It’s 1:30 a.m. in Oslo, Norway, and the official shows at the 2008 by:Larm music festival have all shut down. But as I squeeze into the tiny music room at the back of hole-in-the-wall pub Revolver, the band shows no signs of slowing. The miniscule stage is only a foot or two off the ground, and red velvet drapes hang from the low ceiling, partly obscuring the bass player. This is power-chord bar rock, and with beers in hand, the crowd loves it.
The wiry frontman is unleashing his inner Iggy Pop, jumping around
and off the stage, singing his way to the back of the room, hugging the
woman standing next to me. “Fucking great band,” the bloke on the other
side says in English after first trying Norwegian. “What’re they
called?” I point to the huge banner behind the group that reads, “The
Disciplines.”
I’d be raising my glass with them, but all I can do is stare and
think, “That is Ken Stringfellow?” Anyone familiar with The Posies will
be a little shocked to see “Power Pop Ken”—a man known for polite,
literate songwriting—fronting a Norwegian garage-rock band, but tonight
he looks like he was born to sweat and scream. When the show finally
winds down sometime after 2 a.m., I track him down to find out how a
mild-mannered keyboardist from California ended up in a dive bar in
Oslo.
“My wife is French, and we have a family there,” he explains. “I’ve
been in The Posies for 20 years, and its main musical thrust has been
expressed as best it can. I was looking for a new schtick, ready for
fundamental changes. I’d met some dudes in France, and it was cool. But
then I met these guys [from The Disciplines], and it didn’t take any
effort. I liked them as people right away; we clicked as musicians
right away.”
Stringfellow’s bandmates were working with a female lead, playing
spacious Scandinavian pop, but something about the collaboration led
them all to get a little grittier. “Growing up, I bypassed that whole
Iron Maiden-AC/DC phase of my teen years for whatever reason,”
Stringfellow says. “I was either into The Bee Gees or Black Flag—way
more fey and way more arty. But what [guitarist] Bjorn suggested as
song ideas were so much simpler than whatever I’d do, and I had to
accept that simplicity is not a four-letter word. I just went with it.
I decided I wasn’t going to smarty-pants myself into these songs and
make people go find a dictionary. The less brainiac we were, the better
it felt. It’s very English-as-a-second-language.
“It’s not going to be insulting to anybody’s intelligence to just
be real,” he adds. “I’d love to go insane on many occasions, and it’s
just not appropriate to be. And, here, it is. And I don’t think there’s
anything harmful about that. In fact, I think it can be a good thing.”
The next night, The Disciplines played one of Oslo’s bigger rock
clubs and got just as crazy on stage. Nobody needed a dictionary, and
I’m pretty sure everyone was OK with that.