Polkaninene - Bente (+ bonus)

I want to use this space to celebrate the birth of Ella, the first baby girl of Tor from 4K. She is said to be named after Captain Beefheart's song Ella Guru (and coincidentally the song legendary radio voice and Beefheart-fan Harald Are Lund, in a programme commemorating the sad death of Don van Vliet recently proclaimed to be his favorite Beefheart tune). I congratulate Tor, Ella, and Bente, the woman not only giving birth to Ella, but also being the inspiration behind the lyrics of today's song.

For followers of this blog, the success of 4K should be well known. The whole 4K-phenomenon happened in 1989, and when the 20 year anniversary of this event was approaching, Tor and I talked about marking the occasion somehow. A completely improvised liveshow at the same venue as the original recordings took place was mentioned. However, we decided on trying to recreate the exciting and explosive atmosphere from those recordings in a new recording session.

For a number of reasons, we knew it would be difficult to get the exact same batch of people together, but me, Tor and Geir were eager and ready, and we invited Pål from P-Productions recording act Polkadottene along to play bass. Thereby the name of the new project (which, also in line with the spirit of 4K, was ready long before we played as much as a note): Polkadottene + KaminKaninKanelKamelene. The initial plan was to do it at the same place as the 4K sessions, but it proved difficult to get all the involved people to Levanger at the same time. So, in the end we decided on doing it in Oslo. Unfortunately, it turned out that Geir was unable to participate, but rest of us met in an overcrowded rehearsal space on September 11 2009 (no jokes, please), and had that evening and the afternoon+evening of the following Saturday available before I had to head back.

The set up was identical to 4K: Tor had some lyrics and had thought about some accompanying melodies. Now we just needed to come up with arrangements on the spot, rehearse the songs a couple of times, record, and move on to the next song. The first night proved to be a bit of a let down, though; the good ideas were few and far between. Everything seemed too sparse and naked; we really suffered from the lack of drums. After a few hours, we left the place slightly disillusioned. For the session the day after, we decided on inviting drummer Håvard (from Softcocks) along. This proved to be very fruitful, and the Saturday was much better in terms of coming up with listenable ideas.

In the end, in more or less 20 hours all in all, we recorded material for about 30 songs. However, probably because we've grown a tad more critical over the last 20 years, none of us seemed to be very eager to release what we had done. That is not to say that there weren't any songs that were usable, just that we saw that the songs needed some more work. Which we've never gotten around to be doing; perhaps the amount of material is too overwhelming?

For my own sake, I must say that I am quite unhappy with my performances. When this occurred, I hadn't played the guitar for a long time, and playing for 8 hours straight on Friday, meant that my fingers were hurting real bad on Saturday. This severly limited my playing that day, something that unfortuntaly can be clearly heard on today's song, Bente. The bad playing on 4K could for most part be traced to the amount of alcohol having been consumed, but this time around I have to plead sore fingertips...

This song is, I guess, Tor's love poem to his girlfriend, now the mother of Ella. The lyrics more or less recreates the story of how they met. As far as I remember, Tor did not have a melody for this song, but improvised one over an equally improvised guitarline of mine that Pål tried to play some appropriate basslines to (which I think he managed splendidly). I don't think we even rehearsed it properly because at this point my fingers really hurt. Alas, this take is the first real run-through of the entire song, and we couldn't play it again because of my fingers. Therefore, it was also one of the last things we did. In the end, though, I think the song came out quite OK. It should of course have been re-recorded under better circumstances, but it is just a small ditty, and should be taken for that.

Bonus-song!

That is also the case for today's bonus song. This is an excerpt from a longer song, called (I think) Pokker ta. What we hear is only the verse and chorus. There is an entire third theme that we never really got right, so I leave it out for now. Had we had time to work on this song I think we could have had a hit on our hands! Although this song was recorded much earlier in the day, I remember (and can hear) that the finger problem was already bothering me.

I might post some more excerpts from these sessions. Btw, rumours have it that there is a new band in Oslo playing some of these songs.