Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  The year after, ‘totally pissed off’ with music, he took up painting. ‘My career has been like my private life, filled with ups and downs. After my first single in 1969, nothing happened for a while; I was only twenty-two, and it looked like my career was finished, so I went to lessons to learn how to teach guitar. So when thirty years later I was fed up with music because I felt that I was just repeating myself artistically, it was easy to think: Now I need something different.’ His father had been a keen amateur painter – ‘I was brought up with the smell of turpentine,’ he tells me – and in his early Oslo folk days, Finn had proved himself at the easel. ‘I spent some time at art school, and I always liked artists – that guy in Sweden I stayed with after Dublin, he was like a father figure.’ Asked by a Norwegian cultural publication to rate his interest in art, he replied: ‘Eight out of ten – I love it!’

  He says the intention was to paint for a living, though I’m not able to find out how many paintings he’s sold, nor for how much. But over ten years he’s certainly worked his way through an impressive range of topics and techniques, from an epic portrait of former Norwegian national football manager Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen, depicted as a king on a hilltop, to a series of erotic paintings ‘that I’m not so proud of now – I’ve hidden them away’. ‘What I know about is music and women,’ he told an Oslo journalist at the opening of his late-nineties exhibition, Six Erotic Oils. ‘As a bachelor I have pictures in the bedroom that are not really pornographic, but definitely sexy.’

  When I get home I uncover a gallery of Finn’s art on his website. He’s good: there’s a technical proficiency that the cack-handed biro-doodlers amongst us can only dream of. Of the eighteen on display, most are oil on canvas; some have been created using his latest technique, painting with oils over a gel-treated photograph. But it’s the subject matter that’s most striking. Flesh-flaunting nudes aside, the two that catch the eye most compellingly lie side by side in the bottom row of thumbnails. One, entitled The Nightwatchman, shows a sour-faced woman in her underwear, toting a hefty rolling pin with accusatory menace. Next along, two hands extending from opposite ends of the canvas are joined at the wrist by police cuffs. One is delicately female, dangling lifelessly from its manacle. Its sinewed male counterpart is clasped tightly around a large revolver, finger on trigger, pointing straight down at whoever the other hand is attached to. The hammer is depressed; a small wisp of smoke rises from the tip of the barrel. This painting’s title: The Divorce Judgement.

  The late nineties might not have been the happiest time in Finn’s troubled post-Eurovision life, but it was at least settled. By 1998 it had been three years since he swapped the recording studio for its paint-based cousin; what he produced there might not have been keeping him in the manner to which he had once been accustomed, but producing it endowed Finn a quiet professional satisfaction that he hadn’t known for years. Then, walking home in Oslo one Saturday night, he found himself surrounded by a group of drunken youths. ‘They asked if I was Finn Kalvik,’ he tells me, slowly bunching a fist, ‘and then they roar with laughter. Five, six, seven young people, drinking, and they all laugh in my face.’ More so even than the childhood of the Baudelaire siblings, the story of Finn Kalvik’s middle years is a series of unfortunate events. The latest, longest and most tragic chapter had just begun.

  As I was aware from contact with the Melodi Grand Prix, it would be a challenge to categorise Norwegian state broadcasters NRK as reckless boundary-breakers. Nor, with apologies to Jahn and his surrealist collaborators, would one anticipate finding the nation’s wellspring of humour dispensing a rancid tide of filth and controversy. Imagine a representative NRK comedy, then, and you might expect to watch a blond Mr Bean going about his gently hapless Nordic business, slipping headfirst into a vat of pickled seal flippers or knocking pigtailed milkmaids off their stools with his ladder-handling ineptitude.

  For reasons that have yet to be satisfactorily explained to me, you would be terribly, terribly wrong. Here is a précis of comedian Otto Jespersen’s monologue during a 2002 edition of NRK’s weekly satire, Torsdagsklubben: ‘Having ridiculed Prime Minister Bondevik at length, Jespersen finished off by encouraging “all good forces” to invite Christer Pettersson, a suspect in the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, to visit Oslo.’ And here is an account of fellow NRK comedian Kristopher Schau’s activities at an ‘entertainment show’ in Kristiansand in 2003: ‘On Wednesday, Schau attached an outboard motor to a dead pig and used it as a boat. On Thursday he set light to the pig, and inflated rats and hamsters with helium to make “organic balloons”, which ruptured above the audience. On Friday, a young couple he had invited on-stage pulled off their clothes and had full intercourse, as Schau unfurled a banner informing the audience that they were having sex to save the rainforest.’

  Commissioned in 1998, the thrice-weekly NRK sketch show Åpen Post (Open Mail) was muted in comparison. Yes, there were complaints when one of the resident satirists dressed as a chicken to disrupt a rival channel’s live report on a hospitalised politician’s state of health. But Angry of Stavanger didn’t pick up the phone when another comedian appeared in a jerry-built shrine manically decorated with photocopied images of a grinning, youthful folk singer, and in a wandering, loner-obsessive stutter delivered ‘Finn Kalvik-nyhetene’, the Finn Kalvik News.

  ‘The joke they had is that there is no news about me,’ says Finn, sounding at this stage only wearily offended, like a bald teacher finding his class giggling around an unkind exercise-book caricature. ‘They have this brain-damaged guy talking about what was new in my life, but after a few seconds he would have a nosebleed, or faint, or maybe puke.’ My sympathetic nod falters, then resumes with manic intensity. ‘One of the guys who wrote it told me later they picked on me because of my up-and-down career. Because I was the perfect loser.’

  Åpen Post’s creators intended the Finn Kalvik News as a one-off, but, as the butt of its one joke informs me, ‘people laughed so much they said they had to continue it’. The sketch became a regular highlight, a centrepiece of a show that swiftly graduated from cult hit to ratings smash. One critic called it ‘the funniest TV programme in Norway for over two decades’; at the end of 1998 Åpen Post was voted comedy show of the year (the actor who accepted the prize dedicated it to Finn).

  ‘Jesus! I mean, it was so many years later! A whole new generation were laughing at me – a generation who had no connection with my music at all,’ says Finn, his voice now thickening in a manner that discourages flippant analysis of this latter statement. ‘Three times every week for three months, and then after a few more months they reprised everything once again for another three months … And all these young drunk people laughing at me at bus stops. Sometimes twenty of them.’ He pops open another Chang, and though it’s a little early for me, and perhaps 28 degrees in the palm-tree shade, so do I. Something about the way this story is going, and in particular about the way Finn is telling it, persuades me that in the hours ahead I’ll be needing as much 6.4 per cent alcohol as I can get down my hot neck.

  I take a healthy slug when Finn tells me the show left him needing psychological help, and almost down the remains in one during the revelation that it drove him to contemplate suicide. ‘These guys nearly killed me. They nearly killed me. It was so close you wouldn’t believe it! One of the psychologists I was seeing gave me his home number, because I was so near the edge, and he said if you feel like jumping off the edge you have to call me. When somebody tries to take away something you have built for twenty-five years, and just for these idiots to have some fun on TV …’

  My nodding winds down – I’ll wake up the next day with a slight repetitive-strain ache in the neck – and I just sit there in cowed silence, tracing a finger blankly up and down the Chang-can condensation. Shielded by his reflective shades, Finn’s gaze is angled right out at the horizon. ‘Why do these things happen to me?’ he says, tonelessly.

  All Finn can suggest himself is that as a m
an and musician, he’s just too honest, too earnest. ‘I sing about emotion and feelings and loneliness,’ he’ll tell me later, ‘and maybe those subjects are just too serious for some people.’ There’s certainly something in that. ‘Anything I write about,’ he told a fan online, ‘I must have experienced myself.’ Inevitable, then, that he just can’t stop baring his soul and detailing the inner woes that Jahn so efficiently buried or glossed over.

  ‘When you write a song from the bottom of your heart, you don’t know what effect it’s going to have on people when it gets out there,’ he’d said on our first afternoon. Sometimes they will write to him in humbled gratitude – Finn recently received a letter ‘from a lady in Trondheim who woke up one morning and was paralysed, then her husband left her, and she listened to my songs and it saved her life, got her back on her feet.’ But sometimes they will stand around drunk at bus stops and laugh in his face. You can go to Eurovision and sing about love, or you can go to a folk festival and sing about life as a glimpse between two eternities. Trying to do both, it would seem, is a high-risk strategy. ‘Thank you,’ replied one online Finn-fan, ‘particularly for your openness about the panic attacks you suffer.’

  The calm heads around Finn offered wise counsel. ‘I had another really great psychologist, who died last year, and he said: the smartest thing is not to threaten, not to complain. So I never did those things.’ In fact, in a pattern with which I was now becoming familiar, he proceeded to do them all. A moment later, describing his determination ‘to fight back’, he reveals how when Åpen Post was being prepared for a DVD release, he had his lawyers ‘write a letter saying if they don’t cut out the parts about me, we’re going to sue them for many millions’. The anthology was duly released in an expurgated form, causing a DVD review site to protest that ‘the only pity is to find the Finn Kalvik News taken away’.

  As I discover later, throughout all this he was giving umpteen interviews to the national press, detailing his grievances in unwise detail. ‘The joke is that I do nothing,’ he told one journalist, ‘but in fact I am very busy. I work ten to twelve hours a day!’ ‘These guys in Åpen Post bullied me,’ he complained to VG. ‘My songs are on the school syllabus, I get standing ovations at my concerts, and I sold 240,000 records from 1979 to 1981, so I know that people value what I do. These guys didn’t accept what they were doing to my self-esteem, both as an artist and a human being. So I had a very difficult emotional struggle inside. It was difficult just to be me.’ At the end of Åpen Post’s first series he told the papers he was planning to leave Norway, relocating to a country where ‘artists were respected and valued’. When he lifts his shades to survey the maritime distance once more, I see in those sun-scrunched eyes the lonely glaze of a shipwrecked Crusoe.

  From Finn’s viewpoint, I can all too easily understand the difficulties of maintaining a dignified silence. After Dublin, there had been no one to fight back against, no redress procedure. But this time, the instigators of his humiliation were right there before him, re-humiliating him three times a week on national TV. What undermined Finn’s spirited defence of himself, and rendered it in the truest sense pitiful, was the personal fragility that persistently fractured his defences. Sometimes his brave face would crumple in the course of a paragraph. ‘It will take more than these two guys to sink me!’ he’d bluster to an interviewer. ‘I have balls of steel!’ And then, in a protracted whimper about bus-stop sniggering, they’d soften into balls of porridge.

  Of all the counter-measures Finn employed, none was bolder – or more foolhardy – than his demand for the right to reply. Duly paired with the show’s co-creators, Harald Eia and Bård Tufte Johansen, on an NRK talk show, Finn presented the country with an agonising televisual ordeal. ‘You have no idea how much I have wept because of you and your friends,’ he told Johansen, after the comic had apologised ‘for going too far’ and offered a handshake. ‘I told him people were laughing at me in the street, that I was suicidal,’ he tells me, ‘and he looked so shocked, completely wiped off the planet – these guys, I was their idol when they were twelve. I know they have my records at home.’ I’m relieved to deduce, from their dates of birth and Finn’s sales history, that this is at least statistically probable.

  His retaliatory offensive reached an improbable zenith when Finn phoned the newspapers to announce that an Oslo gangland boss had offered to have the Åpen Post boys ‘taken care of’. ‘I had been singing in a lot of prisons,’ he tells me, ‘and one night I was in a nightclub, and this guy I recognised from prison came and said, “Fuck it, Finn, if you want, we can … stop this. You understand?” That’s how pissed off my generation was with these guys. When I cracked that story it was on the front page. I only had to give the guy an OK, and those two comedians would end up in hospital with a lot of broken bones!’ Finn lets out a bark of harsh, counterfeit laughter. ‘But I said no. I’m a good guy,’ he says, clanking the Kalvikworld emotional rollercoaster up to another summit. ‘A good guy … and a boxer with many years’ experience.’ (Eia and Johansen later denied finding the threats anything other than hilarious.)

  It’s easy to criticise Finn’s tactics from a PR viewpoint. He admits as much when confessing that as well as the wise psychiatrist, ‘many, many friends told me to let the whole thing go’. Addressing Finn during an internet chat, a fan said ‘maybe you should have tackled the Åpen Post situation differently, and taken it for what it was – an innocent joke!’ And I sometimes find myself wondering about all those interviews he gave, all those calls to the papers about his Oslo underworld friends. Was there perhaps a part of him that revelled in the media coverage, that after years in the dark felt compelled to follow the spotlight, painfully glaring as it was?

  Either way, it would take a far better man than I to turn the other cheek three times a week for six months. Particularly if he’s seen the Finn Kalvik News, which I’m happy to describe, on the basis of a thirty-second clip that I didn’t understand, as totally unfunny, largely due to its comic reliance on the presenter’s cognitive handicaps.

  What’s more awkward is the revelation, or at least the consistent claim, that the Åpen Post producers sought and received Finn’s prior approval for the Finn Kalvik News. They’ve also insisted that he appeared in one of the sketches voluntarily, and found it amusing. A media commentator presents a more credible analysis of events with his view that ‘Kalvik certainly had no idea what he had agreed to’.

  ‘That was the worst time for me, ever, but I got apologies and now I’m back on my feet.’ I can see his well-defined jaw tighten. ‘It’s all over,’ he says, in a slightly automatic tone that suggests a prescribed therapy mantra. ‘It’s all over.’

  It is, I say quickly, of course it is, and rather clunkily fast-forward our reminiscences to what I know to be a happier present. After his four-year artistic interlude Finn returned to the recording studio, and plotting the chart-course of the albums released thereafter I’d been heartened to discover a renaissance. ‘Three years ago I went to Prague, and recorded my greatest hits with the symphony orchestra there,’ he says, instantly brightening. ‘“Klassisk Kalvik”, we called it, and it went platinum – amazing! We’re working on “Klassisk Kalvik 2” now. And my last album of new songs came out last year, and was in the chart for more than three months.’ “Dagdrivernotater” (Daydrifter Notes) took Finn’s career album sales past the million mark (and, as I calculate later, comfortably outperformed Jahn’s most recent release).

  Settling back into his lounger, Finn briefly describes a recent trip to the States, one that had incorporated a three-week Harley-Davidson ride from California to Chicago. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘at the airport in LA the customs guy is going through all my motorbike stuff and he asks what I’m doing, and when I tell him he says, “Mister, I wish I had your life.’” I return his broad smile: after the drawn-out miseries of our Åpen Postmortem, this is so much more fun to sit on a beach and listen to. ‘But I never forget who gave me all this,’ he says, his suddenl
y sombre, dignified expression suggesting I’m about to hear of an evangelical awakening on the I-80 out of Des Moines. ‘I always thank my audience after my concerts for giving me such a good life, even for keeping me alive. Most artists don’t do that. I’m very thankful, very grateful. You must remember this, always be humble.’

  Afterwards I don’t know whether to blame the heat, or the Chang, or both mixed up with those terrible spasms of jet lag that are still inciting acts of conspicuous physical and mental clumsiness. Whatever it is, over the course of the afternoon I somehow contrive to demolish the rapport I have painstakingly built up with this damaged, fragile fellow.

  In a rambling and rhetorical exploration of Finn’s recovery, I find myself exhuming the corpse of Åpen Post, declaiming the satisfaction he must feel that in the three years since the show went off the air, Finn Kalvik has just released his fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth albums. The joke may have been on him, I suggest, but he’s still savouring the last laugh. Finn wearily extrudes a hollow chortle. ‘Yeah, well, those guys are still all over TV.’ (After I get home I look up Harald Eia’s CV, and discover that he recently attracted attention when, during a sex-education parody on NRK, ‘Eia discussed and physically explored the area of skin between his anus and scrotum’.) ‘But why are we talking about this thing again?’ Finn looks pained and confused. ‘It’s coming back, and I feel really shitty.’ So of course do I, for jemmying open that well-stocked Pandora’s box of buried memories and forcing his face inside.