Happy Sunday and welcome to the 7th anniversary of this page! Today we have a big birthday -- well, another big birthday besides my own! -- that we'll use to celebrate two people who have known each other since childhood and were born just a few weeks apart in the same town.
For once upon a time, 45 years ago, in a small city in Norway, two eventual classmates would come into the world.
They met, if I have the story straight, as competing projects in a grade school Science Fair.
At age 16, while still at school together, they formed their first band, which was a fairly standard electric rock outfit.
The band broke up when they graduated, but the two stuck to music as a standalone acoustic duo, naming themselves Kings Of Convenience for the easily transported, portable nature of what they were doing.
If I had to describe their music, I would say they are what Brazilian bossa deity João Gilberto might sound like, had he been born in the frozen, wintry half-light of Bergen, Norway.
One of them -- he is on the left in the picture above -- is called Eirik Glambek Bøe, and he is 45 today. The other, Erlend Øye, will be the same on November 21st.
Perhaps even stranger than Norwegians who sound like a Brazilian Simon & Garfunkel is the way I found these cats.
It all happened because my friend worked in the Metreon in San Francisco and they had some sort of Christmas party there, at the end of 2001.
There was, apparently, a little Secret Santa moment, where my friend reached into a sack full of gifts and was fortunate enough to pull out one of these guys' CDs. At the time, they only had two out, and one was of DJ remixes of their stuff.
We spent the first part of 2002 obsessed with them, and later on we even got to see them play when they came to the Bay Area.
We'll celebrate this duo with a half hour of footage from the beloved German program Rockpalast, plus a little secret Easter Egg below that after the fold, for the intrepid readers who stick with my drivel through to its merciful conclusion.
Kings of Convenience
"Rockpalast"
ZAKK
Düsseldorf, Germany
11.29.2004
02 I Don't Know What I Can Save You From
03 Sorry Or Please
04 Stay Out of Trouble
05 Know-How
06 Misread
07 I'd Rather Dance with You
Total time: 29:11
Eirik Glambek Bøe: guitar & vocals
Erlend Øye: guitar, keyboards & vocals
PAL DVD of a digital capture of the original Festival satellite broadcast of an episode of "Rockpalast";
originally aired 11.30.2004
1.64 GB PAL/October 2020 archive link
As a treat -- I believe in giving the best gifts to others for my birthday -- I have placed cloudward, alongside the main share, a compilation of Kings Of Convenience that I keep in my phone, which contains all or most of their best B-sides and rare tracks as well as a few of my choicest LP selections from them.
I hope you can get next to these guys -- their music is extremely special to me and is never far from my mind or my ears -- as we celebrate their Scorpio advent upon the world 45 years ago! And of course I thank everyone reading this for these seven years of Blissness, and promise to try and keep this page flowing for as long as there is unissued music to share.--J.
