Interview mit Geir Zahl von Kaizers Orchestra, 13.09.2003
13. September 2003. Ein Samstag wie jeder andere? Keineswegs, denn an diesem Tag erhält die alte Kaiserstadt nach langem wieder hochherrschaftlichen Besuch. Es sind aber nicht etwa die Habsburger, die einen Abstecher in die Donaumetropole wagen, sondern das norwegische Sextett Kaizers Orchestra. Dabei handelt es sich natürlich nicht um die Hofkapelle des norwegischen Herrscherhauses (was theoretisch auch nicht möglich wäre, denn schließlich hat Norwegen einen König), sondern um eine Band, die europaweit mit ihrem fast nicht in Worte zu fassenden Musikmix für Furore sorgt, darunter auch bei ihrem umjubelten Auftritt beim 2 Days A Week-Festival in Wiesen. Grund genug also, ein paar Stunden vor ihrem Gastspiel in der Szene Wien mit dem kaizerlichen Gitarristen Geir Zahl über essentielles wie Ölfässer oder Helmut Lotti zu plaudern
On the english version your homepage there’s a story about the response the band recently received in Holland and what this country did give to the world such as Marco van Basten or Ruud van Nistelroy. What do you think did Austria give to the world?
(lacht) Oh, that’s a tougher one. Actually I do not know many soccer players. What’s the biggest football star in Austria?
The current kickers are away from being as good as the Dutch players and basically it is not easy to find positve things about Austrian football so I better change the subject. Coming again to you homepage there also is a story written in norvegian entiteled “Bursdagsfeiring I Wien” and if I understand this correctly this would translate as “Birthday Party in Vienna”.
Yes, our singer Jan had birthday on that day and he writes there that he saw about 150 different Mozarts when we walked around town and that he went to the opera to see a concert with the symphonic orchestra.
Actually this was the day before your memorable gig in Wiesen at the 2 Days A Week-Festival which was for about 99,9% of the audience the first contact with Kaisers Orchestra and your show amazed everybody, mainly due to the extensive use of oil barrels. What is the special thing about them?
When we get started up we did most of our stuff accousticly so it was like stand-up bass and pump organ and switched our acoustic guitar to electric guitar but still were staying at the acoustic sounds. If you wanna make really big loud noise that sounds great in an acoustic way you have the oil barrels. We have some percussion solos and we wanted to play on something which is not commonly known as instruments and sound really good and it looks really good. It blows peoples minds because it’s a strange thing to see on stage. It’s not like the show “Stomp” which is totally throughout percussive thing. We have put that into our melodic setting. It’s just there to spice it up or just to wake up the audience.
Is behind the use of the barrels some kind of political message against the European union or the Euro as Norway is not involved in that mainly to due the north sea oil.
We are an oil nation, just taking scrubs from the junkyard because we are not taking part in the oil industry and the oil benefits. We play rock music, put the barrels just from the junkyard and hit them. I guess the most political thing is that we will run out of oil some day but you will not run out of music so it’s some kind of different way of exporting things not only oil and so we do our part.
Norway has a lot of musical exports such as Dimmu Borgir, Briskeby (link), A-ha, Röyksopp, Kings Of Convenience, Motorpsycho just to name a few. Why are there so many great bands in Norway? Is it because the winters there are quite long and you have to kill the time by jamming around or is it the alcohol? What is the source of creativity?
(lacht) That’ hard to say. Norway has been some kind of crappy music county up until the 90s, the only exception were A-ha. Apart from them Sweden had been the main exporting country of good music from Scandinavia. So we had a low self-esteem and we did not have many artists to pave the way for other Norvegian acts. Like Röyksopp or Kings Of Convenience which are friends of us from Bergen which is where we developed Kaizers Orchestra. There is very creative, relaxed music scene. Everybody is helping each other and it’s not very competative. It’s not like as you have to be cool or something like that you just have to contribute something good. So that’s where we picked up a lot of our influences because you have so many different styles. You have Death Metal and you have the opposite like Kings Of Convenience with their acoustic stuff and inbetween there is a very big electronica scene, stright rock scene, alternative rock, art rock and pop. So we have all sorts of things and people are just getting better at it and get a bigger self-esteem when they see they are really creative. Röyksopp or Kings Of Convenience had to go abroad to get a record deal outside Norway because norvegian record companies don’t have any connections abroad.
This explains why your album took nearly two years to get released here.
Yes, you see, everybody in Norway want to pursue an international career and we said, ok, let’s all the others try to do that we just do Norway. There’s nearly no one who wants to be big in Norway so let’s do that and we sing norvegian, so why not. We did that for one year, played 150 shows on our first album. So we were happy with that and made our second album and then we did that Eurosonic show in Holland which was the door-opener for getting gigs in other countries. Since then we were coming abroad and now everything works fine. I think that we are more interesting than other bands in Wiesen. I think people want to see something different from time to time.
Talking about international careers are there any Austrian acts which are popular in Norway
Helmut Lotti is from Austria, isn’t he?
No, no, no, no, he’s from Belgium!
I’d like him to get killed in an accident because he did this pissing terrible coverversion album of Elvis Presley songs. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that. He’s horrible.
Is there really no Austrian act you know? Not even our currently most popular export DJ Ötzi?
No, never heard from him.
Lucky You … What about Falco?
Falco, yes that’s the guy with “Rock Me Amadeus”. What about the band who sang “Forever Young”?
That were Alphaville and they were from Germany. Sad to see that currently no Austrian act, whether commercial or alternative has made some impression in Norway. Staying in Scandinavia, Eläkeläiset from Finland are similar in style to Kaizers Orchestra. What do you think about them?
I was told about them by journalists. Actually I never heard them. All I know is they do humppa versions of popular songs
They played here back in June and did a great gig where they drank quite a lot and also the audience could drink with them on stage
When you’re Finnish you have to drink a lot. People wonder if we listen to Ompa, Humppa, Eastern European Music but we really don’t because we’ve grown up with the Grunge thing and energetic rock sounds. So that’s what we always like and we also like melodic stuff like songs from songwriters.
What is your favourite artist?
That varies. I like Ryan Adams’ first album, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Tom Waits, of course and Turbonegro, a lot of different things but it’s the energy thing and then we like to twist it a little bit and make our own kind of music out of it
Coming to your band name, what’s the story behind it? Might it be that it has something to do with Austria due to the “Kaiser”?
It’s just an Austrian Story, very influenced by Austria … No, it’s just a name that popped out in a song and we used it for a name. Only one man really knows about it but he’s not present in the band.
So it will remain a mystery ..
The name works and that’s all that counts.
No, I hate that bullshit. If you do that in Norway you’re out of the industry.
The reason why I ask you that is that this year we had the comedian Alf Poier there who took nothing seriously and made an anarchic performance which reminds on the philosophy of Kaizers Orchestra
The Song contest is a freakshow. We have a quality freakshow but this is a bullshit freakshow.
You received several awards and you album “Ompa Til Du Dør” meanwhile sold about 90.000 copies in Norway alone. Did you expect this success?
No, not at all. We had to persuede our record company to print 3000 copies of our record because non of the big labels wanted to touch us. We could sell 3000 copies in a year. They said, that’s too many but we said trust us we can do this in a year. Then suddenly it just exploded and there was obviously some kind of vacuum fo norvegian singing artists and a new expression for music in norway. We then were on tour and sold records throughout the whole year so we really came out to the people with our music. That’s been really fun and how we got a lot of support in Norway. I hope we get support here too. Hopefully people will come tonight and check it out.
You can be sure about that because since Wiesen you also got a lot of fans in Austria so tonights gig should be sold out
I hope so because we’re always on our best with a full house!
Diese Aussage wurde ein paar Stunden später in der Szene Wien eindrucksvoll bestätigt, schließlich gelten Kaizers Orchestra nicht zufälig als eine der besten Livebands Europas. Gasmasken und die mit Hämmern malträtierten als Percussionelemente eingesetzten Autofelgen und Ölfässer verliehen ihrem Auftritt fast schon Performancecharakter und Sänger Jan Ove Ottesen verstand es perfekt, die Fans trotz der für mitteleuropäsiche Ohren exotisch klingenden norwegischen Sprache zum Mitsingen bzw -gröhlen zu animieren. Darüberhinaus verführte er das Publikum zu einer mitreißende Call & Response-Orgie, die allen Dabeigewesenen vermutlich lange im Gedächtnis bleiben wird und die bei so manchen in den Sprachgebrauch eingeflossen ist: "Say Halleluja" - "Halleluja", "Say Yeah!" - "Yeah!", "Say Save Me Kaizer" - "Save Me Kaizer", "Whose Your Daddy?" - "Kaizer!". Das hätte dem alten Kaizer äh Kaiser wohl auch sehr gefreut.