by Tim Moore
The official’s benign, fleshy features harden, and he embarks on a painstaking hunt for whatever ‘pranks’ I might be hoping to share with Jahn. A diligent rummage through my guitar case, and in particular the dusted ephemera clogging a compartment intended for plectrums and spare strings, brings his reward: a small, clear-plastic zip-lock bag. He withdraws this with a conjuror’s triumphant flourish, one that withers as together we contemplate its unavoidable emptiness. With diminished portent he parts its fastening, sniffs its minuscule interior, holds it up to the light. ‘You keep something in here?’ I have no idea. There are things in that case that have lain undisturbed for over two decades. Still, it seems important to say something.
‘Buttons.’
‘Party buttons?’
The involuntary spasm of mirth this rhetorical query elicits is still creasing my features when a plump, probing hand locates and holds aloft a second bag. It is identical to the first in every way but one: tiny but stark in a wrinkled corner nestles a dark granule.
‘And this?’
Buttocks, I think, then repeatedly mutter. Half the size of an ungenerous chocolate chip it may be, and of a modest potency further depleted over many forsaken years in that rock ’n’ roll time capsule, yet we both instantly understand that this stupid brown speck will account for several forthcoming hours of our lives. For the customs officer, these are largely devoted to a forensic examination of my possessions; for me, they’re spent alone in a stainless-steel chamber, honing that buttocks mantra to reedy perfection.
Our paths next memorably converge when my now latex-gloved custodian enters the cell and tonelessly asks me first to strip, and having done so to spread my legs and jump up and down. When my bare feet hit the cold floor for a fifth time without an intimately secreted stash of party buttons being thus dislodged, I am told to dress, then once more left alone with my wayward thoughts and the hand-etched footballing allegiances of previous British occupants. What would Jahn do? Giggle less hysterically, perhaps, and certainly cut that pitiful whimpering right out.
A long hour later, two very young policemen, one of either sex, gently ease the cell door ajar and usher me outside. ‘Your drug was too small to register in our machine,’ murmurs the shaven-haired male, in a remorseful tone that correctly warns me not to get my hopes up, ‘so you have been charged with holding hashish resin, quantity under 0.1 grams.’ He essays a bracing smile, and holds out a chewed ballpoint. ‘Write your name here to accept the penalty of 350 Norwegian kroner.’
A moment afterwards I’m being conspicuously escorted towards the arrivals-hall cashpoint, through a curious throng of meeters and greeters. ‘I am sorry your visit to Norway has started like this,’ says the female officer as I shakily stab in my PIN number, ‘but we hope you can still have a good time here.’ Just over an hour later I’m hauling the now hated Fender into downtown Oslo’s Hotel Munch, my face a violated homage to that artist’s most celebrated work.
For an hour I gaze down at the clean, cold streets from my modest fifth-floor room, trying to square the ignominies of my arrival with the almost mocking tranquillity of the bright, pleasant metropolis laid out below. The United Nations recently declared Norway the world’s best place to live, and down there is its capital, a city that I’m trying to remind myself I’d grown quite attached to during a couple of long-ago visits.
But by the time my mobile rings I’ve successfully recovered a little of the morale displaced during those naked, cell-bound star jumps, and with it a little of my affection for Oslo and its people. The odd consolation has even introduced itself. Jahn’s p.m.-focused work schedule means that despite the unforeseen delay, I’m still early. And when we did meet, I now had an ice-breaking, life-on-the-road, us-against-The-Man anecdote to win him over with. Marks, scars, battles, pranks – been there, done that, taken off the T-shirt.
‘Tim?’ It’s Jahn’s manager-cum-PA, Frida, who had organised our meeting with calm efficiency. ‘Jahn was working a little bit late last night, presenting an award for young musicians … you know, because a lot of his fans are a bit older, he really enjoyed it. Maybe he enjoyed it too much! We’ll meet him at his studio.’
Frida very kindly picks me up from the hotel at the wheel of Jahn’s plush new Audi estate – the first indicator that all that talk of post-nul-points success is more than bluster.
A close-cropped blonde in her mid twenties, Frida’s businesslike appearance is matched by a complementary driving style. As she pilots us calmly through Oslo’s compact low-rise heart, I pick out statues and parks familiar from previous trips; even the kebab shop where in this ferociously expensive city I’d regularly refuelled for next to nothing (at time of writing, the Norwegian nothing was trading at £3.12). Then the museums and offices part around us, and we’re facing the prim but cosy suburbs that tumble down the opposite hills into a harbour as vast and comely as Sydney’s, its sun-dappled waters home to bright white cruise liners and tall ships.
Frida calls her boss as we pull up outside his studios at the bright and windy periphery of Aker Brygge, Oslo’s gentrified, beautified docklands. Even with half an Audi between us I pick up the disoriented grunt that suggests Jahn is not yet even half awake. ‘OK,’ says Frida when the brief call ends. There is no surprise or disappointment in her tone, just the brisk commonsense one imagines is a prerequisite for making sense of Jahn Teigen’s life. ‘We are early, so I show you around here, and afterwards we go to meet him somewhere for coffee.’
Teigenstudio, upstairs next to a ballet academy in an old harbour administrator’s building, is not quite as I’d anticipated. The young musician’s award last night, along with the stuff in Frida’s email about helping new talents, had led me to expect a School of Rock, but one run (by Frida) with earnest Scandinavian professionalism. In one room, beanpole youths would be working, with the straight-faced, straight-backed diligence of a young Björn Borg hitting balls at a wall, through a barber shop rendition of Dancing Queen. I’d put my ear to a door marked LYRICS (ADVANCED), and hear: ‘Listen, I don’t care if we’re here till midnight: no one leaves this room until we’ve got three more rhymes for “harpoon”.’ Perhaps after lunch the great man himself would drift in for an impromptu masterclass: ‘No, no, no: it’s krrrrrroppp! OK, let’s take it again, from the bridge.’
None of this is implied by our sombre, foot-echoing progress along corridors bookended by self-slamming fire-doors, a journey I attempt to enliven with an account of my expensive and trouserless airport adventure. It doesn’t quite hit the spot: Frida’s half-chuckle is expelled with a pained reluctance that suggests a professional life blighted too often by variations on this tawdry theme.
‘Anyway,’ I falter, as we enter a long, high-ceilinged hall of a room, with a desk at either end, ‘so nothing kind of, you know, falls out, and then I’m, um … yeah.’ Before me, stacks of framed gold and platinum discs lie against a wall fulsomely decorated with album covers; the most recent of these is a compellingly frank study in degeneration. Jahn’s long face is deeply scored with Keef crevasses, running east to west across the forehead, and most dramatically north to south from eyes to jaw; old-lady pinch-lines purse down into a narrow top lip. The hair – rock-long, blondish and swept back carelessly over Jahn’s head and behind his ears – imparts a look of dishevelled insouciance: here is a man who has been round the block a few times, and got lost more than once while doing so. Jahn’s countenance and certain aspects of his lifestyle had drawn online parallels with Iggy Pop’s, but though at fifty-four he’s three years Iggy’s junior, he looks more like his dad. Like Iggy’s pop. I suppose there are going to be a lot of moments like this in the months ahead. I’d better get used to it.
‘Jahn needs to be respected,’ says Frida, catching my wide-eyed, slack-jawed gaze and returning it with a level, admonitory glare. ‘He’s a star, he makes gold records, he does a lot of shows, maybe three every week in summer.’ (As I know from long Icelandic experience, Scandinavians tend to hibernate.) She
scans the album covers with an air of dour reverence.
Does he have a foreign fanbase? I enquire, still unconvinced that the modest domestic market could keep Jahn in new Audis. Frida considers briefly. ‘We have a connection with Malta.’ I nod slowly; perhaps it’s an odd Euro variant on those obscure British bands who somehow crack Japan. ‘A Norwegian tour operator had contacts with Malta’s tourism and culture officials, and they came to a travel fair in Norway and saw Jahn, and how huge he was for people here.’
I pause before a large, soft-focus print of a baby-faced Jahn cheek to cheek with a woman I recognise as his ex-wife and sometime Eurovision collaborator, Anita Skorgan. ‘What you will see is how interesting Jahn is, how different,’ says Frida, ‘how he connects with people, what a star he is.’ A pause. ‘He has thirty-eight albums in total, and two million sales.’ It works: I’m flabbergasted, to the point of impertinence.
We stroll along the album wall. Jahn in a yellow jumpsuit, holding an artist’s palette; Jahn in a flasher’s mac; Jahn – Jahn! – battering a large fish and a pint of beer with a huge club, his face semi-mummified in tape. ‘This was Prima Vera, a kind of insane group, a kind of Monty Python thing he was in for many years. Some songs, some funny scenes. You call them sketches?’
‘Jahn Teigen, man of a thousand faces,’ read a newspaper headline that Birna and her Norwegian-Icelandic dictionary had translated at my request, and which now recurs to me, along with its memorable sub-heading: ‘national clown who ate bouquet of flowers’.
As we walk on, I become aware of a muffled Prima Vera-style commotion coming from behind the wall. ‘It’s the studio,’ Frida explains, dismissively. Inside, I can only assume, are some of the livelier ‘new talents in the music industry’ that Jahn has taken under his wing. ‘I work for a real perfectionist,’ she continues, improbably, raising her voice in a doomed bid to drown out the multiplying thumps and guffaws. Frida indicates the pile of gold discs: ‘These are still like this because Jahn can’t decide how they must go up, in what sequence.’
I bend down to inspect the top one, and in doing so am caught square on the side of the head by the studio door. A young man dressed in joke-shop homage to Elvis Presley’s Vegas phase – black wig, white jumpsuit, wraparound shades – emerges on his knees, along with a ragged chorus of background jeers that fade to a muted hubbub as the soundproof door slams behind him. He rises with some difficulty, pulls off his eyewear, scans the room with a red-eyed gaze of blank confusion, then palms my doubled form haphazardly aside before staggering at unwise speed towards the exit.
‘Yes,’ says Frida, by way of explanation and apology. ‘It is OK with you if I smoke a cigarette?’
She’s extinguishing it when Elvis reappears, his breathing heavy and uneven. ‘English!’ he shouts, interrupting our conversion on Norway’s place in Europe. ‘Tell me, tell me, what is your team?’ His response to my answer is one of lethargic hysteria. ‘Tot-ten-ham, Tot-ten-ham, ha, ha, ha. Ha ha ha! Gary Mabbutt!’ An unexpected reference to a defender whose playing days ended when young Elvis here was nothing but a hound pup. ‘Ha ha ha!’ He throws open the door, which rebounds violently off his misplaced white brothel creeper. Re-entry to the studio is eventually completed at the third attempt; we are allowed a glimpse of shirtless male revelry before the door slams shut once more.
‘What, um, kind of band are they?’
Frida ineffectively stifles an exasperated sigh. ‘There’s a tradition in Norway that on some occasions, people want to make a record.’ Occasions? Like, occasions when you want to be a rock star? ‘Maybe when you leave a job.’
The door opens an inch: ‘Tot-ten-ham! Osvaldo Ardiles! Steffen Iversen!’
With a brittle smile Frida leans over and heaves it shut. ‘Or before you … get married.’
And so it emerges, in Frida’s rather craven confession, that the main business undertaken here at Teigenstudio is the digitised recording of stag-party karaoke sessions. I press my head to the door: isn’t that Wet Wet Wet? The game’s up; Frida shrugs. ‘You pay, you choose. For 2,500 kroner you select the backing track and record your CD. Sometimes in the summer we have ten of them in a day, and it’s too much.’ She shivers in haunted recollection, but having done the maths – ten times 2,500 kroner is the thick end of £2,000 – I tell her I’d put up with a lot worse for that sort of return.
Perhaps consoled by this, and maybe relieved that the loud, drunk cat is out of the studio bag, Frida seems to mellow as we heave open the fire-door and walk back down the corridor. ‘Jahn is very down-to-earth,’ she says, almost tenderly. ‘Sometimes people want to book him to sing with them, and if he can do it, he does.’ I nod happily, then recognise that this is the ideal moment to bring up my planned duet. Except it isn’t. ‘We can maybe ask him,’ says Frida, with a politely regretful air that squashes my hopes more completely than a furious volley of outraged invective.
‘These days Jahn likes to talk more than sing,’ she explains, as we walk out into the waning light of a Nordic winter afternoon. ‘About his philosophy on life, about being positive. He goes straight to people’s hearts.’ Still a little crestfallen, I ask if she means those life-after-nul-points corporate lectures. ‘Yes, for business, or like last week, at a silver wedding. Jahn reaches out to all people, all ages. People connect with him.’ With a blip and a click she unlocks the big Audi, and in we get. ‘He has families to watch him at the summer music festivals, and then at these clubs, well …’ She smiles indulgently. ‘So many drunk people try to climb up on-stage to be with him. Sometimes he needs five security guys.’
A moment later we’re pulling to a halt in a car park further down the waterfront. ‘Jahn is at this place most days,’ says Frida as we walk out of the frail, dying sun and into a wind funnelled to painful bitterness down a tight, shadowy street of bars and designer shops. ‘Ah! I see him. Outside that café with his … people.’
A small coterie of twenty and thirty somethings, all in artfully weathered retro streetwear, is huddled beneath the radiant glow of a stainless-steel patio heater. At the group’s centre, blanket over his lap like a cruise-ship pensioner in a deck-chair, sits a cadaverous figure in bug-eyed red sunglasses, fag propped between his thin, dry lips. Emerging beneath the blanket, two tightly denimed legs end in a pair of scuffed trainers. Above it is the top half of a shapeless and very long coat, concealing a suit jacket that the wearer later tells me, with quiet pride, was his father’s.
We approach; that long face spreads into a smile that somehow sparkles despite opening up a whole new set of parched flesh valleys. ‘In Malta they have a law against smoking in bars, but not like here everyone ignores it,’ says Jahn Teigen, his voice low and engagingly assured. ‘You know, I bought a book in Malta,’ he continues seamlessly, ‘with one sentence for each day. And on my birthday, 27 September, it said, “You are a god, but you don’t know it.”’
Holding that twinkly, wrinkly beam Jahn stands; the cronies melt away and Frida and I follow the slight figure inside. He is offered a prime table – apparently kept on hold for his personal use – and a waitress glides up. Jahn orders a coffee and a water; I brace myself with a beer; all three arrive almost immediately. Bending to raise the former to his lips, the red-framed shades slip down his thin nose, as they will throughout our meeting; he pushes them back in place with a twisted, ancient index finger. As a chain-smoking serial gesticulator, Jahn has his hands on permanent display, and both sprout digits as gnarled and swollen as bonsai oaks. He seems to have far too many knuckles, each the size of an Adam’s apple. ‘His arthritis is bad,’ the peerlessly named president of Jahn’s fan club, Øistein Wickle, will later tell me, ‘but he never talks about it.’
I’m wondering whether to kick off with my strip-search icebreaker when Jahn starts to talk. What follows is a lecture more than a conversation, but if it’s one he’s given before then practice has not made perfect. ‘You know, we can blame the Swedish. Some centuries ago the Swedes sent their stupidest king to rul
e Norway …’ He begins to move ashtrays around like a demented cup-and-balls street trickster, in apparent representation of shifting alliances amongst Scandinavian nation states in the fourteenth century. I have no idea what he’s on about, other than possibly pre-empting my theories about trans-Nordic Swedish-envy, but it’s an undeniably diverting performance. Jahn, I can already sense, is an it’s-the-way-I-tell-’em entertainer.
With difficulty I steer him back to the beginning. ‘OK,’ he croaks, expansively. ‘So Eurovision was a dream for me since I was a young boy. I remember watching in 1963 and seeing Anita Thallaug sing for Norway, and in this year Denmark won. This was exciting.’ That it certainly was, I say, but Jahn doesn’t seem too interested in my account of the scandalous voting antics by which his countrymen deprived Switzerland of victory that year, and it seems a bad idea to mention that Anita’s Solhverv delivered Norway its first nul-points finish. ‘I thought this was a great possibility to be big outside Norway, and I really believed I would do it one day.’
The son of a barber, Jahn was born in 1949 in Tønsberg, a modest industro-maritime town of refineries and trawlers a couple of hours south down-fjord from Oslo. ‘You have to imagine this, and I think you can: in the sixties, Norway was very grey. No live rock music, no Norwegian pop stars, nothing like this.’ The teenage Jahn, humming the Beatles (and, um, Frankie Valli) as he watched the ferries from Oslo steam past en route to more colourful lands, knew that Tønsberg wouldn’t hold him for long.
By sixteen he’d already formed his first band, the Enemies, and a year later Jahn jumped on one of those ferries and went off to Copenhagen, blagging his way into a clerical job in a music management office. ‘I was there when this beat band from Manchester phoned up: the Red Squares, really big in Denmark and Sweden then.’ Indeed: subsequent research reveals damp-seated, screaming idolatry at their gigs. ‘I was thinking: They could come to Norway. I had no authority at all, but there was no one else in the office to hear, so right there on the phone I booked them to do a tour of my country.’ His voice is animated with excited reminiscence; for a seventeen year old from the Norwegian woods, this must have been quite a moment.