The second article in this column is finally here. And, like I promised, it’s the 1994 classic Never Is Forever. Between the first article and this one, some things have happened. A new year has come upon us. Sadly, Hans-Erik Dyvik Husby, or Hans Erik or Hertug Hans or Hank Von Helvete/ Von Hell passed away on November 19, 2021. It’s always difficult when a band member perishes when an article is in the process of being written. How does one stay respectful to the passed and the left behind (especially considering the material’s often crude nature), and not make it a tribute piece or an obituary, but a timeless text that explores a classic album? Whether I will succeed in any of this is debatable, but I will have to try, because this is truly a Scandinavian classic to me. It was intended as more of a rock opera influenced by bands like Blue Öyster Cult than the aggressive death punk of their debut Hot Cars and Spent Contraceptives, and more suited for Hank’s vocals than those of Harry (Harald Fossberg) who sang on the debut. Fossberg will get another article, as he sang in the classic Norwegian punk band Hærverk. In this article, I will try to go through the themes and the story of the rock opera. Something that will be hard, as it’s confusing as hell. Another interesting thing to consider, is that the album had two different covers. The re-release had a picture of German television detective Derrick with a gun toward his head on the cover, while the original was a bit more sexual. The songs were mostly written by Thomas Seltzer, or Happy Tom. He is now the bassist, but at the time he played drums.

The album starts with a ballad. I was shocked the first time I heard it and thought I had gotten the wrong album. “Letter from Your Momma” as it is called is a beautiful song with clean guitars and pianos. Whether it is a joke or not is unclear, but it’s strong and beautiful regardless. It has a strong build-up to the 2nd track with a sample. The sample is from Norwegian cult-classic Hotel St. Pauli (I read), a movie by film-duo Wam & Vennerød, that people either love or hate, I’m in the former camp. The song’s lyrics are simple and somewhat sad. It’s a letter talking about the good old days and longing for how things used to be: “Hey You/ So long/ Since we had our glory days/ Then we both went separate ways/ So long”, the phrase “so long” is used ambivalently here. It’s unclear whether this letter actually is from the rock opera’s main-character’s mother or if that’s just a misleading title. The song goes straight into a rocker of a song called “Suburban Prince’s Death Song”. While the sample in the former song has someone screaming “nei” in Norwegian, this starts with the same word in English “oh no” being yelled. Musically, this sounds very inspired by the Ramones, but maybe with a cleaner guitar sound and more melodic leads, minor chords and heavier vocals. The lyrics have always been a bit creepy to listen to. The song is about a teenager that grows up in the suburbs and becomes a drug addict. It’s somewhat ironic that the chorus goes “I was a pre-teen druggie” when he starts doing drugs at 13. Later in the song, the protagonist turns away from drugs and turns to Christ. The choruses are extremely catchy and warn against drug use “I was a pre-teen druggie, didn’t know that I would die”.

The lyrics of the two first songs on the album are pretty straight forward. The third song “Übermensch”, however, takes us to a weirder place, and it’s really where the absurd story and theme of the album comes into sight. The title comes from Friedrich Nietzsche and his theory about the master versus slave morality. An idea that Hitler took to heart and developed in an even more disturbing way in his eugenics. The song introduces motorcycle stuntman and daredevil Evel Knievel and he becomes a prominent part of the rock opera, even though I’m not sure how. The song describes him going through suicide fire-jumps and surviving them. In the chorus, the song takes an even darker turn, as we hear about the white knight of the far-right. The second verse is about German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich was Jewish, so I don’t suppose he is the white knight of the far-right. The verse references actual historical and maybe some unhistorical incidents. Reich was known for an energy he called Orgone. A life force that allegedly was present in every living being. When Hitler came into power in Germany, Reich fled to Oslo, Norway. When Reich’s Norwegian visa ran out, many Norwegian scientists who were against his ideas wanted him out of Norway. This is an incident which is referenced in the song “Red fascists kicked him out of Oslo”, this took place about a year before the German invasion of Norway in 1940. The song also references the Kate Bush music video “Cloudbusting” about Reich, J. Edgar Hoover’s sexuality (“Gay Edgar Hoover masturbating on his phone”) and Reich’s book on Nazi-sexuality (The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In an interview with the free culture magazine Natt og Dag, Happy Tom (as his real name) said that Reich is one of his heroes and that he (Reich) embodied all of modernity in one figure. Musically, it’s a punk song to the bone, with shout-singing and palm-muting. Evil Knievel also appears in the next song, “I Will Never Die”. It’s possible that the song is sung from the point of view of the suburban prince. He feels immortal. No matter what he does or what kind of drugs he takes he feels invincible, and this is most likely before he realized that he is mortal in “Suburban Prince’s Death Song”. There’s a Rolling Stones reference in the song, “The get the fuck off of my cloud”. And the song is a mix of power pop, pop punk and Blue Öyster Cult style rock and it’s catchy as hell. It’s my favorite song on the album and probably one of the best Norwegian songs that exist. The song ends with a sample of an Evel Knievel interview where he talks about why he survived a motorcycle jump, and attributes it to not doing drugs. Something that draws a huge line between the character of the song and the real Evel Knievel.

“No Beast so Fierce” shares its title with Edward Bunker’s book from 1973 about his stay in prison. The lyrics could easily be about Bunker’s prison stay as well. They are dark and hopeless, “Twenty one years/ In line for some thing better/ The signals and the codes/ No meaning what so ever”. Musically, it’s a punk song with some grunge influences. It’s a song that has grown on me a lot since I first bought the album. “Destination: Hell” references the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the assassin Sirhan Sirhan. The song is about someone committing an evil deed and who ends up in hell. Like “Übermensch”, it’s a straight-up punk tune. There’s a funny spoken word part where Hanky and Panky talk about the impending doom and the dark confession “did you do something?” “Yes, it was pretty heavy.” The story has taken an even darker turn. Now with four fast punk songs in a row, with “Timebomb” being about seeing swastikas in broad daylight and touching the flames of hell. And “Pain in der Arsch Pocket Full of Cash” is our character selling his body to an old man. A common theme in the band’s catalog. The song is the fastest and catchiest of the four punk songs. What does this story lack? An alien invasion that is! “Hush, Earthling” is about an alien from Szürdelifoy and he tells the earthling how girlie of a boy he is and wants to eat him. The song is the heaviest on the album and is basically a metal song.

The album title comes from the song “Nihil Sleighride”. It’s one of the album’s most melodic tunes. The chorus concludes, “Never is forever/ I don’t think we’ll ever meet again”. Definitely one of the band’s strongest songs. I’m not sure what the title is supposed to mean. It translates as “Nothing Sleigh Ride”. It might be a nihilistic version of the famous winter song “Sleigh Ride” or another reference to Nietzsche. There’s a reference to the WW2 movie/Alistair MacLean novel Where Eagles Dare. So that could have something to do with it. The second verse ends, “Gather all your strength and deliver/ You’re a straight line and not a curve”, which is I think is a good line.

The nineties started with grunge rock as the dominating rock genre. In 1991, songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” were hits for Nirvana and other bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were also starting to come up. “(He’s a) Grunge Whore” was a parody and a comment on the genre and appeared on the single with the same name released long before the album in 1993, under the moniker Stierkampf, which sounds like something out of the third reich, but is really the German word for bullfighting. “Timebomb” and “Pain in der arsch Pocket Full of Cash” also appeared on the EP single, so did “Black Chrome” and a cover of Black Flag’s “Six Pack”. “(He’s a) Grunge Whore” starts with the same strumming pattern and clean guitar as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the lyrics of the song, which in many ways, don’t fit in with the rest of the album’s songs, ironically fit quite well because of its theme and the absurdity that this grunge character appears on the album. The song is about a grunge singer who is also a sex worker, selling himself to other men in Tacoma, WA. It fits with “Pain in der asrch Pocket Full of Cash” and the image the band had started to adapt at the time. “Well he’s a grunge whore/ Knows what he likes/ Black leather men on motorbikes”. The “grunge whore” ends his life with a heroin overdose where he injects it into his eye. One could connect the character of the song to Kurt Cobain, both geographically and with the musical references in the song, but the single being released in 1993 means that Cobain hadn’t perished yet, so the overdose, in that case, only becomes a creepy coincidence, which the album is full of. On the EP, Happy Tom would go by the name Bongo and Von Helvete would go by Herr Tugen a reference to the character Hertug Hans, created by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe. The aforementioned song “Black Chrome” that appeared on the EP also follows “(He’s a) Grunge Whore” on the album. It’s the song that sounds most like the album’s predecessor and its follower, Ass Cobra, in which they returned to a more death punk/Poison Idea sound. Black chrome is a type of carwax. The song could both refer to a gun or a car, as the character is about to die. That is until the chorus from the fourth song appears again, “Death row/ You would like to see me fry/ Death Row/ But I’ll never die”.

The original album features two songs from a trilogy: the Oslo Bloodbath trilogy. “Oslo Bloodbath Part II: I Don’t Care” appears on both releases and would actually fit on any Fat Wreck or Epitaph album at the time. The song is about revenge. It’s about two best friends where one of them has betrayed the other and he seeks revenge on his friend. He does not care anymore, he will fight till death (even if that entails both dying); it will be a bloodbath, despite the two’s friendly past. In an album review from Groove.no, reviewer Pangerød describes the song as pop punk (along with “I Will Never Die”). He also writes about the album that evil seethes, but that the music is not as brutal as the debut, something that is appropriate concerning the song as well. The lyrics are dark as hell, but it’s a catchy sing-a-long pop punk tune. “Oslo Bloodbath Part III: The Ballad of Gerda and Tore” is about the death of a sex worker by the name Gerda. Gerda’s lover Tore becomes aware of Gerda’s affair with a bearded man and kills them both with a gun. The couple has been around the world in prostitution districts in Thailand and Eastern Europe, but now they’re in Oslo, Norway. The song’s first line is “Two transvestites, Norwegian style”. It ends “Because she looked so good in blue/ Runny make-up and missing a shoe/ Her scarlet blood baby covering the floor/ I ran terrified towards the door/ I’m just a denim boy(…)/ Gerda laying face down/ In her newly found love’s boudoir dead/ Tore tried to explain to the handsome young police officer/ “Most rooms have four walls and a ceiling/ But sometimes the floor is missing/ And this makes me very angry”/ “Who would ever think a Sunday evening in Oslo, Norway/ Could be so sad and grey?”/ The policeman replied, feeling most intelligent” in spoken word. It also includes a sample from Hotel St. Pauli. Gerda is also the name of a character in the movie. Musically, it’s a bit slower and possibly more Iggy Pop/The Stooges inspired than the other songs. It’s got a nice melody, but with vocals that sound troubled and muddy. It’s a great tune that I’ve never really listened much to, as I only own the re-release. I’m not sure why it’s not on the re-release (there’s a misprint and it appears on the cover instead of Part II), and I don’t know if there’s a part I somewhere either.

On the re-release, the bonus tracks are “Let It Burn” and the strangely positive pop punk track “Kick It Out”, as well as an alternate version of “Hush, Earthling”. The hidden tracks on the original included a song by Evel Knievel himself and a cover of a Swedish song. The song was “Den ena handed vet vad den andra handed gör“ by Blå tåget, but it resembled Ebba Grön’s version “Staten och kapitalet” (which the cover is also labelled as), something that relates it to the last column. In the ‘00s, albums like Scandinavian Leather and Party Animals would be released on Burning Heart Records under Epitaph, the next album in this column was released on another Epitaph subsidiary, Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat. The album is Bring It On! By HorrorPops.

-Rene