IN THE middle OF nowhere IN THE middle OF Norway

2nd July

I’ve offered to play on both nights of the festival for free as long as they can cover the price of the flight. Even better, the Ryanair flight lands at Torp, right in the middle of nowhere but just a few kilometres from the country park where the festival will take place.

I have a few minutes of anxiety once I get through the airport and find none of the band there to meet me. It occurs to me suddenly that it might have been a good idea to exchange phone numbers before I set out – but twenty minutes later guitarist Loco arrives. He and the rest of the band have been setting up things at the site all day and just managed to get a soundcheck in before it opened, that’s why he was a little late.

Before we drive to the festival we have to go to a rehearsal room in nearby Larvik to pick up a bass guitar that one of the members in another band forgot. You have to wonder: if you’re a musician and you’re going to play in a festival, how disorganised do you have to be to actually forget your instrument?

So, on through the twisty country roads, forested hills with shelves of granite rising steeply on one side, a rushing river on the other, clouds lowering overhead and raindrops the size of your thumb beating down. It is, of course, an open-air festival.

The inclement weather and the location does make me wonder if anyone will turn up. Another factor is the enormous Rosskilde festival in Denkmark which is being held this same weekend, and the ferry goes from – guess where – Larvik. Of course, our festival is bound to be a different affair from a huge commercial enterprise like Rosskilde. When we pull into the riverside glade that serves as the camping ground there are perhaps twenty tents there, as well as an enormous old bus with “666” written on the destination board. 666 – the number of the Bus.

I go into the large open-sided wooden cabin next to the campsite, where Dan, the singer and guitarist with Algorythms who invited me to play this festival, hands me a beer from the makeshift bar and introduces me to a few of the people helping out, mostly friends of the band. There are also two official security guys who it has been necessary to hire to comply with Norwegian law. These are the ones responsible for making sure that drinking only takes place in the cabin – no drinks to be taken out to the nearby stage area – and that all the music finishes promptly at 1.00 a.m. even though there are no houses for miles around.

Over in the next glade where the stage is set up I can hear the first band starting, but for now I sit at one of the picnic tables and get to know a few people. They all seem really glad I’ve come. One young girl’s eyes nearly pop out of her head when she finds out I come from the same era as the Sex Pistols, her favourite band.

“Is it true you knew the Sex Pistols?” she asks.

“Well, yes.”

“Oh my God! Did you ever touch the Sex Pistols?”

Dan, who sports a red Mohican style haircut hands me another beer and tells me that he is going to get me drunk and then cut my hair like his. That would be something – a grey hair Mohawk.

I get to put faces to a couple of my email correspondents when they introduce themselves. They point to the campsite and tell me that they have a huge tent out there if I need somewhere to sleep tonight. Which is a good point. Where exactly am I sleeping tonight?

A word with Dan confirms that I can sleep at his place, which is just a twenty minute drive away and will be completely empty. Good, that’s sorted. The only question is – looking at the rapidly increasing drunkenness around me – will anyone actually be sober enough to drive me back later? It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been stranded at a festival in Scandinavia. Maybe I will end up staying with the guys with the huge tent…meanwhile they take many photographs – me with each of them individually, with both of them together, with their girlfriends, on my own – until I run out of faces.

Over the next few hours I wander over to the stage area from time to time to watch a few songs from the bands. The stage has a bucket in the middle of it to catch the last of the rainwater draining from the awning. The sound is very good, and the setting dramatic with the pines all around and a wide river at the foot of the hill.

“Dan’t be fooled by that river,” says Dan. “It has a very strong current – if you went swimming in there you would be in Larvik ten minutes later.”

Hmm, I did bring my trunks, but…maybe not. Anyway, it’s far too cold. I am already wearing every T-shirt in my bag (3).

Soon it will be time for Algorythms, to play, and I’ll be on after them. When they first got in email contact, the band asked me if we could play two of my songs together at the end of their set. We obviously haven’t been able to rehearse them together so now we go to the back of the cabin with guitars and snare drum and have a quick run through. I’m quite surprised to find the arrangements and tempos are rather different from the way I’ve always played them. Drummer Andy explains that he hadn’t actually heard the original records when he learned them, he was just going by the way Dan played them to him. It’s the Chinese Whispers approach to learning a song!

The Algorythms set goes down well. There are probably only about fifty people on the festival site in total, but there’s a lot of good-natured bustling and dancing at the front of the stage. I get up for the last two songs. The first one goes pretty well; the second is a bit of a disaster – so different from the version I usually play that I completely lose track of where I am in it - but nobody in the audience seems particularly to notice and we bluff our way though to the end somehow and all finish at the same time.

Then I go straight into my own set, which goes well. After the first song I start getting requests from the audience, quite a few of them from the people with the big tent. I notice other people singing along too, which I hadn’t expected out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Norway, and it’s very pleasing.

After about forty minutes I hurry off stage to give the last band of the night time to play before the one o’clock curfew, and make my way back to the cabin, where I get a lot of congratulations from people who enjoyed the set. The good mood is only broken by a girl who is having an argument with her boyfriend and screaming non-stop at the top of her voice. I think it is the Sex Pistols girl.

The guys in Algorythms tell me how much they enjoyed playing the songs with me. It seems a pity we only got to play them one time so I bring up the idea that we could do them again at the end of my set tomorrow. They hadn’t been intending to play tomorrow but seem pretty keen on the idea, drummer Andy included – even though he thinks he may have broken a finger during the set today. It’s non-drinking Andy who now tells me that he can give me a lift back to Dan’s place whenever I’m ready. Just then Dan returns and asks me if it would be alright if one of his friends who has been working on security by the river stayed in the house with me. It seems the girl who was having the argument with her boyfriend earlier has just thrown herself in the river and Dan’s friend had to pull her out. The cost of being a hero is that now all his clothes are soaked and he needs a shower and somewhere warm to sleep. Of course that’s OK. In the end, I also persuade Dan that he doesn’t need to stay on the site overnight, so he and his girlfriend Camilla, the hero and me all end up back at his place with beer and pizza in traditional rock’n’roll fashion and I bed down on the mattress in the computer room at around 4.30.

3rd July

The house rouses mid-morning and we have a quick breakfast of bread, cheese and salad. Dan phones to arrange someone to give him and Camilla a lift back to the festival site where Camilla will start cleaning up and Dan will pick up his car and go and buy more supplies of food and beer then come back and pick up me and the hero.

When Dan and Camilla have gone me and the hero have a slightly awkward silence as he speaks very little English and I don’t speak any Norwegian, It’s not a language I’m likely to attempt to learn. It took most of yesterday before I recognised the sound of Dan’s name, which seems to be pronounced “Doo-won.” The hero switches on MTV. It’s awful. It’s become ever more censorious, bleeping out even the mildest swear words, but – knowing they will be bleeped out anyway - the presenters have responded by swearing as much as possible to give the impression that they are radical and cutting edge, with the result that there are more bleeps than words.

I go out on the deck and sit in the sun with a book. Hours go by. Finally Dan is back with another of the security guys from the festival and his girlfriend and a carload of beer and food. Now we have the challenging prospect of squeezing all five of us, the supplies and my guitar into a rather small car. “I am driving with my elbows,” says Dan from the front seat.

Even though it’s Saturday there’s not a huge amount more people at the festival site than yesterday. I see the guys who had boasted about their huge tent across the campsite and wander over to them. They are a bit bleary, just getting up. I look the tent up and down. “It’s not that huge,” I tell them.

Nothing’s really happening yet so I go for a walk along the river bank and over a graceful low bridge to a decked platform over a weir, where the water pounds by beneath me, throwing up a refreshing spray. The sun is hot. Black-throated swallows dart past. On one side of the weir is an old fish trap, a cage-like arrangement of spruce branches that the water is diverted through. Next to it on the bank is a six foot long net on a pole for scooping out the catch. Would also be handy for fishing out heart-broken Sex Pistols fans.

Back at the festival site there’s still nothing happening. The band due to play first haven’t turned up and no-one else can play instead because although the drummers in the bands were told they had to bring their own cymbals hi-hats and pedals, none of them has. I suggest to Dan that in the meantime we could have another run-through the songs we’ll be playing together to iron out the mistakes we made last night, but it seems bass player Ciggy was seen driving off the site a while ago and no-one knows where he is now. His mobile phone is on the bar, charging.

I wander over to the stage area where the sound and light technicians and the security guy who came in the car with us this afternoon are standing around looking bored. Looking at the empty stage with the half-assembled drum kit I muse out loud, “I guess I’m the only person who could actually play right now…” Three faces light up in front of me.

“Let’s go get your guitar!” says the security guy, striding towards the cabin. But when we get there, we find that the drum equipment has just arrived and the first band of the day is preparing to go over to the stage. I stand down.

Due to the problems with starting the music, the timings have all changed and I find Dan is at one of the tables in the cabin feverishly scribbling away at a revised running order for the evening. I’m being pushed back later than originally planned – partly because he doesn’t want me on too early before there’s a good atmosphere and partly because Ciggy still hasn’t arrived back and we can’t play the songs together without him. “I’m getting seriously worried now,” says Dan. “He hadn’t drunk anything today, but if he was stopped by the police he might still be over the limit from yesterday.”

The music starts up. The people with the huge tent come over and take my photos. One of them tells me that they have some hot dogs back at the tent if I want something to eat. I say I’m vegetarian and he suggests I could just have the bread roll. When I don’t look too excited about that he thinks furiously for a moment and adds, “…with as much ketchup and mustard on it as you want!”

I see the Sex Pistols girl back together with her boyfriend. Throwing yourself in the river works.

The sun has dipped below the top of the hill and it’s getting rapidly cold again. I chat with a guy from one of the bands tonight, The Trashcan Darlings, who booked my last gig in Oslo. “So, what do you think of Norway?” he asks.

“Really, all I’ve seen is Oslo,” I reply, then gesture at the forest and the river, “…and this.”

“Well, if you’ve seen Oslo and this,” he says, repeating my gesture, “that’s pretty much all of it.”

I bump into another guy who I last met when I played his hometown, a small place in Austria called St Pölten. It’s a small world. But big enough that Ciggy is somewhere out in it and we don’t know where. Time for my set is fast approaching. Dan waves his mobile at me, “We just phoned Ciggy’s parents…he was seen in Svarstad half an hour ago!”

We arrange that I will start playing and when Ciggy arrives Dan will come to the stage and give me the thumbs-up so I know that I can get the band on with me. The drama!

It all works out. My set goes down even better than yesterday, Ciggy arrives in time and we play the two numbers together, this time without any mistakes. We’re all happy.

The last two bands play, then it’s time to wind down. It’s after one a.m. so the official padlock is on the drinks cabinet, but us musicians seem to have secret access. Unfortunately it’s hard to relax – tonight is even colder than last night and pretty soon I am wearing the three T-shirts, a jacket, and someone has put a sleeping bag around my shoulders. I have turned down the offer of a large woolly jumper because it looks too naff. Dan tells me that there is a precedent: a popular Norwegian magazine regularly interviews celebrities and the journalist always brings along an awful jumper that the celebrity has to wear for a photograph.

In a final effort to beat off the cold Camilla suggests some exercises, touching head, shoulders, knees, toes. “Hode, skulder, kne og tå…” Maybe I could get the hang of this language after all.

I’m not succeeding in getting any warmer though. It’s time to leave. Dan and Camilla have decided to stay on site tonight. The job of sober driver has fallen to Ciggy. He’s going to take me back to Dan’s, then return for members of the last two bands who will also be staying at the house. There’s not room for them in the car on this run and, in any case, they look like they are still partying here and I don’t want to wait around any longer. I feel pretty sorry for Ciggy who will have to come back for them, he looks pretty much dead on his feet already.

Probably the party will continue when the bands get back to Dan’s place, but for me the festival is over. I close the door of the computer room, put in the earplugs and I’m out.

4th July

I open the door to the computer room to find people sprawled all over the house among empty tins of beer, overflowing ashtrays and half-finished plates of food. A bleary eye opens from one of the bodies. “I – er – hope we didn’t disturb you…we got back and decided to have a bit of a party.”

God bless earplugs.

Not sure how I’m going to get to the airport today. Ciggy, who lives in the downstairs flat, was going to drive me, but apparently he’s back at the campsite. The drummer from the Trashcan Darlings tells me that that he can give me a lift though – someone is coming to pick them up and take them back to the festival site, then he can pick up his car and drop me off at the airport on the way back to Oslo. Good, that’s sorted. No doubt Dan would have arranged something but I hate sitting around out of contact not knowing if I’ll get to the airport in time.

At the festival site all the tents have gone, including the huge one. Ciggy is sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the cabin, looking tired. “Did you see my car on the way here?” he asks. Seems it ran out of petrol on the last trip back and he had to abandon it.

I walk around to the stage area. All the equipment has gone, now there’s just a large empty stage – oh, except that Dan and Camilla are asleep in the middle of it. I say my goodbyes and head off with the drummer from the Trashcan Darlings. By the side of the road I spot a pair of shoes. How can anybody leave a festival and forget their shoes?

We stop at a petrol station to buy some food, but I can’t find anything vegetarian. I realise that I’ve only eaten a spring roll since breakfast yesterday and I’m seriously hungry. My first opportunity comes at the airport, where half a bread roll with a thin slice of cheese on it costs around two pounds. One isn’t nearly enough. Musing on this with a three pound cup of coffee, I realise that what with the twenty four pound train ticket to Stansted, the tube fares and all the other expenses, it’s actually cost me quite a bit to come and play this festival. But I’m glad I came. I got to play my songs, I met a lot of good people and helped get a festival off the ground that hopefully will become an annual event. This year not a lot of people turned up but those that did had a great time. Most importantly, in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Norway…something happened.