Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  Certainly there’s an undeniable frailness, even a desperation, in those stubborn celebrations of his failure. The Toilet Tour, ‘This Year’s Loser’, ‘From Nothing to Gold’ … Kai Eide, Mil Etter Mil’s co-composer, went on to form a blues outfit called The Nil Club. All that, particularly seen in the light of Jahn’s almost reckless determination to compete at Eurovision again, seems to suggest a man protesting his indifference too much.

  Maybe somewhere in there is that pimpled boy from Tønsberg, belatedly coming to terms with a thwarted dream of global stardom. It’s tempting to view the extended stays in Israel, London and Italy as the last, frail foreign forays of an aged Viking still bent on conquest, his spirit willing but his flesh weak. Jahn himself admits that though his early MGP appearances were intended as launch pads for overseas glory, in recent years he’s only done the show ‘to offer the Norwegian people a new song’.

  Back in Oslo, Jahn started fumbling together his shattered career: having released no fewer than thirteen albums in the five years that followed Mil Etter Mil, in the five since his divorce he’d managed just two. His first break came courtesy of another member of Norway’s hard-bitten Eurovision club. As Dollie Deluxe, Ingrid and Benedicte had earnt a par-for-the-course seventeenth place in the 1984 final; over the next eight years they devised and composed a musical entitled Which Witch, a knockabout romp of blasphemous adultery and fire-based slaughter set in medieval Norway. Jahn was persuaded to take the role of the executioner, and performed it with predictable relish. After 100 well-received performances at home, Norwegian corporate backers put up the finance for a run in London’s West End; it opened – in the presence of A-ha – at the Piccadilly Theatre in October 1992.

  The musical’s heritage, and the on-stage presence of Jahn Teigen, proved too great a temptation for our critics. ‘Nul Points for Norway’ read the review headlines, and the show closed before Christmas. Even now it lives on as a benchmark of awfulness: ‘right up there with Which Witch for connoisseurs of the truly bad musical’, said the Standard of a recent West End attempt to put the life of Wallis Simpson into song; in 2002 the Guardian’s theatre critic reminisced on the ‘excesses of incompetence that lent Which Witch a curious fascination’. Precisely the sort of stuff, you’d have thought, to send Jahn back to his pub-brewery with an unquenchable thirst, yet after Which Witch enjoyed a long and successful additional run back in Norway, he felt himself reinvigorated.

  ‘I did some children’s TV, and then in the mid nineties I was asked to be the host for Norway’s Stars in Their Eyes, which I worked on for three years,’ he says quietly. We’re back outside now, watching the tip of Jahn’s latest Marlboro glow in the dwindling light. Did anyone try and ‘do’ him? ‘A few times.’ A crevassed grin. ‘But of course it was just not possible.’

  His TV work opened up a new, younger audience, who Jahn now blended with his older fanbase. ‘We reformed Prima Vera, and sold 120,000 copies of a new album, made a new TV series, released a DVD, did a big sell-out tour.’ His prog-rock pomp was revisited in the symphonic glory it had always screamed out for when the NRK orchestra remixed the greatest hits of Popol Ace. ‘And then I thought: I have had reunions with Prima Vera and Popol Ace – but I haven’t had a reunion with me!’

  And so in 2004 he released a new album, ‘Undressed With Myself’, the one whose cover-portrayal of decrepitude had so shocked me back at the studio. Frida delves into her black satchel and delves out a copy. Looking at the cover again, and at the man huddled up beside me with a ciggie in his pinched and puckered gob, I’m reminded of jazz wit George Melly’s unimprovable retort to Mick Jagger, after rock’s most deluded narcissist dismissed his deepening wrinkles as ‘laughter lines’: ‘Nothing’s that funny.’

  But Jahn is no Jagger. He knows what he looks like, and he’s comfortable with it. The CD’s inside sleeve is an untouched celebration of physical decline: a Hard Day’s Night gallery that showcases Jahn’s glaring, gurning, grinning visage in all its dilapidated glory. Almost simultaneous was the release of the zero-to-hero greatest-hits anthology Frida now hands me. Inevitably, the track list kicks off with Mil Etter Mil.

  I listen to ‘Fra Null Til Gull’ a week or so later: a bit Leonard Cohen, a bit Bob Dylan, a lot Jahn Teigen. It can’t have been easy to see the best-of retrospective rise to number four in the album charts, while the new material received a critical roasting and limped to a peak of twenty-one. No Teigen album had ever sold so badly. A quick spin suggests why this might be: downbeat to the point of torpor, it’s uncomfortably suggestive of an anthology of Eurovision ballads from the late eighties.

  But perhaps there’s more to its failure than that. Following Jahn back towards the café entrance, I glance about at the huge scale of the refurbishment and regeneration happening all around. Here at the old docks, everything was being modernised, improved, overhauled; the route I’ll take back to my hotel is circuitously routed around stadium-sized holes in the ground and crane-forest construction sites. With an enviable economic destiny assured by canny investment of their oil billions, maybe Norway is more confident now, more at ease with itself and its enhanced position in the world. No longer a nation of fishermen, with chips on their shoulders. See all this, Sweden? See all this, Brussels? We don’t need you, any of you. We’ve done all this on our own. As one of the most conspicuous figureheads of Norway’s parochial past, perhaps Jahn Teigen is being crowded out of its fast-paced, hi-tech future.

  With his studio career winding down, so Jahn is now obliged to earn his crust from those stag-party karaoke recordings and what must be an increasingly debilitating schedule of live performances. ‘But in this I also include my talks to businessmen and others,’ he says. Ah yes! I’ve been wanting to hear about these, and it seems that Jahn has been wanting to tell me. Almost immediately he’s prone on his banquette, those pipe-cleaner legs hanging limply off the end. ‘This is my philosophy,’ comes a voice from under the table. ‘If you are in a home for old people, the people there want you to stay in bed. It’s easier for them, and for you. This is a little similar to my zero-points situation. I could have given up, I could have stayed in bed. But if you stay in bed … you die!’

  With far more vigour than I’d have thought possible, Jahn abruptly levers himself to his feet, and begins to wave his arms and jog on the spot. ‘Everything starts with zero! Every day! Getting no points is like getting up in the morning, like coming out of an egg!’ Single exclamation marks do not do justice to the animation of his physical performance and its associated utterances. The small number of our fellow patrons previously unaware of Jahn Teigen’s presence amongst them is swiftly reduced to zero. He’s suddenly everywhere, like the boy who was at both ends of the school photo. ‘Some of us, we come out of the egg and we make noise. We make friction, we dare to do difficult things, we use energy, and maybe we make ourselves idiots. Like Eddie Eagle, your ski jumper, he dared! He was brave! And the people who aren’t so brave, who don’t want to take a chance or be an idiot, they like us. They love us!’ I’m beginning to understand. Jahn is not a musician, but a performer, one who thrives on forcing people into a reaction – any reaction. Applause, tears, screams, abuse, jeering scorn: it’s all grist to the strangely geared Teigen mill.

  Not for the first time I’m reminded of my wife’s uncle, who as a fifty-something Scandinavian rock survivor (he now owns and runs a Reykjavik recording studio) shares many of the bullet points on Jahn’s CV. He’s also a holder-forth, a showman, and as entertaining as he always is, on certain occasions – public occasions – it’s sometimes a little too conspicuous.

  Suddenly Jahn sits down, shuts up and fixes me with a look of troubled earnestness. ‘You understand,’ he says at length. ‘This zero-points is … An Experience. It’s something I created or gave birth to, but it’s not simple to explain. Look at this cup!’ Not hard: it’s now being held aloft two inches from my nose. ‘How do you make a cup? There’s so much to it.’

  We’re on our way back o
ut for what proves to be the final fag break when a pale, black-haired young woman with a fair bit of metal in her face shuffles listlessly up and mumbles something sullen at Jahn’s shoes. ‘My daughter,’ says Jahn simply, once she’s shuffled off again a moment later. ‘All the attention has not been easy. People expect her to be a performer, like me, but that’s not her. She works in the theatre as a hairdresser.’

  ‘Like her grandfather in Tønsberg,’ I offer, bracingly, as we watch her trudge away up the street alone, hooded top angled at the floor, arms wrapped defensively around her middle.

  ‘You know I am in the Melodi Grand Prix again this year?’ blurts Jahn, yanking our attention from this uncomfortable spectacle and its associated ruminations. It’s a clumsy but highly effective diversion – I had no idea. ‘You know Tor Endresen?’ Not yet, I reply, though with reference to this man’s experiences at Dublin in 1997 I soon will. ‘He’s a good friend, and he’s entering again, so I thought I must also. I don’t want him to catch me: he has nine Melodi entries, I think, and I have fourteen.’

  And so a moment later, having been asked for my linguistic input, I’m squinting raptly at Jahn’s scrawled English lyrics for My Heart Is My Home. A few weeks back this would have been at best an awkward scenario, but as it is I’m thrilled to a tizzy: what I say now will, however fleetingly, affect the lives of 400 million people.

  ‘You seem to say “hate” quite a lot,’ I offer at ruminative length. ‘Maybe that’s not really a great Eurovision word?’ I’m about to suggest something more apposite, perhaps ‘bomp’ or ‘laloo’, or a cheeky ‘krrrroppp’ for old times’ sake, when I clock the intensity of Jahn’s nodding.

  ‘Yes … but the hate fits with the song.’ Loudly, and without skimping on the gesticulations, he now performs the song. Weighty and anthemic, it most closely approximates to We Will Rock You.

  ‘Well, that sounds a lot better than almost everything I’ve heard in the last few weeks,’ I say when he sits down, and I say it with feeling and a clean conscience.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jahn rasps, clearly exhausted by his performance. ‘You know, I have a concert tonight.’ He suddenly looks even older, and only with difficulty do I stop myself grabbing one of those thin arms to steady Jahn as he rises. ‘Maybe I have to go to sleep a little now.’

  After an exchange of thanks and farewells, I turn to walk away across a square burnished by the low-angle Nordic sunset. All around me, Oslo is doing its low-key, Saturday-night warm-up: pallid, stringy skateboarders clattering off a banister, apple-cheeked families with ice-skates hung over their shoulders massing towards a new open-air rink Frida had mentioned. I look behind for a last glance at this nation’s first pop star, and doing so suddenly remember the one thing I meant to say to him, or the one thing that wasn’t a question. Jahn and Frida are now thirty yards away across the wide and windy plaza, but having spent half a day in such reckless, theatrical company I’m hardly scared to shout.

  ‘I had to take my trousers off at the airport!’ Jahn turns, and his furrowed brow furrows further. Frida leans towards his ear and says something into it. ‘Yeah,’ I call, my internal volume knob swivelling rapidly anti-clockwise. ‘Yeah, Frida will tell you … pants down, drug-jumps, the works.’ Jahn hoists an uncertain, placatory wave and I shuffle away, cringingly aware of how little I rock.

  ‘So – you know Freddie Mercury?’ says a voice from just behind me.

  Here we go, I think, turning slowly around to face the fallout of my ill-chosen public pronouncement. With a chest-length ginger beard of galloping pubic frizz, my youthful interrogator clearly stands apart from his contemporaries, although just how far apart only becomes apparent during his reply to my monosyllabic expression of assent. ‘So do you know his, ah, dead place?’ It’s a bad time to notice the many rather large pieces of food that have made their home deep in the young man’s rampant chin furniture. Christ – is that half a lollystick? ‘So do you know, one hundred per cent, he is dead?’

  ‘Well …’ I say, setting off a furious volley of impassioned, beardy nods.

  ‘So do you know John Deacon? The house of Deacon, where Deacon is at home?’

  It’s at this point that I wonder if I’m falling victim to an elaborate sting organised by Norwegian eccentrics – both of them. Had I not many years ago spent a painful two days failing to master one of Mr Deacon’s few prominent instrumental performances, it is probable that the name of Queen’s bassist would mean no more to me than the name of Queen’s florist. As it is, I did not allow a persistent indifference to their musical legacy to prevent the fostering of a mild but stubborn fixation with the band’s most anonymous member.

  The Queen-ish aspects of Jahn’s new Melodi entry had set off a train of thought that, having rattled at merciful speed past youthful memories of the cover of Crazy Little Thing Called Love that was part of the Rough Justice repertoire, had mere moments ago pulled up to the buffers at Deacon Central. His, I long ago decided, was the most enviable of lives – being John Deacon meant enjoying huge wealth, seasoned with just the right amount of ego-fondling adulation. You’d get stopped in the street often enough to keep you smiling, and only then by apologetically nerdish anoraks rather than unhinged stalkers who’d hide under your shed, and then get immovably wedged and scratch a note blaming their slow deaths on you. And as one whose short on-stage career was largely occupied in finding the biggest speaker cabinet and hiding behind it, John Deacon had always been my live-performance idol: a non-singer blessed with the face of a lab technician, he was never expected to compete with the preening showmen around him.

  Walking across the plaza it had begun to occur to me that being Jahn was a little like being John: yes, the money wasn’t so good, and as I’d seen for myself the attention could become overbearing. But that top-of-the-range Audi estate told its story, and as far as the street-hassle went, all Jahn had to do was get on a plane. Any plane. Go anywhere else in the world and as long as you steered clear of any suspiciously blond tourists you’d be safe.

  ‘That’s quite extraordinary,’ I say, oblivious now to the man’s previously unsettling lunacy. ‘I’ve been thinking about John Deacon for the la-’

  ‘So do you know Creedence Clearwater?’

  Well, that was too much. By the time he obscurely excused himself with a shriek of ‘Errrta Kitt!’ I was 100 yards nearer my hotel.

  4 April 1981 Royal Dublin Society Finn Kalvik Norway Aldri i Livet

  A DETERMINATION TO visit all my nul-pointers in chronological order, combined with Scandinavia’s impressive early hat trick and the time of year, seemed to promise a forbiddingly dark, cold beginning to my tour. But excellently, in every way but financial, I soon learnt that one of the three Norsemen in question was looking up at a very different winter sky.

  ‘If u really want to hook up with me,’ wrote Finn Kalvik in reply to an email I’d sent to his website, ‘I’m planning to go up to a good place in Thailand, a beautiful tiny island that would “freak u out” because of all its colourful fishes in the sea, and small beautiful beaches.’

  After Jahn and his two million albums, here was an even more compelling post-nul turnaround: once we’d established phone contact, Finn explained in eager, boyish tones that South Seas island-hopping throughout the Norwegian winter was his long-established wont. ‘Painting, scuba-diving, writing songs – that’s my life out here.’ Every time I called to arrange another detail – he was unfailingly helpful in providing travel assistance – he’d break off briefly to order a beer, or apologise for being distracted by some comely female presence.

  ‘I’m really a lucky guy,’ he mused in our last chat, the day before I left. ‘I wrote these huge hits, and in the winter I leave Norway to live in all these exciting places. My view here … it’s like a postcard or a commercial.’ At fifty-seven, how much better could life possibly be?

  It was under a month since Thailand’s western coast had been so murderously battered by the tsunami, but Koh Samui – an offshore touris
t magnet deemed by Finn more logistically sensible than the tiny island originally planned for our rendezvous – was on the east. All Finn had noticed, he said on the phone, were odd patterns in tourist numbers: in the days after the disaster the island had been crowded with holiday-makers diverted from Phuket, but now, with these gone, there was an eerie emptiness. Wholesale, knee-jerk cancellations meant that even unaffected areas were almost devoid of tourists, and despite the heart-punching expense involved, I’d had no trouble in bagging a last-minute flight.

  My fellow passengers at Heathrow were an odd assortment of backpackers and beer-bellies, united by a shared love for indelible body art. Young couples with a dozen earrings each trooping into the 747 alongside balding, grizzled men of Kalvik vintage, lardy rejects off to punch way above their considerable weight with the economically disadvantaged female populace. Was that what had drawn Finn there? Despite the bar stool ogling, it didn’t seem likely. His website photo depicted a svelte, tanned blond exuding good health and happiness, looking how Björn Borg might have done if he’d kept playing tennis, instead of designing underpants. Though two years older than Jahn, he appeared twenty younger.

  There were dozens of young Scandinavians in the rows around, and with a now practised eye and ear I placed them all. The three blonde girls in front could only be Swedish – they wore immaculate matching sportswear, and did everything, even sleeping, in strict synchronisation. The two couples behind, their hackingly guttural enunciation emphasised by a debilitating intake of beer, were surely Danes. I passed the Norwegians on the way to the loo. There were five of them, all reading or watching their seat-back screens in straight-backed silence. With flags on their hats.