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The first days on tour are tough on the frail Jan Zahl. Life in a bus isn’t made for everybody...

How am I supposed to stand this life for more than a month, if I can’t sleep in the bus? The basic principle of the tour is to sleep while driving from one gig to another. That saves costs for hotels and lets you sleep during the boring transport legs. These can vary from three, four hours between cities in Denmark and Germany and up to 18 hours from Paris to Barcelona. If I don’t get used to the hum and sway of the bus, I’ll go psychotic before reaching Svinesund.
This is gonna be one long night. I turn another time and try to squeeze the disfigured pillow into a new form. I hit the roof directly above me with my nose. I kick with my feet and try to find a position that doesn’t make my body itch or hurt. A little moment I suffer from panic and claustrophobia. I’m lying in a dark tomb and the bus is the hearse that’s bringing me to my own funeral. Oh, god is letting me suffer eternally. But then I see a faint light through the curtains and the fear passes. I try to turn again. It doesn’t help.

Page 26 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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3

Music was already Jan Ove's und Geir's hobby when they still went to school...

Jan Ove got his first guitar 1990 at the event of his confirmation by his grandmother. He had been inspired by all the Guitars at Geir’s place and had consequently nagged his parents about getting his own for one year.
For the first half year he worked hard. But after the first steep learning curve smoothed out, he got fed up and put the guitar away for a while. Jan Ove would never become a great instrumentalist.
Janove: "I was a songwriter right from the start. I learned to play just good enough to play my own songs and managed a few cover songs quite nicely."
Four years later, after endless rounds of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer", Guns'n'Roses' "Patience" and Nirvana's "Even in his youth", Jan Ove and Geir took the step out of the cellar to a studio in Klepp, four, five kilometers north down state road 44. The studio was located in a cellar of a haughty little guy with hockey hair, who wasn't actually called Daffy but was known to everybody by this name.
Daffy was an old heavy-rocker from the eighties, who had played the bass in the dangerous band Hell Patrol from Verdalen/Sandnes. He still tried to be especially heavy and rocky when he met young staring music rookies.
Daffy drank red fire gasoline only to show that it was possible. Then he tilted out and climbed on the mixer. After that he puked into the sink. A workday in the studio was over when Daffy fell asleep.
Actually Jan Ove and Geir's musical carrier started like a joke. They took off in the same class in elementary school and developed a companionship that was mainly based on a common sense of humor.
Janove: „We were funny in and out of class. That's why we were never allowed to sit next to each other. We'd raised hell then“.
Geir: „We were exchanging ideas all the time. Our compositions were actually directed to each other. We were an exclusive circle of two persons. As there was nobody else to show off to we were aiming at showing off to each other all the time.”

page 28 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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Maestro-Tour 2005: A night in Ålborg holds a few complications…

Geir and Geoff went to the first hotel they could spot to get a room. The receptionist flickered his eyes suspiciously while claiming that the hotel unfortunately was booked out. The receptionist in the second hotel seemed to be more honest. According to the rules it was too late - or too early - to get a room. The two scoundrels tried to persuade the receptionist to be give a shit about the rules and show a good heart. However, they were told that they were no desirable guests.
"May I at least use your toilet?", asked Geir, who felt a pressing need, still somewhat politely.
"No, the toilet is for guests only", answered the receptionist and the catch 22 situation was a fact.
Geoff tried to persuade the man behind the counter of the humane aspect of the whole thing. There stood none the less two fellow men, who were tired and had a need for a piss after a long night in Ålborg. But not even the well-dressed, eloquent Canadian could evoke any sympathy in the receptionist.
If there is one thing that is typical of Geir, then it is his strong - sometimes too strong - sense of justice, that goes to bizarre measures at times. This sense of justice is founded in strict logical thinking and obvious correlations of cause and effect. Looking back, Geir thinks he had given the receptionist a clear choice: The man behind the counter could either be Geir' friend or his enemy. The receptionist chose the latter and had to face the consequences.
"If I am neither allowed to be a guest here nor allowed to use your toilet, I have no other choice but to piss on your window", Geir proclaimed.

page 50 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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5

"Maestro tour 2005: Hamburg is the next station on the tour. There is a good atmosphere in the district of St. Pauli but there are also doubts about the future of the band in Europe...

Actually, the band and the crew wanted to drive to Hamburg a day earlier. Everybody felt more like a free day in Hamburg than a parking lot in Odense. However, Bjarke and Fritz said there were no parking lots to provide the bus with electricity and toilets in Hamburg. Of course, after having arrived at the Knust and parked there, this turned out to be utter nonsense. We could have come a day earlier. Well, well. That way we got a good close look at Odense. A tip for all those who want to visit Odense on a typical Monday evening: There is absolutely nothing happening.
The Knust is located in the district of St. Pauli, covered in graffiti, kebab- and second-hand stores and cool cafés. It is obviously the hippest district in Hamburg. St. Pauli is a bit radical, freaky and anti-commercial, even though the cool clothing shops are extremely expensive featuring hyper capitalistic brands like Replay and Energie. After all, it is important to be well dressed when the day of revolution arrives.
„Great place“, says the Whiskey Rabbi after a short tour around the place. „It’s a bit of chaos here. Dirty.“
„You like places that are dirty? “
„Yeah. It gives them kind of a human touch“, says Geoff.
On our walk through the district on this clear, lurid late summer morning Terje, Øyvind, Rune and I agree that the atmosphere here is good.
The first time Kaizers played in Hamburg 80 people came to see them. The second time, at Knust, a few hundreds came. This time 350 tickets have been sold in advance. So every time there has been a doubling, but that’s going too slow for the impatient band. „We won’t play in Hamburg again if there won’t be more than 500 people showing up,“ says Geir decidedly.
"The problem about making a name for ourselves through playing club gigs in Europe is that the ends don't meet before our career is over. We would have to play in front of 1500 people for this to be profitable. But at this pace it will take us another three years. We don’t have this much time,“ says Janove.

page 68 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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6

Maestro Tour 2005, Frankfurt: This part explains why Helge will save the band in the end...

Outside the Frankfurt venue Batschkapp, Helge sits on a discarded sofa and reads the bible. Somebody has placed the old light blue thing in the backyard next to four trash containers. Helge is surrounded by a sweet and awful smell of rotten food and compost. Directly behind him, a train rattles past.
He doesn’t seem to mind, however. Helge is lost in Matthew’s gospel. To be exact he reads the part, where it is being discussed that nobody knows the exact day or hour (of their lives’ ends). Life in this pit of misery can be at an end before one notices it. That’s why one should turn around and be ready.
Helge smiles as I talk to him. He is sure. He knows that he will go to heaven.
“What do you think about the fact that there is a bus full of people damned to eternal pain if everything you believe is true?”
Helge hesitates a moment.
“Well. You just have to start believing. I do my best to make them turn around. I pray for them”, he answers at last. He says it even makes sense, when only one of the sinful souls in the Kaizers Orchestra apparatus turns around and can be converted.

page 84 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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7

Retrospect on the year 2000: the band is not really successful, but the song “Bastard” is well received by the audience. So the band decides to carry on with “Bastard”’s musical direction, while also looking for a new band name...

Kaizers Orchestra was born on the day that, according to the Western calendar, the third millennium began. But although the official birthday of the band is the 1st of January 2000, the child had already gotten its name a couple of days earlier – on an evening between Christmas and New Year’s Day – in the pub Thime Station in Bryne.
Janove: “At that time Norwegian music was incredibly unpopular and we didn’t want to have a name that sounded like a typical Norwegian band. We liked the word “Kaizer” from “Bastard” and were thinking about calling ourselves just that. But then it looked good with “Orchestra” behind it. It went well with all the strange instruments we played.”
Although the name was new, the band stayed the same and the music was still a bastard. The first Kaizers Orchestra gig was together with bigger parts of the rock milieu in Bergen, at the Ride This Train Festival for the Cato Skogstrand foundation, at the Garage on Friday the 21st of January.
Five weeks later the band had their own concert at the Garage, still without having made up their minds. The week after that, Einar “the Angel” Engelstad wrote the first newspaper article on Kaizers Orchestra in Bergens Tidende:
„Kaizers Orchestra, formerly known as gnom, came from Haugesund and played singer-songwriter-pop. Together with the name the band has also changed its musical style – which means that they are still working on it. For Friday’s concert at the Garage revealed a band that hasn’t made up its mind yet. At times the band sounds like a mixture between Tom Waits, Kurt Weill and Tom Tveits complete with oil barrels and all kinds of strange rattling instruments. But other songs go back to the singer-songwriter-pop. The Norwegian lyrics maintain a constant high quality, but Kaizers Orchestra should settle for one form of expression. They manage both well, but the question is if the rattling version wasn’t the better one.”
The band didn’t fight its way towards one musical form of expression without swordplay and strains. Kaizers rehearsed every Monday evening at the teachers school in Landås. The way Geir remembers it, it was always raining, so that he always got there with his guitar case soaked and heavy. After the success with “Bastard”, Kaizers were on the hunt for new metal plingplong things like addicts.
Geir: “We knew that we needed new oil barrels for each concert. We are not talking about many concerts here, but still we couldn’t just write “oil barrels” on the rider. We had to find and provide them ourselves.”
Thus Kaizers were constantly on the lookout for oil barrels and wheel rims at nights. Often they found the barrels at the Gaia traffic enterprises, took them along and varnished them in the laundry room at home in Konsul Børs’ street. And after gnom und Kaizers Orchestra had rehearsed for a while at the teachers school, the metal bins that served the institute as waste bins were replaced by plastic bins.
Rune: “It became a subject at school what happened to the metal bins. That mystery was never solved.”

page 70 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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Flashback: Kaizers Orchestra need it comfortable on stage. That means you have to spend a few bucks. But not too many, please… Besides: How a film becomes a source for an album.

Additionally to the barrels, rims, the old table lamp, the crowbars, and the axe handles, Helge had an old military helmet and a picture of Martin Luther on the sheet holder. From time to time the quiet man with the dark puppy eyes put on an old gas mask over his face. Kaizers had gotten the lamp, two gas masks from the years of the civil defense from 1939 and the portrait of Martin Luther in a used furniture store one time they played in some student place in Stavanger.
None of them had any money so the principle was to get the cheapest bargain possible, it would be good enough. Each of the gasmasks cost 40 Norwegian Krones. And sometimes one's luck is better than one's wit.
Janove: “In this store they had two pictures for sale. One looked better, but it cost 300 Krones. That was way too much for us. So we had to go for Luther, he was half the price, cost us only 150 Krones. With hindsight it was for the best, as the expensive picture portrayed Heinrich Himmler.”
Janove says himself that they simply wanted a few properties and stuff on stage, there was no general idea of a basic design or general expression to it. Still the properties look as though they had been taken from a film set of director Emir Kusturica’s "Underground". The first time Janove had seen Underground was by accident and he was drunk on a Friday evening in Paris, when he lived there as an Au Pair. He fell asleep after the first hour. A few years later at home in Bergen he watched the Film full length on video.

Janove: „The atmosphere in this film is crazy and it makes you wonder what it actually is you are looking at. Elephants run around freely in Yugoslavia, the people celebrate and dance like mad, although it's war. The film is bursting with lies, drinking and wickedness.“
Kaizers' debut is like a soundtrack to "Underground", while "Resistansen" seems to be taken directly out of the film's screenplay. The song describes the stairs down to Marcello's cellar, where ordinary people and Russian ballerinas dance on the table, shoot themselves in the head and get confirmed. Jan Ove wrote the whole text within a quarter of an hour one day he was sitting in the reading room of the U. Pihl school in Bergen when he should have been learning for the exams.

Page 107 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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Maestro-Tour: Kaizers have never before played in Paris, so meeting journalists there gets on their nerves.

Now here is another of those interviews Kaizers give every time they start up in a new country. Janove and Geir do the talking and the others merely stand around, Terje smokes distantly, Rune and Oyvind, the two nice guys look like dangerous thugs.
Nearly none of the questions gets serious answers. The few honest answers sound like lies. Practiced one-liners mix with cryptic statements that underline a Mafia-like mysticism.
“What is it like for him to play with the mask?”, asks a journalist and points to Helge who wears a suit and the gas mask, stiff as a singed tin soldier.
“We don’t know. We haven’t asked him yet”, says Geir.
“You haven’t asked him?”
“No, and he hasn’t told us, why he wears the gasmask“, says Geir.
“Why are you called Kaizers Orchestra?”, the journalist wants to know.
“Because we are the Orchestra of Kaizer. Mister Kaizer has an orchestra and that’s us”, says Janove.
“Who is Mister Kaizer?”
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Maybe we know, but even then we still can’t tell you, who he is. Maybe he can tell you” says Janove and points to me. I am standing behind the camera team and cannot be seen in the picture.
I decide to play along “I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you”, I say.
“Are you Mister Kaizer?” the French Journalist asks later.
“Maybe I am, maybe I am not”, I answer.

Page 133-134 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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Sometimes you have to do very special things for fans…

Although the job in Paris was pretty much unsuccessful in many regards, the evening was full of magic as well. After the show Janove meets a girl, who bursts into tears before his eyes.
She is upset, because Kaizers haven’t played “Bris”.
“She tried to get to the concert in Brussels, but she got no hike out of Paris. That’s why she came here,” says Janove after he has returned to backstage. He is pretty mixed up after the flood of tears. “She said that Kaizers’ mix of melancholy and industrial rock merged most perfectly in ‘Bris’, the song we didn’t play,” recalls Janove.
“You could have just played the song for her,” somebody says from backstage.
“Well I could have,” says Janove.
“Is she gone already?” somebody else asks.
All of a sudden half of the guys backstage dash into the concert hall to find the girl. She is gone. Terje, Nils and Tor run up the stairs, outside. There they find the girl and her three friends, convince her to turn around and come back with them to the “Boule Noir”. Janove has gotten out his acoustic guitar, that had been about to leave the closed venue. So there is a private concert. Janove sits on the long bench that runs along the whole wall of the long narrow club, sings that his name was Kristoffer, who was a war victim, whilst the three long-haired friends of the girl form a group. The girl, Terje and Rune build another trio. She squeezes their hands so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Tears run down all over her in a bizarre mixture of happiness and sadness. She lays her head alternately on the band members’ shoulders.
“This has been one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced,” Terje says later. “She squeezed my hand that it nearly hurt. And then she sat there and sobbed and cried, repeating over and over: »This is my life, this is my life. «“…

Page 135 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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11

After the great success of "Ompa Til Du Dør" the band is not content with the reputation as a party band. This is one reason, that "Evig Pint" turns out to be darker in theme and music than its predecessor...

Janove: “’Min Kvite Russer’ and ’Di Grind’ were the first songs I wrote for the album. They set the atmosphere. I was looking for a mixture of drinking songs and tales of the absurd, whereas I didn’t want it to be a concept album again like the first one.”
Again, Janove has been inspired by the movies. Not as directly as it had been in the case of "Underground". But the fact was that Kaizers had gotten a kick out of White Russians on the Ompa Til Du Dør Tour. They had become aquainted with the drink through the Dude in the film “The Big Lebowski”. However, to understand the atmosphere of Evig Pint, it is more important to know the film “Dead Man Walking”. Therein the convict communicates with a nun who fights his cause on the outside. Just like the powerful mafia boss and the conductor of the devil’s orchestra have their contacts outside, namely Sonny. The mafia boss has been the victim of a conspiracy that has put him behind bars with a death sentence. Revenge is sweet when served cold, so the boss organizes a bloody rebellion from his cell. Sonny receives a ring and a list of those involved.
Though they seem rough on the outside, both Sonny and his boss have days of doubt and unease. Sonny dreams away in alcohol, and the convict looks back on his life. He fears what is going to happen when everything is over. Two of Geir’s lyrics have been inspired by Camus’ “The Stranger”. Like Meursault, the main character struggles to deal with his existence, as the convict of Evig Pint does with his own. If there is a life after death, the boss’ chances are high to be awaited by eternal suffering in hell. No matter how much he may ask god for forgiveness, looks for a way out or is given brandy in the night before his death.

Page 164 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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Maestro-Tour 2005: Kaizers are at the venue Backstage in Munich. Read of how important food is and why Geir’s brain is different from others…

„That’s the highlight of the day“, says Geir. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon, it’s become cold, grey and autumnal outside. We have just had breakfast in the backstage of the Backstage. Each day of the tour begins formally with the so-called „get in“ at about 2 p.m. Then the venue opens for the band that’s supposed to play that evening. The venue offers hands and workers, who help carrying in and setting up the equipment. Backstage there is bread, cold cuts, fruit baskets and snacks, which are attacked by the starved band and the crew after a long night and a morning without food.
Geir has just had bread with cold cuts.
„There is nothing better for me than that: the breakfast’s ready, the first cup of coffee of the day and a bit of sweets“, says Geir and chews loudly on a mini mars.
„So standing in front of 700 wild fans and playing is nothing compared to a cup of coffee aftre breakfast?“
„Eh. No, actually I feel fine now. The only thing that drags me down is that this cup is made of plastic“, says my strange brother.
His brain doesn’t work like other other people’s brains. This was proven by Rune’s brain test. Rune has tried the test on all members of the band: You scroll down a page on the computer and add all the numbers that show up bit by bit. Then you are asked to think of a tool and a colour. Four of six in the band have thought of a „red hammer“, Helge thinks of a „red spanner“, while Geir thinks of a „yellow saw“.
„If you think of something else than „red“ and „hammer“, you belong to the two percent of the people whose brains work differently“, says the text below the test.

Page 190 in the book "Kontroll På Kontinentet"

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