Sturle Brustad

When Perry hijacks the sound system at the local football cup and Sex Pistols roar out over a bewildered crowd, causing the furious mayor to make a police report, it’s like nothing HP has ever heard. It’s late seventies in a small town in rural Norway, and if you’re not into sports or with the popular crowd, there’s really not much going on for a teenager. Together with a couple of other misfits – farm boy Bönna and the strange, silent Deniro, they form a punk band – to show their town that they don’t want to belong. To show that the outside is the new inside. This brick of a novel is plainly and simply about the rise, flight and fall of that band - Anarchy in Åmot.

Fifteen years later, I spent a couple of years in my late teens hammering on a base, in a tiny rehearsal space at the youth centre (in another small town starting with an Å) and on strange little clubs and venues in the woods and towns in the west of Sweden. Much like Anarchy in Åmot, we were a mix of middle-class misfits and kids form rougher backgrounds. We were never even close to making a record or playing in the capital, like HP’s band does, but this was in so many ways a trip down memory lane for me.

And really, most of the things in this novel follow well-trod patterns from many films and books about bands. Finding the members. The crappy first rehearsals. The horrid first gig. Our hero gets a girlfriend (“Horny Gunhild”, who thankfully delvelops some complexity as the book progresses). Our hero has a brainy but nerdy female friend who is secretly in love with him. Band starts writing their own songs and gains local success. Someone quits. Band plays in the big city and gets humiliated. And so on. And it’s no secret that things will end in disbandment; it’s clearly mentioned early on. But there are some interesting variations on this theme. Firstly, it deals a lot with actually playing music. Arrangements are detailed, the process of painstakingly writing songs too. My band were never involved in deep discussions about how the songs should sound (we played as we knew how) – but it’s interesting. I dig out my old punk records just to follow. And secondly, there’s a lot of darker streaks here. Some kids are getting blamed for everything that ever goes wrong in a little community. A brother is trying to protect his little sister from an abusive dad. And when the end comes for the band, it’s does so much more tragically than one could expect.

So, file under “lad lit” I suppose, but I enjoyed every bit of the 577 pages this ride lasted, and wiped a tear as I finished it half past two this morning, after reading through it in just three days. A great start to 2012.… (mehr)