Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Internationally best-selling crime writer, king of Nordic Noir, creator of detective Harry Hula.
On the island
Eight records
I love the idea that he seemed to have too much to say, too much for a short song like that. He's rushing through his lyrics. And it feels like he's really passionate about what he has to say. So passionate that at the end of the song, the song is over. But he is still, you know, throwing words and lyrics at you. So there's too much lyrics and really minimalistic playing, even the guitar solo.
Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)
This is Steve Hawley and Cockney Rebel. The song is Make Me Smile and my older brother Per, he had a record collection. So me and my younger brother Knut, we sort of just had to listen to what he listened to.
It was the first concert I went to was a Maddie Waters concert. I was, I think, nine or ten years old. It was because Moldova, my small hometown, population 20,000, they had this famous international jazz festival, and so Maddie Waters was coming there with his band. And I remember sitting there in the cinema listening to this great band, and it was just being mesmerized. And the title of the song is I Can't Be Satisfied.
which is just one of my favorite artists and one of my favorite songs. It's just this really sad, sad song about her singing about where she grew up, which was not a happy place. But for me, it's a song about going back, trying to go back and realizing there's no going back.
Carnage is one of the reasons why I and Eustein put Nick Cavan and Warren Ellis on top of our wish list for people to write a score for the Harry Hool series. And of course we didn't believe that they would be willing to do that for a small Norwegian show. So we were like really surprised, pleasant is surprised when they said yes right away. I came over here to London to Nick's studio working with him and Warren here and we were like starstruck for five minutes but then we got down to work and they were you know so lovely and so accommodating and so professional it was just great working with them.
I would listen to Talking Heads when I was a student and it was a sort of smart people's band. It was kind of punk rock but the members in the band they were like art students. And I started listening to the old Talking Heads albums and I realized that they sounded even better now than they did then. And then I picked up Stop Making Sense, the movie that I'd seen back then, and I remember it was good. I saw it now, and it's fantastic. I mean, if you haven't seen Stop Making Sense for a while, listen to it now. It sounds like it was made yesterday, and they're so good musicians. I saw David Byrne as a, you know, okay musician. If you see him playing the acoustic guitar on the opening track, Psycho Killer, he is just fantastic. Talking heads swarm.
Independence DayFavourite
I actually directed a short movie based on that song many years ago, me and a friend of mine. So it's no it's just one of those three chords song that is just great.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:11Is that really your happy place [waking up to a crazy way to kill someone]?
I don't know if it's my happy place. It's not the dark side as such. It's just knowing that you come up with a story worthy of telling your two best friends for whom I have always been writing. From the start it was, I imagine, those two friends with whom I share taste in popular culture. And if I can make them interested, I've succeeded.
Presenter asks
4:10Is [making music] similar to writing for you?
Yes, it is. I think I started out writing lyrics for my friends' bands and that was like my writer's goal was to tell a story in three verses and a refrain. So I didn't pick up the guitar until I was 20 actually and then we started a band first when I was a student and later on with my brother and some friends. They were like real musicians. I could play the guitar, but I was more the songwriter and still am. So I definitely see that connection that in three ver versus and refrain, you have to rely so much on the listener to fill out the story, um just point them in a direction and uh leave it up to their own imagination and and intelligence. And I realized when I started writing novels that it's exactly the same.
Presenter asks
11:04What was [your father's] role in the Second World War and how did you find out what he had done?
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Bukowski
I had to think about this for a long time and I ended up with Charles Prokofsky Ham on Rye because that is definitely three chords and the truth. It's simple and complicated. It's hilarious and it's painful and it's a book that I thought when I read it when I was quite young in my late teens or early 20s, I thought it was a young man's book. And I gave it to my father and he couldn't stop laughing. He thought it was so hilarious.
The luxury
One of the few things that makes your life easier without the world having to produce more stuff because it saves the shoes also.
I was 15 years old and Norway was occupied in 1940 and stayed occupied throughout the war and the royal family fled here to London and it was like the quintessential evil person was the person with the German helmet. And what I didn't know at the age of 15 was that when my father and my grandparents moved back to Norway being Americans strongly anti-communist, they saw Stalin and Russia, a country with which Norway has a border, they saw that more as a threat than Germany and Hitler. And at the time, they saw that the European democracies like England and France, they were more or less bankrupt. So they saw this as an area where you had to go with one of the strongmen of Europe. So my father decided he wanted to fight for Norway against Russia, meaning joining the Germans on the Eastern Front. And he volunteered to do that at the age of 19. And when he told me this at the age of 15, I mean, after the war, he had to spend three years in jail for treason. That was like the punishment all of them got. And it was a total shock to me because my father was my hero and I really respected him in so many ways. And he said that, okay, your older brother already know this, but now I'm telling you, now you're old enough and to make up your mind about it. And if you don't want to talk about it, we don't have to talk about it, but if you want to talk about it... I'll answer any question.
Presenter asks
15:00How many of [your father's] experiences and the stories that he told you after you started that conversation feature in [The Red Breast]?
Most of them. It's the story of the soldier who joined the Germans in that novel is more or less my father's story, including the love story, including the New Year's Eve where he's sitting with a Norwegian friend of his, also a volunteer, and they're talking about how it is at home, how they are eating dinner at home now because they are hungry all the time. And in the middle of that conversation, there's a gunshot and my father's friend's head explodes inside his helmet. And it's 20 degrees below zero. So for the rest of that New Year's Eve, he has to pick out the pieces of brain on the machine gun to make it function again. And I was asking what an experience like that, what that do to you? And here is that. I thought I would get crazy. Some of my friends did. PTSD. And he never did. He told me that it was a friend of him that One evening phoned him from another city and committed suicide there and there in the phone booth because he couldn't take it any longer, the the nightmares. But my father said he was always waiting for the nightmares, but they they never came. So he was just we're just lucky, I guess.
Presenter asks
22:58In what way was [your military service] a formative experience for you?
I got time to think about my life. I think up until then I had been just riding the waves that came along. If it was football, I had some talent, I played football. If it was hanging out with friends writing lyrics for their songs, I do that. I really didn't have a plan. And I, first thing, I did was I went to officer school and I was two and a half, three years in the Air Force and after that I still didn't know what to do and what do you do when you don't know what you want to do? You study economics but in order to get into the school that I wanted to get into I had to improve my grades so I also when I was doing service in the Air Force I took to high school from the ground up and got good grades, which meant that I could actually start studying at the school my my father wanted to study in when he was young. He didn't have the money at the time. He was just out of jail after the war. So he went to evening school. Yeah, studied economics there while while working. So it was me kind of not being that interested in economics. So I guess my looking back, the reason why I went there may have been that I was fulfilling my my my dad's dream in a way, that he I could do what he couldn't.
Presenter asks
31:14What was [Harry Hole] a metaphor for in those early days [of your writing]?
I don't know if it was a metaphor for anything, at least not something that I'm conscious about. He was a tool I could use to ask myself questions, questions about morality, given moral dilemmas that I wondered about myself. If somebody killed your loved one, would you claim revenge? Would a prison sentence be enough? Or would you need an eye for an eye? Basic questions like that. I would put them forward to Harian, not always sure what it would do, so it was like inspecting my own values, going back to my father and the choices he made, of course, which meant I wanted the hero that sometimes made the wrong choice, that you could see as the wrong choice. Not making excuses for those choices, but making them understand them as a human being.
“If you have the tolerance to talk to somebody about stuff that you totally disagree with, that will get you to interesting places to gain insight.”
“I think it all goes black.”
“I think it was the fact that I am scared of heights which made it a personal challenge for me.”
“It's a fight between the part of your brain that panics and the part of your brain that tells that, okay, you're in a rope. If you fall, the rope is going to catch you.”