A rough sounding voice answers the phone, mumbling a barely audible “Hello”, followed by two minutes of hacking and coughing. It’s 10am as Adne, lead singer of Norway electro-rockers 120 Days, speeds across the Canadian border in a rattling tour bus. He’s still comatose in his bunk after a show in Seattle when his phone starts blinking and the call from Clash pulls him into the real world.
The Oslo foursome have spent the last few months ripping-up America and Europe with their blend of latter day Primal Scream guitar licks and krautrock rhythms. They’ve spent the long days on the road living a debauched life, in a whirlwind of drugs and alcohol that would put Bobby Gillespie and the boys to shame. But life hasn’t always been so rock and roll.
“We’ve never had any master plan; the only real rule is the four of us have to like it. “
After forming in their small hometown, Kristiansund, in 2001, the band moved to Oslo to find their sound. But with the most lucrative housing market in the world, the band all scraped their money together and lived in a caravan under a bridge. “We did that for a while a couple of years ago, when we first moved there,” Adne whispers before dropping the phone on his bunk and scrambling to find it. “Oslo was so expensive and we just wanted to focus on the music and not get real jobs. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
While there were many alcohol-fuelled arguments as the band banged off the caravan’s thin plastic walls, it played an intrinsic part in forming the sound of their self-titled debut album. The swirls of atmospheric guitar, underpinned by tight, pulsing drums, are the product of months holed up with nothing but each other and a pile of battered guitars, drums and synths for company. “Of course it got claustrophobic,” says Adne. “It was tight, let’s just say that. I think it’s influenced our music, I think everything around you comes out in your music and I’m sure that is there when you listen to the record.”
When their album starts spinning in the CD player, you are glad the band didn’t throttle each other in the cramped caravan. Adne screams out his lyrics like a young Iggy Pop, and you can almost feel the sweat dripping from fashionably tousled fringes as the band tear through the more urgent tracks of the album. But they‘re a band who can also take the foot off the accelerator and unleash a warm flow of Can and Neu influenced electronica – as on ‘Sedated Times’, where layers of gentle synth and keys wash calmly over a disciplined, mechanical drum loop.
“I guess we have a lot of influences,” nods Adne. “We listen to a lot of rock stuff, but a lot of electronic music, a lot of Kraftwerk. I’m lucky, because it’s not my job to describe the music, I just have to play it and hope people will listen. We’ve never had any master plan; the only real rule is the four of us have to like it. So we just get together and play, but luckily not in a caravan any more.”
