Nul Points Page 11

  ‘Actually you know there were three zeroes to look at,’ he says, his sing-song Scandinavian delivery settling into a monotone. ‘If you had 119 points it was 1,1,9 on the scoreboard, and we just had 0,0,0. One of my roadies said when he saw me, “Here he is – agent double-0 zero.’” The battle to purge from my face the visible signs of amusement is short and inglorious. ‘Yes, double-O zero, licensed to sing,’ says Finn, casting a mirthless glance at me as the titters fade. ‘I have myself made that joke.’

  But your song wasn’t the worst, I say after a recuperative pause, and, as I had with Jahn, do so with utter sincerity. ‘Maybe. I have forgotten the others.’ And indeed he has. He goes on to refer to the victors as ‘Gin Fizz’, and even after I gently correct him he thereafter opts – rather winningly – for ‘The Fizz’. He thinks Johnny Logan was Ireland’s entrant, when he wasn’t. The only rival he can recall by name, or even by tune, is Björn Skifs.

  Yet he has seen the contest on video since, and more than once. ‘The first time I watch the tape, I hear the technician forgot to put on my guitar – on the first verse it’s just me singing a cappella, no guitar!’ He nods significantly before going on to dissect his performance in surprising detail: Finn’s autopsy report is the most complete I will hear from any nul-pointer.

  ‘My songs are the kind of songs that you have to listen to many times,’ he says, ‘and the more times you listen to them the more they grow.’ This was certainly something I’d experienced – a month after first hearing it, Aldri i Livet was now a regular in my head, its melody emerging through pursed lips many times a day. Clearly, though, to embed a tune with delayed catchiness is to shut the Eurovision door long after the votes have bolted. You have three minutes to make an impression on eyes and ears, and Finn accepts he managed neither (though hearing him describe 1981 as ‘the glitter time’ I’m quite glad he didn’t try too hard with the former). ‘ABBA had these big shoes and Björn’s guitar shaped like a star, it was very visual, that was the setting for Eurovision, but I was just sitting there in a chair with my guitar, like at my concerts …’ On he goes, identifying and analysing in great technical detail the low-key aspects of the song and its rendition, eventually bringing these all together in a vocal parody that reduces Aldri i Livet to a funereal, Gregorian dirge.

  I’d imagined that the problem would be getting Finn to start talking about that night in Dublin. For the moment I’m having trouble getting him to stop. ‘When The Fizz were doing their winner song, I was standing behind this huge scene wall,’ he continues, resolving the mystery of his whereabouts during the mass wave-to-the-camera reprise that brought every other performer back out on-stage. ‘I never forgot this moment, I was alone there, and I guess I felt humiliated, really small … because of course I also had this dream, a dream about … about …’

  Oh, Finn. I’d never imagined that a big Norwegian in mirrored shades lying on a beach with a beer in his hand could ever look vulnerable, but the cracked, fragile sigh he now releases isn’t easy to endure. His doughty nonchalance is crumbling; that elephant in the room is now loose on our beach, and looking for a head to sit on.

  ‘There was a party after, and I got a little drunk. A lot of people did. I thought Stig Anderson might come and pat me on the head and say never mind, but he took it real personal, he was really humiliated.’ It’s the first time he’s mentioned ABBA’S famously domineering manager, a svengali so ruthless that when he drank himself to death in 1997, Agnetha boycotted the funeral. ‘Because, you know, a guy from out of the ABBA stable got zero points … he was really angry with me, shouting, “Why did you pick that song? It was too slow, I told you not to pick that song.” There’s a picture I’ve got at home of Stig standing with his fist in my stomach.’

  Humiliation, assault – can it get any worse? Surveying the nul-points experience through the Teigen kaleidoscope, its sombre shadows diffracted into a whirl of colourful tomfoolery, I’d naively allowed myself to anticipate hearing many more tales of triumph over Eurovision adversity. But this was a trip to a majestically daft insitution’s dark side.

  Jahn afforded Mil Etter Mil a joyous and very public wake; registering the frail intensity of Finn’s diction and bearing, I feel I’m intruding on private grief. If this was happening in Oslo, I’d probably have switched the recorder off by now, placed an understanding, apologetic hand on Finn’s shoulder and gone home. But here I am, on a small island halfway round the world, with a very expensive plane ticket that tells me I’m not leaving for two more days. Another sympathetic nod will have to do.

  ‘Afterwards I went to sleep OK. It only really hit me in the morning, when I saw all the voting charts in the papers. I must say that I didn’t feel too well at the airport. I felt that everybody was looking at me, I felt like a loser. So on the plane from Dublin I got a little drunk again.’

  Bjørn and Sissel wander up at this point, get the drift of what’s being said and swiftly wander off again. With slight envy I watch as they shuffle around outside their bungalow, shaking sand out of sandals, hanging up towels, going about their slow-paced holiday pottering.

  By opting to catch a flight to Stockholm rather than Oslo, Finn made what has to be considered a tactical error. Going straight back to Norway, Jahn did what every Eurovision watcher expected: we’d faced the music, and now it was his turn. He went home with his head held high, and his countrymen loved him for it. But Finn instead sought solace in the bosom of his homeland’s neighbouring foe.

  ‘The newspapers said I was hiding, that I didn’t dare to come home. No one could get in touch with me. But it had been set for many months. I was there to rehearse with my new band – I was going on tour with a band for the first time, and I needed time to prepare. In fact, I was staying with Åse Kleveland’s husband in his artist studio.’ Once again I marvel at the tininess of Scandinavian society. But would he still have bought that ticket to Stockholm had he won? ‘I was away like a week, two weeks …’ He waves a dismissive hand about, then sits up suddenly on his sun lounger and turns to me, abruptly re-energised. ‘You know, I talked to Benny about what happened, and he just laughed his head off! He’s such a great guy – he arranged the song and all, but he could still have a big laugh about it!’

  It’s becoming difficult to avoid concluding that ABBA were Finn’s family at this point, and Sweden his homeland: he’s made no mention of how his wife, parents and countrymen in general reacted to his experience. ‘I had letters from little girls in Norway, ten or eleven years,’ is all he says when I tentatively broach this issue. ‘They were saying they cried to see me get no points.’

  In the light of Jahn’s repeated outbursts about ‘the bully big brother’, an awkward question needs to be asked here, and figuring there isn’t going to be a better time, I ask it. Didn’t his countrymen hold it against him for living and working in the land of their natural enemy, for fraternising with them in international competition, and running into their arms for comfort afterwards? To Norwegians, he must have seemed like one of the 184 who 100 years before had voted against independence from Sweden.

  ‘The brotherhood among Scandinavians is gone,’ he concedes, with some reluctance; arresting words from a Swedish-based Norwegian named Finn. ‘Even when I sort of rolled a six with Benny, and had great reviews and sales, I could never win any songwriting award in Norway because I was recording with Swedish musicians.’ And indeed singing their language: in another of the online interrogations Finn regularly submits to, he was roundly castigated for abandoning his mother tongue in favour of Benny’s during his years in the ABBA stable. His response is brusque. ‘OK, but I never sing in English! At least, I never write in English. You know, in Dublin I was drowned in there, between the Irish song and The Fizz. The home country and the winner: both in English! My experience proved that the language had a lot to do with it. England was winning the whole time then, every second year.’ There is no point, I’m learning, in trying to steer a Norwegian away from this grievously pejorative sum
mation of the British Isles – all I can do is urge those planning to open their mouths never to visit Glasgow.

  Finn is a patriot, he insists, but one of a very different breed to Jahn. For him it’s more cultural, less visceral, the emphasis on art and landscape, not bloodshed and nose-thumbing regional rivalry. ‘I am proud of my country, and my countryside, but come to Norway on 17 May, our national day, and you will understand that there is a lot of … chauvinism.’ His weary tut suggests he’s diplomatically foregone the mot juste. ‘When I was a teenager I never felt comfortable on 17 May. These days I love to celebrate it, but then to make a sort of protest I used to go with a friend up to the forest with a case of beer. I get embarrassed to think of it now, but we would get drunk watching all these stupid people doing their parades.’

  Yet, those Benny-led albums aside, Finn’s most enduring works are the words of Norwegian poets put to his music. He stresses again that performers who ignore the whims of domestic culture do so at their peril. ‘Some bands and singers have huge hits in Norwegian, and then they do something in English, and nothing happens with it. Nothing. Norway is such a small country … one should be aware of changing things like this. You could lose everybody.’ There must have been times when Finn thought he had. Even today, most of the Finn-fan sites on the net are Swedish.

  By the time he returned home from Sweden, ‘Night and Day’ was no longer number one, and within a month it had plummeted out of the top forty. For a record whose pre-Eurovision sales would make it the year’s second highest-selling album (after Chris de Burgh’s ‘Eastern Wind’), such a precipitous slump was bewildering.

  Finn returned to Polar Studios to record the follow up, but this time the twinkle-eyed beardy wasn’t there behind the mixing desk. Despite his enduring loyalty to Benny, it’s hard to imagine there was no connection between events in Dublin and the ABBA man’s absence from the studio.

  ‘It’s weird that Aldri i Livet failed to achieve any points at all,’ writes an online ABBA authority, ‘but the weirdest thing is that this fact is completely ignored in any ABBA-book that relates to their outside productions for other Polar acts … I wonder if Benny himself was disappointed about this?’ Splendid chap that Benny Andersson is widely acknowledged to be, he’s also a hard-driven perfectionist. After six years of worldwide number ones, ABBA singles were now peaking lower and lower; if Benny had been worried that his touch was deserting him, the last person he’d have wanted in his studio was a card-carrying nul-pointer, the embodiment of his lowest ebb as a producer. Almost twenty years would pass before their professional paths crossed for a final time, when Benny allowed Finn to add vocals to an instrumental rather poignantly entitled The Comfort Song. Later, when I ask if the two are still in touch, Finn brightly replies, ‘Well, I call him on the phone, and I always send him my new records.’

  The album was, by common consent, a disaster. ‘We worked really hard to make it sound like a Benny Andersson production, but of course we failed. It’s the only record I have buried: I don’t do one single song from this album live today.’ It touched number thirteen, then disappeared. Finn was swiftly dropped by Polar; shunned by his adopted homeland, he found few friends waiting for him back in the old country. ‘Some of my fans, who remembered me as a folk singer, were really giving me a hard time.’ Few things in music are guaranteed to attract vitriol more magnetically than bad commercial pop-rock. Fiercely criticised for crass, desperate commercialism, he even found himself lampooned by newspaper cartoonists: Finn has been known to bracket himself with Bob Dylan, and there were at least faint parallels here with the ‘Bob goes electric’ furore of 1965.

  ‘You know, I felt pretty bad about myself for a long time,’ says Finn of this period. I have to remind myself he was thirty-four when he set off for Dublin, and had already endured and bounced back from career disappointments. But he doesn’t seem to feel that age and experience softened the blow, instead pointing out that as his own composer, he bore a heavier burden than Jahn (and, as it transpires, every one of my other nul-pointers). The rest would always be able to point fingers, to share the blame; with history’s most gifted pop maestro the only other name on Aldri i Livet’s label, this was never an option for Finn. ‘The good part of this,’ he says, bracingly, ‘is that exactly because I was responsible for my own songs, it meant I could change my direction.’

  The change was a U-turn. ‘Working with Benny I was maybe thinking too much about refrains and catchy melodies.’ After releasing a Benny-less album along these lines, Finn retreated to his folksome musical roots. ‘Now I’m back to where I started. I’m a picker, a guitar picker. All the pop-rock songs I did with Benny that were hits, they’re not what people want now. I’m famous for my picking tunes, my ballads. I’m a low-key guy.’

  I will soon discover the dramatic extent to which this is not so. Certainly there’s a jarring contrast between Finn’s personal and professional lives at this time: in the studio he was putting nursery rhymes to music for an album entitled ‘Little Parsley’, then he’d step outside into a world of Gothic chaos. In April 1983, Finn’s wife gave birth to their daughter, Malene; before she was walking her father had left. Twenty-two years on, she has yet to see her parents together in the same room. ‘Divorce isn’t a defeat,’ he told an interviewer. ‘It’s an opportunity for freedom.’

  Finn does not deny embracing this opportunity. ‘There were a lot of women after that,’ he says, a little smugly, ‘and a lot of fast cars.’ Though he’ll complain bitterly at the financial cost of divorce, at this point there was still a lot of cash in the Kalvik bank from the 200,000 albums he’d sold during the Benny era. ‘I lost my licence three times. Everything was a little wild.’

  It was about now that Finn developed an extraordinary fixation with Ernest Hemingway (later, he spent a year or two modelling himself on Mel Gibson). ‘I’ve read some of his books, but it’s the way he lived that I love, travelling the world, doing adventures … you know, he would drink champagne at six in the morning and then write, and he did this for years! What a guy! Don’t do it your way, do it the Hemingway!’

  For a great many years Finn endeavoured to do just that. He started training with Norway’s flyweight champion, and wound up sparring in his gym four times a week for seven years. He went out hunting. It’s tempting – too tempting for me – to conclude that having killed off the music that brought about his downfall in Dublin, he now sought to kill off the high-voiced, slightly simpering fellow who’d sung it. But with tragic predictability, his experiment in macho pomposity ended with a bang, then a whimper: in Africa on a hunting safari, Finn’s eardrums were blown out when the guy behind let loose an old Winchester. ‘Now I have this tinnitus,’ he says, tapping the side of his bleached and burnished head, ‘like a Niagara Falls all the time.’

  The horrors of this exasperating condition are brought to my attention that evening, as the four of us are rounding off another piquant, aromatic extravaganza under the stars. One of the young Germans dining at the next table wanders halfway to the sea, crouches down to wedge something in the sand, then pelts back as a pyrotechnic whoosh soars skyward.

  ‘Ah, no, no!’ cries Finn as the ensuing blast shatters the bay’s silence, clamping both hands to the sides of his head. An agonised wince annexes his features until we rise to leave; Finn doesn’t speak during the short walk back to our chalets, and when I bid him goodnight from P11’s mesh-doored threshold, all he can muster is a hoarse whisper.

  As young Gob clears away the pawpaw skins and bacon rind of my penultimate Big John breakfast, I look down to the beach and see Finn prone on the now established interviewee’s sun lounger. Walking down to join him, I slowly release a long sigh that attempts to bridge the widening void between the uncomplicated hedonism that should define Finn’s life out here, and its flawed and troubled reality. ‘I’ve always been working towards total freedom,’ he’d said on our first afternoon. At the time, looking up and down the unpeopled, palm-fringed sand, I’d thought:
Well, you’re there, mate. But now I knew he wasn’t.

  It was in 1986 that, in his significant words, Finn ‘started to run away from the country in the winter’. ‘Every 20 December, the radio stations pay musicians for all the times they have played their songs that year, and I got this huge cheque, like an early Christmas present. I had no gigs in January, and only one in February, so I cancelled it and went to Lanzarote for the whole winter.’

  While there he wrote Malene, a song dedicated to his three-year-old daughter, and which was to be his entry in the 1987 Melodi Grand Prix. (With multiple MGP entries almost compulsory for Norwegian artistes, Finn always knew he’d have to stick in another token effort sometime: ‘I came fourth. Not first, not last – I was very happy.’) ‘I was getting on the aeroplane home every four or five weeks to see her. I think I’ve been a good father. Yes, I think so.’

  As a divorced dad, Finn has generally managed to cultivate a guilt-free ‘opportunity for freedom’. These days he dedicates Aldri i Livet to his daughter, and cites his favourite song as Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence, helpfully encapsulated for me by an online authority as ‘a first-person account of a young child watching his parents go through divorce’. ‘When my daughter was twelve or thirteen, I was travelling all around Australia, and these islands’ – Finn jabs a thumb at the hot sand beneath us – ‘and so I bought a fax machine for her, so we could send each other drawings and stories. She loved that.’ I nod, encouragingly.

  All the time, though, his musical career was in steady decline. ‘You always have a lot of ideas when you start as a songwriter, but then with one record after another you are running out and it’s really hard work.’ He sighs, heavy eyed, and of course he’s hardly alone in discovering this uncomfortable truth. By 1987, after all, Finn had been recording for eighteen years, a shelf-life well beyond the sales span of most artists. Now forty, he took the path taken by many guitar-based songwriters desperate for an injection of creativity, and learnt to play the piano. When that didn’t work, he bowed to the inevitable and released a greatest-hits album. This stayed three weeks in the top thirty compiled by Norway’s largest newspaper, VG, two more than his studio follow-up managed in 1995. A lonely stump on their archived bar chart, it slipped in at number twenty-nine, then slipped straight out.