Finn remains an anti-fashion folkist at heart. ‘Oh, this shirt was one from my local ice-hockey team,’ he sighs, without interest. ‘And the scarf … I don’t know. Benny and I wore scarves when we were hanging out in Stockholm nightclubs together.’ Whatever other reasons he’ll give for Aldri i Livet’s implosive failure, aesthetics won’t be among them.

  So there’s Finn backstage in Dublin; Björn Skifs strides breathlessly in, perhaps pulling his sweaty lurex gloves off as he does so, and it’s over to Vienna for the results of the Austrian jury. ‘After six or seven countries have voted, I look at my chorus, my choir, and one of them looks back and says, “You have to hope now you don’t get any points, Finn, it’s better to get nothing than so small points.” This was Anita Skorgan, who was with Jahn at the time.’ A woman who knew the no-score.

  I can feel our conversation slipping into a deep, black hole, but hearing these names animates my sombre, sympathetic visage into tickled delight. Anita! I’d thought there was something familiar about one of the girls leaning over the canal bridge in Norway’s introductory filmette. What an astounding one-couple Eurovision industry those two were: together or separately, they represented Norway in all but one of the seven finals from 1977–84.

  ‘I did not understand her position at all,’ says Finn slowly, and thus chastened, I settle back into gentle, prompting nods. Admirable as Jahn’s zero-hugging defiance surely is, most of us would surely empathise more with the weary, bitter scowl the man beside me now aims out to sea.

  ‘It wasn’t me up there on the scoreboard,’ he mumbles. ‘It wasn’t “Finn Kalvik zero points”, it was the country’s name.’ Did that help? I ask, wondering how it possibly could have. But Finn is now blankly surveying the tiny crabs that scuttle along the damp, dark sand at the sea’s lapping edge. He’s miles away, in time and space, back in the Royal Dublin Society’s green room, twenty-four years ago. As I feared it might when we got to this point, the warm intimacy of those first hours is receding a lot faster than the tide.