Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  3 May 1997 The Point, Dublin Tor Endresen Norway San Francisco

  IF THE 1994 final had set the modern contest’s overall tone, by 1997 the last details of today’s Eurovision were being coloured in (notable exception: the native-language rule, abolished in 1999). The 1996 victory of Irishwoman Eimear Quinn’s The Voice, the floaty, folky antithesis of pop, had again besmirched Eurovision’s once-proud reputation as a hit-maker of commercial finger-clickers: Australia-born UK entrant Gina G’s chart-friendly Ooh Aah … Just a Little Bit signally failed to impress the juries that year, yet went on to sell a million copies worldwide.

  If Eurovision was going to once more reflect public musical opinion, something had to be done. Astoundingly, the EBU did it. Out went the arcane restrictions on backing tracks – in two years’ time the orchestra, with its tiered ranks of sombre hornblowers and fiddlers, had gone for good – and in came phone voting. In what was to be a successful trial, the public of five nations – the UK, plus the techno-axis of Sweden and all the German speakers – would take responsibility for points distribution, with the obvious proviso that one’s own country was excluded from the process. (Successful at least in technical terms: the results were skewed both by a potent blend of expat loyalties and drunkenness. Britain, home to half as many Cypriots as Cyprus and half as many Irishmen as Ireland, would give both islands seventeen points to share – along with a what-the-bollocks six for Iceland, a third of that nation’s total, by simple virtue of penultimate performer Páll Oscar bagging votes from those who had blundered home from the pub to catch Katrina, the night’s final entrant.)

  The almost desperate pandering to populism expresses itself within the 1997 final’s opening seconds. Isn’t that Ronan Keating walking out to assume compere responsibilities? Well, yes it is. And in place of the dickie-bowed grandees who have stocked the auditoria of yesteryear, here’s a reasonable approximation of a mosh pit, an unruly sea of noise, heads and banners. And flags, amongst them a lot of blue-and-white crosses on a red background, proud standard of a nation in the Euro-form of its life.

  In four contests after 1992, Norway had come in no lower than sixth, with Nocturne’s victory in 1995 interrupting a record-breaking run of Irish wins. When the Eurovision came to Oslo in 1996, the home nation finished second; by 1997, Norway found itself in the extraordinary position of taking a strong showing for granted.

  They’re third out, after Cyprus and Turkey have showcased Eurovision’s new allegiance to contemporary trends, leading the way with a pair of lively ethno-dance numbers. It’s immediately clear that Norway has no intention of following them. As the camera pans away from the drunk-looking audience and back to the stage, the ORF commentator delivers a précis of the lyrical themes about to be explored: ‘Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, make love not war, und flower power,’ he intones, without enthusiasm. ‘Tor Endresen, Norvegen, San Francisco.’

  Halfway through the long zooming shot that will eventually fill our screens with his big, happy face, it’s plain that Tor, a sprightly man of early middle years, has gone for a look even more retro than his lyrics. The guitar he’s energetically strumming is a rockabilly semi-acoustic as old as Eurovision itself; the early days of rock ’n’ roll have also donated the Elvis-twitch that has annexed Tor’s right leg, and his canary-yellow jacket with its embroidered lapels. The music he then eagerly launches into is consistent in taking its cue from a genre that predates the thirty-year-old events he’s singing about by a good decade. It’s nice-boy, side-parting rock ’n’ roll, jollied along with plenty of snare drum and the Little Richard falsetto ‘Woooooh!’ that Tor gamely throws in after an off-key adventure in the opening couplet.

  He’s clearly a seasoned performer is Tor, grinning into the camera, belabouring his guitar with assured showmanship, letting out dextrous, powerful vocal flourishes and even essaying a small kick, a kind of demi-Teigen, which he just about pulls off with dignity intact. Perhaps he’s doing all he can to distract us from the inanities escaping his mouth: San Francisco quickly proves itself an even lazier parade of period catchphrases than the ORF guy has led me to believe. Slapping the language rule in the face until it begs for mercy, the song incorporates such popular Norwegian expressions as ‘man on the moon’, ‘blowin’ in the wind’ and ‘California dreamin”.

  Only as Tor winds up to his big, air-punching ‘Woah yeah!’ finale do I understand what he’s trying to do. Just three years before, on this very stage, Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington had served up a crusted dollop of nostalgia and won. If Rock ’n’ Roll Kids had bagged a Eurovision points record with the torpid, no-tune namechecking of Elvis, Jerry Lee and blue suede shoes, what might Tor achieve by rocking up the beat and really cramming in those period references? The two Norsemen frenziedly flapping the ‘VICTORY FOR NORWAY’ banner seem to have a pretty good idea. Who can blame them? I know which one I’d rather hear again. As indeed I do, often, between the moment I watch Tor walk off for what will be an uncomfortable backstage vigil, to the moment he opens the door to room 312 at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo.

  ‘Tor Endresen tried lots of times to enter Eurovision,’ emailed Andreas as I began the process that would take me back to the land that had last welcomed me with a compulsory round of cell-based nude bouncing. ‘Still making music, but has pretty often changed record companies.’ While awaiting a response from the most recent of those revealed in the discography I consulted as the 14,312th visitor to his official website, I did a little online probing.

  From the modest English section in his own site I learnt of Tor’s astounding persistence in the Melodi qualifiers: in the decade that separated his 1987 debut from the triumph of San Francisco, he’d entered no fewer than eight times, finishing runner-up on three occasions and third on two. I was made aware of his year of birth (1959), his home town (Bergen) and his recent sell-out Christmas tour, in which Tor had travelled the monstrous length and modest breadth of his homeland while playing forty-one churches in twenty-six days. If that offered a literal suggestion of life after nul-points death, there was more tangible evidence in the form of a quoted result for Norwegian Artist of the Year, 2000. OK, so Tor didn’t win, but he beat A-ha into fourth place.

  Elsewhere the pickings for Tor’s non-Norwegian fans were slim indeed: the sole English-language sighting unrelated to his whereabouts on 3 May 1997 named him as one of the 255 artists, along with Gerry and the Pacemakers (and indeed Helge Schneider and the Firefuckers), to have recorded a cover of A Whiter Shade of Pale. I’d been reduced to fumbling through a list of foreign-language versions of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree when an email from BareBra Musikk (calm down: it translates as ‘Only Good’) pinged into my inbox. In it was Tor’s mobile number.

  In recent years, Norway has devoted a hefty slice of its oil billions to establishing itself as the nation with more miles of subterranean road and rail per capita than any other. In conjunction with his clearly active touring schedule, this was to cast rather a blight over my initial communications with Tor Endresen. ‘Oh, hi – yeah, my record company told me you …’ was the extent of his contribution to our debut conversation; ‘I think we’re …’ and ‘Ja?’ perhaps definitive later examples. Only once did he manage to squeeze in the word ‘tunnel’ before our traditional crackle-beep sign off, but by then I had already begun to suspect advantage was being taken. Yes, Norway has the world’s longest road tunnel, but unless Tor was passing through it by drunk elk that couldn’t explain why five hours later his phone was still dead. In the end I got Birna to call him. And it worked a treat, the filthy old goat.

  ‘Had a real nice talk with your wife,’ he said when I phoned him the next morning, his notably more relaxed voice settling into the mildly Yank-tainted English that is the nul-pointer’s lingua franca. ‘A lovely lady you have there.’ The small pause here allowed us both to reflect on my comparative unloveliness, condensed as this was in his next sentence. ‘She tells me you’re writing about all us poor no-point guys, right?’

/>   My faltering efforts to cast the endeavour in a gentler light were swiftly cut short by a gotcha snigger. ‘Ah, it’s OK. I’ll meet you. Just first I need to get the go-ahead from my agent – he’s in Thailand just now.’ Thailand?

  ‘It’s not Finn Kalvik, is it?’ I blurted.

  Well, you should have heard him laugh. ‘Ha ha ha!’ he went. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’ Then, after another half-dozen or so: ‘No! Finn Kalvik is not my agent!’

  So there I am again, striding guitarlessly through the Oslo airport customs just past dawn, jogging on to the train, catching a distant glimpse of the world’s most majestic scenery as we slam through the awakening suburbs, hopping out at the central station to discover – ooooh Christ – that it’s spring on the calendar, but not in the air.

  Tor is in Oslo to film a TV show, and he’s staying at the plushly venerable Hotel Bristol. I’ve got a couple of hours to kill, and opt to suffocate them slowly over a pair of coffees in a slippery Chesterfield armchair near the back of the Bristol’s dimly panelled bar. The bill is enough to reduce a Lithuanian to tears, and perhaps prostitution.

  While I’m there I call Sissel – not the Koh Samui Sissel, but an old Norwegian friend of mine. As a resident of Bergen and reliable purveyor of lurid gossip, I figure she might have the low-down on Tor (who I will have to remember to call ‘Toor’). ‘Endresen? He’s pretty popular still in Bergen, in all Norway,’ she says, in a slightly flat tone that implies a life of disappointing non-controversy. ‘But you have met Teigen and Finn Kalvik also, yes?’ Her trademark phlegmy cackle erupts into my ear. ‘Ah, Teigen! He was playing here last year at a festival. Looks quite old now, but he’s still a great performer. We love Teigen!’ And Finn? Hearing her delight subside, I instantly wish I hadn’t asked. ‘Well, I hear him a lot on the radio, like he refuses to be forgotten, fighting on the edge. And there are jokes in radio and TV: you understand, he was the joke.’ I understand, I say. ‘He took that very bad, he was really insulted.’ I’m about to wind things up when that cackle abruptly bursts forth anew. ‘Oh, yes! I know a girl who was in bed with Finn Kalvik! He’s had a lot of women!’ This cheers me up more than perhaps it should, and fifteen minutes later I’m knocking on a third-floor door with a smile on my face.

  Two things strike me about the open-shirted, open-faced man who welcomes me in to his surprisingly compact temporary home. One is that he’s still wearing his orange-hued TV make-up, and the other is that despite this – and the inevitable Marlboro Light in his hand – he looks significantly younger than forty-six. With his dark semi-quiff and a family-friendly twinkle in his eye, he’s the Shakin’ Stevens to Jahn’s Iggy Pop.

  ‘Do you mind if we stay here?’ Not at all, I say, as he clears a space on the bed, hanging his dark-grey stage jacket on the back of the room’s only chair and carefully relocating a guitar case to the floor. ‘You know, we have this law against smoking in bars, so …’ With a wry shake of the head Tor stubs out the Marlboro; within a minute he’s got another on the go, along with a minibar brandy.

  ‘We’re here filming a kind of high-school reunion thing, back to 1960 – we did a lot of Everly Brothers, Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie. Yes, it’s a busy time for me.’ Before I can stop Tor he’s off, pulling us as far away from 1997 as he can with a rundown of his recent and forthcoming engagements on-stage and in the studio. The 30,000 tickets sold for that Christmas church tour (in the company of Anita Skorgan, amongst others), the session to over-dub songs for the Norwegian release of Tarzan 2, and the rapidly approaching release of his latest album: ‘My favourite ballads of the eighties, recorded with the Estonian Symphony Orchestra.’ There is no time to take on board the full scale of this project’s post-Eurovision majesty. ‘And then this summer I’m doing Chess, you know, the Björn and Benny musical. I’m the Russian.’ It’s the most relentless I’m-still-standing sales pitch I’ve yet been treated to.

  He sits in the chair, I sit two feet away on the bed and in this oddly intimate setting we go back to Tor’s childhood in sixties Bergen. ‘In the east of Norway the radio and all the local bands played Swedish pop, but in Bergen it was all about Radio Luxembourg. Actually I wrote a song about it.’ What, Bergen? He smiles, wrinkling his tangerine foundation. ‘No, Radio Luxembourg. It was in fact one of my Melodi songs: came second, I think in 1992. So that was a shame, but at the end of that year, when Radio Luxembourg closed down, mine was the last song they played.’

  The last song ever played on Radio Luxembourg? I’m impressed to the point of awe. ‘That’s fantastic!’ I say, though listening back to the recording it’s more of a squeak. All nul-pointers have a claim to infamy, but I’d been concerned that Tor might be the first not to offset this with a claim to fame. Instead, he’s just trumped everyone. It’s dubbing the little fat blue one in Top Cat into Icelandic, and driving about in a Maserati with ABBA’S beardy genius all rolled into one: a Benny sandwich.

  ‘So we had all this rock and roll, and the big ships and all – it felt like Bergen was a twin city with Liverpool. Of course I loved the Beatles. When I was four or five I had a big thing for their version of Chuck Berry’s Rock ’n’ Roll Music – I used to spend a long time in front of the mirror, singing with a brush.’ When his teenage peers were into Led Zep and Bad Company, Tor was learning to love Elvis. ‘People laughed at him then, but I always liked the real showmen. And I liked to copy them. I’m a very good impersonator, yes I am.’ By way of intended demonstration, Tor raises his brandy miniature with a wink, and launches into wheedling, nasal semi-Cockney. ‘Have a swig of that, me old china, that’ll blow the back of your shirt up!’ He raises his eyebrows promptingly; all I can manage is a soft, uncertain chortle. ‘Oh, come on. How about this: What are you doing, Miss Jones?’ Well, it’s a better Leonard Rossiter than I’d have managed.

  Happily, Tor’s gift for mimicry is expressed more effectively, and more lucratively, in his chosen field of professional endeavour. ‘I got an award from Disney, for my Norwegian over-dub of the songs Phil Collins sang in the first Tarzan movie. Elvis, of course – I’ve done him a lot. Tom Jones: he’s my kind of guy. In concert I do The Green Green Grass of Home and Kiss. And then the Beatles.’ Tor clearly knows how to push my buttons – most of which are labelled 1966 – and astounds me afresh with the aftermath of a Beatles medley he performed in Bergen a few years before. ‘Yoko and Sean Lennon were there, and Cynthia. She wrote to me afterwards saying, “That was the greatest post-Beatles Beatles experience ever”.’ But instead of leaving that sublime revelation hanging in the air, Tor brusquely yanks it down. ‘Then one time I worked with Pat Boone, and he asked me to tour with him. I asked him why, and he said, “Son, you do the best Speedy Gonzalez mouse I’ve ever heard.”’

  Arriba, arriba, Tor. Let’s not run away with ourselves. First band? ‘I was seventeen, messing about with guitar in the school gym, when this guy in my class, Are, heard me and asked me to join his band. White Rock, a kind of a dance band. It was fun, but that ended with national service. But you know the nice story, about my new Melodi song?’ Remembering my encounter with Jahn, I tell him a little bird (or rather a fifty-six-year-old blond crow) had mentioned it. ‘Yes, and it’s in a duet with Are. It’s been really good to work with him again.’

  Once again I’m cheered by the tight-knit happy family that is the non-Kalvik Norwegian music community. Did White Rock make any records? ‘No, my first single wasn’t until 1983, with this other dance band called Salex.’ (I look it up later: with Window Cleaner on the B-side, I wish I’d enquired deeper.) You’d have been twenty-four by then, I say. What paid the bills? ‘I was playing a lot in bars around Bergen, doing my Beatles and Elvis stuff. But it was tough – I was already married, and with a kid. And then in 1985 I got one more child – you know, I have five now – so I decided to cut down on music.’

  To do what? Apparently reluctant to declare any income not earnt through showbusiness, he ignores this enquiry. ‘I just cut down, I didn’t stop. I was still playing
every Wednesday in this bar, and one time a producer came in and asked me to do an audition, and then I found I had my first real record deal.’ The producer was a chap called Pal Thowsen, and it was as vocalist for his eponymous band that Tor released his first albums, their content rather grimly described on a Swedish fansite as ‘eighties uptempo classic AOR rock’. A departure too drastic for most, you’d suspect, but as a father in his late twenties Tor couldn’t afford to be precious. ‘If someone asks me to sing, and they’re paying,’ he tells me later, ‘I sing.’ You suspect this practised musical chameleon would rather describe himself as an artisan than an artist.

  ‘We did an album in ‘86 and then one in ‘88 – it was a bit rock, a bit pop-fusion, maybe like Al Jarreau. And there was a hit single, Black Rain, a big radio hit.’ Elsewhere I encounter a claim that this was narrowly pipped by A-ha as the title soundtrack for the James Bond outing The Living Daylights: a lofty ambition for a single conspicuous by its absence from the VG chart archive. Ditto the two albums Tor’s mentioned, which may explain his delight when a chap at NRK – another admirer of those Wednesday gigs – rang Tor out of the blue and booked him for a four-part show of musical nostalgia. ‘It was called Lollipop, and I played this kind of singing waiter, in humoristic form. In those days there was only one TV channel, so this was a big, big break.’

  Bigger than he could have imagined: uncomplicated retro-spection has always played well in Norway – how else to explain their enduring love for Jahn Teigen? – and Tor played it better than most. ‘Yeah, that was my breakthrough as a solo artist. But it worked because we did it properly, with passion. Everything had to be just right – we even got the correct old microphones from the NRK museum.’ Those four programmes eventually swelled into sixty, spawning albums (one sold 120,000 copies) and an ongoing national roadshow. Almost twenty years on, the Norwegian public are still sucking hard on Tor’s Lollipop.