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YOU PUT EVERYTHING INTO IT, NO MATTER WHAT!
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Sometime in the early eighties, three young men performed on prime-time TV. A new band and a new song. For most people, their real dream becomes too big to put a name on, and ends up as grey dust in a lived life. For others, no dream is too big. The three young men were into music and were certain that they would become stars. There was no doubt about it. For my part, I had heard it all before and saw their dream as youthful naivety. About a year later "Take on me" was on top of the charts all over the world, and the video was on high rotation on MTV. a-ha and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy were living their own dream. Fifteen years have passed since that Saturday night TV-show, and now I met one of them. Songwriter and star, a man who let the dream colour his life without loosing control. He has walked the road to the "Royal Albert Hall" that Åge Aleksandersen has described [in one of his songs], and so many Norwegian artists have dreamed of. Now he is happy with his wife Lauren, he has just become a dad, and he is the bandleader of Savoy with a-ha as his hobby-band. The place [of the interview] is "The ROOM" at Vinderen - a furniture store, of all things. The cafè is quite cool to be in a furniture store, quality furniture, quality prices, quality cafè - we are at Vinderen allright. He has decided the place. The main songwriter in a-ha, Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, isn`t a young man anymore. He carries thirty-eight eventful years, and he is taller than I had imagined, dark jacket, slim and grey eyes. Solid handshake, obliging and secure. We order cappuccinos and settle outdoors, in a September evening that seems to think that it`s still summer. The hysteria surrounding a-ha, stardom and idol-worshipping - your soul could be seriously damaged by less. Paul Waaktaar-Savoy has his feet on solid ground. It`s like talking to an old friend. An ordinary rural boy from Manglerud Paul is no antiseptic celebrity, having grown up at Manglerud. He is not a post 68-er, but perhaps an early child of the seventies - teenager around 1975. During that period, there was a significant drug-problem at Manglerud, and large groups of young people got big problems. Many of them are no longer with us on this side of eternity. "We stayed clear of that", says Paul, referring to himself and Magne Furuholmen. "Even if we were addicted to music, we avoided drugs!". "Hexagon" was the name of their band. Paul Waaktaar couldn`t get into music-studies, and he was too shy to study language. "That just wasn`t me in that period - stuttering some speech in other languages, with blushing cheeks". So he ended up in science studies, with lots of math. And perhaps that wasn`t such a bad thing. According to Paul there is a lot of math and logic in music. Tones and chords are supposed to match, and even though he can`t write musical notes himself, his wife Lauren says that he almost never harmonize or arrange something in the wrong way. But school wasn`t exactly the most important thing: "At senior high school I was just referred to as "the Guest" - but the final exam wasn`t bad at all. It was all about music and music. We were going to do the "Beatles-thing" and I guess my parents weren`t too optimistic about my future. My sister was perhaps the first person that took my music seriously, and then my parents gradually accepted the state of things. After the breakthrough they have been to a lot of concerts all over the world. A very ordinary family, but I think they are quite proud!" When the pain is all that`s left It`s impossible not to talk about a-ha. A new CD is coming, and was supposed to be released this fall. Now it will be delayed to next year, but most of it is finished. Paul Waaktaar talks enthusiasticly about the project. About working together after many years, with new ways of approaching it. About working with a-ha as a hobby-band, while other projects in life are more important. "All that`s left now is the pain", he says. "We have a lot of songs in a lot of different mixes that will be compressed into one CD. Then the process is about finding back to the moment of creation , the moment when the song came to life, and where it made the premises of its own existence. It`s about peeling off, and finding back to the genuine. Even if we put everything into it anyway, it`s as simple as only that which gives you goosebumps is good enough. If it doesn`t, then we haven`t fully brought forward the potential of the song!" "I get that kind of "White Album"-feeling", he continues. "We have lived apart, gotten new impulses each on our own, and now all this is melted together on the new CD. A bit schizophrenic and subjective, but the entirity will be good. I think this album will be the best a-ha has ever made!" About flesh and sonority Paul Waaktaar talks about music and sound as something organic, almost as food and wine, with a flood of tone colours and taste nuances. He talks about sonority, about challenging the characteristics of an instrument or a voice. He talks about different microphones, sound boxes, mixing tables and other things as his colour palette, a colour palette that he uses to paint his sound images. He sees himself as the studio`s counterpart to an audiophile, and he collects equipment - lots of equipment. He has bought the Beach Boys` mixing table, and his latest purchase is sound boxes from NRK. Not electronic high-tech stuff - no, it`s old-fashioned mono sonority boxes with metal plates and adjustment screws. The small, cute boxes weigh 400 kilos, but the sound they make is worth every kilo, claims the sound painter Waaktaar-Savoy. "Digital sonority is uninteresting compared to these things", he claims. We talk more about production techniques. About how he deliberately can choose to bring out a certain hollowness in an instrument, by using a microphone which strengthens and highlights the "hollowness" further. He talks about "the flesh" in an instrument or a voice, the frequence area where the main substance lies. He deliberately highlights and uses sounds, instruments and boxes as a kind of clay to shape his own expression. He laughs, and tells about a trumpeter who, after having been exposed to one of Paul Waaktaar`s weird microphones, claimed that he was surprised by how ugly his trumpet could sound. "But I thought that it sounded really cool", says Paul. "I managed to bring out the flesh in the trumpetsound, and when the trumpeter heard the finished result he agreed. He thought that it sounded cool too", he adds. When I mention that I can hear a certain Beatles-sound in the Savoy songs, Paul Waaktaar chuckles. "Most people perceive our sound differently. I listen to incredibly much different music, and I bring some impulses with me, concious or unconcius. That`s why it`s probably both some Beatles and a-ha and other stuff in Savoy. At least there`s a lot of sound!" Stars and hotels Most of us probably haven`t realized how big a-ha were. When the band rocketed into stardom with "Take on Me", they also entered the world of the megastars. There`s countless examples of what that can do to people, because that kind of life is probably not just balsam for your soul and your ego. Three young men, worshipped and idolized. Hotels, TV, airports, girls - stress, that must do something to impressionable souls? "Even if we`ve experienced all of that Beatles-thing, with screaming girls and crowds of people waiting at airports and hotels, I really don`t think much about that", says Paul. "Now I actually think that I should have lived it out a bit more. Now I remember that period as if I was a contestant in some kind of game, where everything was happening incredibly fast, without a chance for us to really digest things. I also think that we had a realistic approach to what we were doing. As opposed to other bands that I know about, we weren`t hysterically conserned with the latest charts. We were doing our own thing, and we experienced the idol-and star worshipping differently from our perspective. We were working and realizing our dream. Besides, I personally had an anchor in having Lauren. We were together before a-ha took off, and that was perhaps a stabilizing factor. In a way, screaming girls didn`t have an impression on me", says Paul. Savoy The current project is Savoy. They have been getting outstanding reviews, received a gold record, and are about to conquer the Scandinavian and international markets. I confront Paul by saying that I didn`t really like the new Savoy-album the first time I heard it, but that it gradually grew on me. Paul grins: "It`s quite typical that the songs need some time to get to you. Savoy is a different kind of project than a-ha. In a-ha we were going to do the "Beatles-thing", become stars and the greatest. We stayed in the same house together, lived together, travelled together - in order to reach our goal. And we succeded. A concert with a-ha was like standing inside a machine. The lights, the sound, the musicians, everything was perfectionized and produced. Even though we gradually allowed ourselves to improvise, it was still music performed on the premises of the concept! It`s totally different with Savoy. Now we`re playing in small clubs, sometimes using the equipment of others. Everything becomes smaller and more naked. There is nothing you can hide behind. Lauren is an important part of the concept. She has never been in a band before Savoy, but now she is an important factor in the band. When she comes up with some unexpected guitar sounds, I have to relate to impulses that to a certain degree are unpredictable. She is doing her thing, which challenges and contributes to new things!" About pipe microphones and important stuff I try to go a bit deeper and closer, but when we`re approaching religion, Paul Waaktaar ducks out of the way. "You might say that I believe in pipe microphones", he says. But there`s something else underneath. Maybe a belief in love. What do I know, because when we start talking about his wife Lauren, you can sense a deep flame, which has lasted for fifteen years and probably will never stop. He talks warmly and close about her. "I thought I had to give up music if I met someone", says Paul, "but that was before Lauren". She studied film and art in London, and they met each other in 1984, before a-ha became really big. Paul Waaktaar talks about an interdependence, about a soulmate who has never questioned music as a way of living, but rather been complementing and encouraging. "Some of the letters Lauren wrote to me are almost like poem-analysis!", says Paul. Now she is a part of Savoy, and they have had a child together this year. Paul Waaktaar-Savoy talks about this strange thing with this third person in their house - a new responsibility and a new obligation. "After a long period with us two and our projects, this new one who makes his own aganda and has his own demands. It gives you a new perspective to not just be the two of us, with our own things". One hour It`s September, and this is not the end. It was about an hour - a fragment from a history a September evening. For me, the story of Paul Waaktaar started a Saturday evening in the early eighties, and it will continue far into the next millennium. For Paul Waaktaar, the history has become the fulfillment of a dream. But inside a dream live new dreams, and inside a story live new stories. Paul Waaktaar has his feet on the ground. It was like talking to an old friend. |
