Nul Points Read online

  Yet it was quickly trumped, then trumped again. Jahn was drafted in as a roadie, and when the Red Squares’ bassist abruptly quit, the band asked him to step in. ‘I had to think for some time, because I was actually still in the Enemies,’ he says, but any recriminations must have been shortlived: within eighteen months the Red Squares were in London, recording at Abbey Road. ‘We were there at the same time as the Beatles. Incredible! I was always bumping into them.’ Jahn slowly shakes his head; thirty-seven years on, he still can’t quite believe it.

  For both bands, those Abbey Road sessions marked the beginning of the end. Looking around afterwards, I can find evidence of only one single (Five Times I’ve Said Goodbye) released during Jahn’s tenure with the Red Squares, and when work-permit problems made life difficult in their Danish power base, the band rolled the dice one last time and decamped to Israel. A bold and swiftly disastrous move: in December 1969, the Red Squares split up and went home, leaving their bassist in Jerusalem.

  But Jahn’s blue touch paper had been lit. Two years before he’d been marooned in the deafening silence of small-town Norway, and now, though not yet 20, he had known what it was to be screamed at by girls, to unzip beside Ringo at the Abbey Road urinals. It might be the end for the Red Squares, but for him this could only be the start. ‘I had begun to believe that everything was possible,’ he smiles. ‘The happiest parts of my dream were already coming true.’ But Jahn didn’t get wherever he was today by submitting to the obvious: he joined a local group, The Lions of Judea, and stayed in Jerusalem for over a year.

  Having conspicuously failed to break out of (or even into) the Israeli market, Jahn Teigen returned home to find that shifts in the European music zeitgeist had been felt even in Oslo. It was now 1971, and close-harmony beat groups on the Red Squares model were finished: things were getting rockier, hairier and generally more flared. If you couldn’t tell as much from its name, Arman Sumpe Dur Express represented a bearded, floral and album-oriented departure for the ooh-baby bassist, one best described in the pages of www.progrock.no.

  Within a year the band metamorphosed into Popol Vuh, but back in the mid seventies you had to be pretty quick off the mark when naming yourself after the creation story of the Maya, and the pre-existence of a German Popol Vuh forced a rebrand to Popol Ace. With its epic tone and hobbity subculture, prog rock has always struck an almost deafeningly resonant chord in the land of trolls and Vikings, and as lead vocalist of Popol Ace, Jahn enjoyed his first big album hits.

  Dragons-on-Mars fantasy-art album covers, checked-cheese-cloth Open University chic, lashings of Gothic script: Popol Ace went the whole nine yards, and not just when ordering their trousers. (It is to Jahn’s enduring credit that throughout these testing years, he never went beyond a Shakespeare goatee and a Conan-the-Barbarian centre parting.) They were playing to crowds of 40,000 throughout Scandinavia, and, perhaps uniquely for a symphonic-progressive rock band, given their own national TV series (and having seen their album covers, how I’d loved to have watched that). Within a couple of years, Jahn had conquered his homeland. What else was there to do?

  His record company thought they knew. When a British band outgrows its domestic market, it looks to crack America; for a Scandinavian group, the next step is Europe. With this in mind, Popol Ace’s 1975 album ‘Stolen From Time’ was painstakingly recorded on a vast budget and accompanied with a set of lavishly produced promo videos. Musically the principal influence was Genesis, and when the public-school prog-rockers toured Norway that year Jahn made it a priority to meet up.

  ‘After their concert we found them in a bar,’ he says, beginning to smirk oddly. ‘I was talking to Michael Rutherford and then our new Popol Ace video comes on the TV in the bar: he watches it and hears me singing, and says, “You know Peter Gabriel is leaving, and we need a singer. What kind of contract do you have with your band?”’

  I look at Jahn; the look quickly settles into a frozen gawp of astonishment. As if to show he is not shirking my impertinent stare, Jahn doffs his shades. ‘Yes: I was asked to join Genesis. And I said no.’ My gawp hardens further, evolving helplessly into one of frank incredulity. ‘Well, how would you think?’ And with that he launches into one of his trademark vignettes, opening an imaginary newspaper with theatrical gusto and reading from it very loudly: ‘Oh, I see Peter Gabriel has left Genesis … and the new singer is … Norwegian?’ So strident is the incredulous bark of disdain employed for this last word that a woman walking past the window outside turns to see what the fuss is about. ‘You know, sometimes it’s just not the right time to take a chance like that.’ And so began the grim process that was to end with ‘No Jacket Required’.

  ‘Stolen From Time’ predictably bombed abroad; Popol Ace predictably split. Jahn was already setting up Prima Vera with his friends Herodes Falsk and Tom Mathisen; at the same time, though he’s now reluctant to talk about it, Norway’s overlord of prog-rock formed the Norsk Punklag, or Norwegian Punk Union. Needing a cover story to deflect attention from a recent career that had embodied everything punk was so eager to vomit upon, Jahn held a press conference to announce his redrafted CV: having been thrown out on to the streets at the age of thirteen, he told gathered journalists, he had spent the balance of his adolescence in a brutal children’s home. No one believed him – an authority on Norwegian punk dismisses the band as ‘counterfeit’ and ‘irrelevant’ – and in partial consequence no one bought Norsk Punklag’s only single: You Are a Pig b/w I’m Just Sitting Here Bored.

  Prima Vera was never a full-time job for Jahn, but around this time the absurdist partnership occupied much of his creative energy. ‘Green tights and dinner jackets!’ emailed one Norwegian Eurovision fan when I posted a message requesting an encapsulation of their appeal; clearly it’s difficult to explain to a non-Norwegian why Prima Vera have notched six top-ten albums, so difficult that Jahn can’t even bring himself to try. Nonetheless they’ve apparently managed to outrage the Norwegian royal family and the nation’s religious authorities on a regular basis, which isn’t bad going for a Eurovision performer. ‘Prima Vera have amused and offended our country for years,’ concluded a review of a recent retrospective, and of that Jahn Teigen can be justly proud.

  ‘You can say I was not a typical Norwegian artist,’ he says, with a smile, and it’s certainly difficult not to admire the man’s capacity for shameless reinvention: from prog-rock to Python to punk to the Palais des Congrès, all in the space of a year. Considering it afresh, his Mil Etter Mil outfit was the perfect synthesis of this progression – the half-mast narrow red tie and drainpipes, the braces, the centre parting and aviator shades, the gold rose. If the brace-twanging was Pythonesque in its silliness, then the leap that followed it was half rock-god, half pogo.

  In fact, Mil Etter Mil wasn’t his first Melodi Grand Prix entry at all: he’d tried three times before, most memorably in 1976 when performing Voodoo dressed as a skeleton. Eurovision, and its tantalising promise of global stardom, was becoming an obsession. ‘We all saw what ABBA did after Waterloo,’ he says. ‘In my part of the world Eurovision was really the only way to get an audience in other countries.’ When I ask if he ever felt uneasy mixing Eurovision with punk, prog and Python, he shoots back: ‘You are going to start talking about credibility. I hate this terrible word! What an arrogant concept!’

  Jahn first heard Mil Etter Mil in 1977. Written by Kai Eide and Brit expat songwriter David Cooper in the latter’s Oslo flat, Jahn recalls it as ‘a nice, sweet song, a little like Creedence Clearwater Revival.’ I stifle a gulp of misapprehension: is my beloved Mil Etter Mil at the top of a slippery slope into blando Yankrock? If so, it’s clearly too late. Six long months later, watching Live8 unfold over a great many sofa-bound hours, I’m possessed of a powerful desire to see Jahn Teigen hold his microphone out to a swaying, singalong crowd of uncountable thousands, stretching to the horizon on all sides: ‘C’mon, London! Mil etter mil etter mil …’

  Inevitably, the pared-down three-p
iece original didn’t appeal to the NRK executives responsible for the Melodi Grand Prix. I’m mightily relieved to hear Jahn decry the reworked orchestral version: ‘From the opening it was awful … it had nothing. As an artist, that’s hard, to do a good song that has been destroyed like this.’

  Telling him how much I’ve enjoyed playing along to that first version, and shooting a quick glance at Frida, I mention that I’ve brought my guitar along.

  ‘Oh yes?’ he says, in a tone that says, ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I could go to the hotel right now and get it: I’d really like us to play Mil Etter Mil together,’ I say, trying to pretend he isn’t glazing over before my eyes at this evidently underwhelming prospect. His gaze settles on my red trousers, and tightens into a small frown. Take the piss out of my outfit if you must, he’s thinking, but I’m not having you take the piss out of my song.

  ‘I’m not so sure about this idea,’ he says, with an air of closure. But Jahn Teigen doesn’t do haughty refusals too well, and a moment later his face lights up. ‘Maybe instead we can do something more fun – in a studio! In Abbey Road, why not? Maybe we take these thirteen, fourteen zero-points songs, and record them again – the worst songs that are not the worst songs!’

  He picks up a pencil and doodles on one of Frida’s press releases. ‘We can call this CD … “From Zeroes to Heroes”! No … we can call it just zero, like the Beatles had that album “1”. Like this!’ He draws a square the size of a beermat, and fills it with a big nought. ‘It is the solution of the dream for everyone, because all these people have a strength inside them that comes from their suffering.’ The gleam in his eye is zealous; perhaps just half a watt shy of manic. ‘Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon … Sammy Davis Junior! They have suffered, just as the zero-points singers!’ (Later I will try, without success, to rekindle Jahn’s interest in – and indeed memory of – this appealingly unhinged project.)

  It’s the first time Jahn has acknowledged that to score nul points is to suffer, and perhaps recognising this he moves quickly to set his own looming experience apart. ‘But after we won the Melodi, everyone was up. This was my fourth try to qualify, and I’ve done it! And Mil Etter Mil was already in the charts! Of course, everybody was confident. Everybody thought this could be my chance, Norway’s chance.’ And he’s off once again on what Eurovision means to Norwegians. ‘It’s such a strong opportunity for us – to be noticed outside our small country. Here in Norway we don’t have any self-confidence. We have this bully big brother next to us, and here in this contest is our chance to get one back.’

  The bully, of course, is Sweden, and I’m therefore now treated to another dilatory diatribe against the Nordic region’s most hated foisters of stupid kings. Jahn is hardly a lone voice in the considerable Norwegian wilderness on this issue: when in 1905 Norway held a plebiscite on ending its union with Sweden, the country voted in favour of dissolution by the impressive majority of 368,208 votes to 184.

  The long tradition of Scandinavian jokes makes Norway’s place in the regional hierarchy clear. The Swede is always depicted as rich and a little arrogant, the Dane as a decadent hedonist, leaving the Norwegian to assume the role currently played by the Welshman in the British Isle equivalents. (Being just that little bit too odd, the Finns and the Icelanders tend to get left out.)

  Here is one instance. A Swede, a Dane and a Norwegian are shipwrecked on a desert island when a genie appears, granting each a wish. The Swede immediately demands to go home, proudly detailing the many lifestyle enhancements present in his open-plan, beech-floored residence. After he vanishes, the Dane expresses his desire to be returned to his Copenhagen penthouse, fondly eulogising its yielding leather furniture, fridge full of brewed intoxicants and winsome female incumbent. In a flash, he disappears. The Norwegian, having pondered his predicament for some time, turns to the genie and says, ‘It’s miserable here now. I wish for my two friends to come back.’

  It was different, as we have seen, in the contest’s early years. During the sixties all Scandinavians felt as Jahn claims the Norwegians still do – uncertain outsiders, newly emerged from harsh rural poverty. They had to bury their old rivalries and band together, support each other. Yet in this alliance of equals, Sweden somehow managed once again to be the most equal. The nation sourced all its Eurovision points from the Nordic brotherhood in 1965, half in ‘67 and ‘68, three-quarters in 1969; Norway, having lavished a total of nineteen points on Sweden in these four years, received precisely two in return. Even in 1966, when the shamelessness of inter-Nordic voting patterns almost handed victory to Sweden’s flute-playing swineherd, Norway’s dutiful scratching of neighbourly backs went stubbornly unreciprocated.

  Succumbing to the slightly autistic obsession with data that infects anyone over-exposed to the ESC, I’d trawled the 1966 stats: in that year Denmark garnered all its points from Scandinavia, and Sweden and Finland all but one. Norway’s Åse Kleveland, though, had to look elsewhere for votes: of her 1966 total of fifteen, just three were secured from Nordic nations. (Good enough for third, mind you: Åse’s reward for the best Norwegian result to date was a future career as the nation’s Minister of Culture. Try to picture Sandie Shaw’s bare feet under the cabinet table and you’ll understand the fjord-wide chasm that separates the British perception of Eurovision from its Scandinavian counterpart.)

  When Waterloo triumphed, the grumbles of discontent gave way to an open venting of seething historical enmities. Sweden, the ‘bully big brother’ who had dominated the region – economically, politically, culturally – for 400 years, was at it again: the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself. For the Swedes, ABBA’S victory, and subsequent global success, underpinned their growing self-confidence, by inference amplifying the mewling whines of those parochial unsophisticates across that endless western border. Watching a Swedish TV channel in my hotel room (yes, yes), I was struck by the number of adverts broadcast entirely in English – an indicator of laid-back cultural relaxation unthinkable in Norway.

  Waterloo buried the one-sided votes-for-Vikings alliance: in 1975 Sweden sourced less than a quarter of its votes from fellow Scandinavians, and in ‘77, ‘79 and ‘80 it was shunned by them completely. Only with the introduction of televoting in 1997 was this trend reversed: the intra-Scandinavian diaspora meant that all the thousands of Swedes living in Norway, and all the Icelanders in Denmark, could phone up and vote for themselves. In that first year of phone voting, Sweden and Iceland secured half their votes from Scandinavia, and Denmark a monstrous four-fifths. Yet somehow, the 1997 contest ended with the perennial exception to this rule anchored to the bottom of the scoreboard: la Norvège, nul points.

  It’s becoming rather easier to understand Jahn’s reaction when, in 1985, Bobbysocks won Norway its first ESC … in Sweden: ‘I was in the hall, but I had to leave before the voting was over – luckily not before it was clear Norway were going to win,’ he told a journalist afterwards. (A shame: he’d have missed out on the Swedish compere’s splendidly barbed congratulations. ‘I’m so pleased you won,’ she simpered, handing Bobbysocks their bouquet. ‘Norway so often loses.’) ‘So when I got out on the street a lot of Swedes recognised me and asked me who was the winner. “Norway!” I shouted ecstatically, but the Swedes just laughed and said, “Sure, Teigen …”. They refused to believe it was true. That night – and all the celebrations afterwards – I’ll never forget.’ To the extent that he cites Bobbysocks’ La Det Swinge as his favourite Eurovision number of all time. Even though it’s awful.

  A world citizen as yet unburdened by the fallout of failure, Jahn arrived in Paris, light of head and fleet of foot, a week before the 1978 final. ‘I did my best to turn the other artists into punks. It was a great time. Everyone liked me! The Israelis, you know, had all these bodyguards, and people were too scared to talk with them, but I just went straight past their guards and said: “Mazel tov!’” That year with The Lions of Judea wasn’t all wasted, then. Jahn smiles, then stops. ‘I was the
clown there, but they all thought I could win. I remember the NRK boss in Paris coming into my dressing room twenty minutes before the show, really excited, saying, “Everyone likes you, everyone likes Norway – I just talked to some other bosses and they say we have a real chance! But quick, Jahn – you are on-stage in twenty minutes! You must change now!” And I tell him that no one tells me what to do, what to wear. This is my outfit, I tell him, these braces, this shirt, this is me.’

  His expression morphs again, into an unsettling, narrow-eyed, narrow-mouthed glare of furious hatred. He raises one of those alarming fingers to my face and I become genuinely concerned: I’d always been aware that the questions I’m going to ask my nul-pointers could lead to confrontation. And indeed they will, but not just yet. For the moment, he’s the director, and I’m Jahn Teigen. ‘Mr Teigen,’ he growls at me venomously, ‘if you wear that on-stage tonight, I will personally make sure that you never appear on NRK again.’ What I’d taken for the commentator’s Nordic reserve was clearly nothing of the sort.

  If Jahn doesn’t regret his wardrobe (which he later tells me he still has somewhere), what of the performance? ‘It was just three minutes. It’s strange to think everyone is still so excited about it.’ Bitter words on paper, but uttered in a tone of simple curiosity. ‘I think you are talking about the jump, yes? I have seen that 6,000 times on TV.’ Well, yes, the jump. And the brace-twangs. ‘You see, I was just so happy, I couldn’t not do these things. I always try to do something unexpected, to give people something to think about. If Voodoo had won in ‘76, I would have worn my skeleton suit to Eurovision. And no one thought it was so stupid at the time. All the other performers were clapping for me backstage. Even the NRK director was a little proud. I did the jump again in the green room, I remember, and we were all drinking champagne.’